I see this argument a lot, but it's contradictory. You're simultaneously arguing that people don't understand statistics because they're treating a 25% chance as no chance to win, but then you're doing the same by saying that the other predictions, in the 15% to 2% range[1] are "cope forecasts" that people who followed them "looked extremely foolish" (the only major 99% forecast was PEC, but Wang said that's because the model broke down and the actual forecast was around 5% [1]).
25%, 15%, 5%, even 2% chances happen with a decent amount of frequency. I don't understand how people can say that people don't understand probability because they think a 25% chance won't happen, but then turn around and treat a 15% chance the very same way.
Like the Rationalist's "Bayesian priors," the election models were a remnant of the "big data" hype from a decade and a half ago. This article is a decent overview for anyone who forgot about it[1]. Like with many hype cycles, there was something actually important underneath the surface (useful statistical modeling), but then people with a poor understanding of the limitations ran wild thinking it could do things far beyond its capabilities (in this case, the degree to which one could use statistics to predict the future).
Industry gave up on the more extreme claims fairly quickly because it wasn't able to produce. But it lingered on in other places where there was less direct feedback or it was telling people what they wanted it to hear.
To add to this, it became obvious that many of the leaders in this "field" were people who believed they had an expertise that was far beyond their actual capabilities. Nate Silver ended up accusing much of the polling industry of fraud recently, because he wasn't able to do basic statistical math[2].
The console says “Space Imploder,” which isn’t a real arcade console, from what I can tell. There’s more discussion here[1], but it seems likely that a lot of the things weren’t real (or if they were real, they weren’t were junk that was broken beyond repair).
This seems to be a major point that’s missing from the discussion. If a lot of this is stuff that was fake or already headed for the dump, it completely undermines the argument that perfectly good equipment was destroyed.
Interesting point. The Clash even celebrated the destruction of instruments on the cover of London Calling (the cover being a photo of their bassist smashing his bass). And though the Apple ad seems like it’s trying to convey they idea that all these devices are within the iPad, the smashing of instruments and equipment by rockers seems to just be about…reveling in the destruction of instruments and equipment.
You see this in other art as well. For example, the Dadaists took a lot of functional tools, messed them up, and displayed them as art. Moving beyond art, destruction that accompanies political unrest is often dismissed.
It’s interesting that the Apple ad is what touched off this discussion, because it’s actually fairly tame with regards to a lot of intentional destruction of equipment.
> If somebody reads your script and they're like, well the protagonist clearly FELL but then the only KINDA ROSE but KINDA STAYED THERE and I don't get what the point is? Are you trying to say their efforts were worthwhile or futile? And then the writer is going to do much better if they change the story to become clearly either "FALL" or "FALL, RISE" -- instead of a muddy in-between.
Plenty of good stories have ambiguous endings. That’s actually one of the issues with this article - even when things are abstracted to the point of absurdity like they are here, it still doesn’t cover all stories.
Yeah, I remember ~2000 or so it seemed like a lot of non-techie people were creating their own personal site on Geocities/Angelfire/etc. In high schools lots of teenagers (again, including non-techie folk) had their own web pages.
What was nice is that more thought went into it, since it was basically a blank canvas. There also was a focus on quality over quantity - your website was something you continually grew and improved. Modern content is something you churn out and forget about immediately after.
But as easier options became available, those sites disappeared. First blogs came along, which were more structured. And modern social media is even more structured as well. We went from a single blank canvas you could spend hours tinkering with to a coloring book page you're given for sixty seconds before it gets thrown away and you're given the next one.
You almost never see a bunch of drivers arguing that it's OK to run red lights. It's quite common with cyclists; you can even look at the comments here and see several arguing that it's not a problem for cyclists to run red lights. Whether or not they're correct, it at least indicates that the behavior is much more common among cyclists.
It seems like people get irrationally anxious and angry having to wait behind people moving slower in general. On paths that cyclists share with pedestrians, cyclists are usually even more angry and aggressive with pedestrians than drivers are with cyclists (pedestrians are expected to move out of the way and often get yelled at if they don't). There seems to be this almost atavistic response people have to something in front of them impeding there movement.
> ... that sounds more like a military alliance between independent city-states in ancient Greece than your average human friendship.
It doesn't sound like your average friendship in modern atomized societies. But it seems that it was the bedrock for many societies throughout history, including close knit societies today. I've heard it argued fairly persuasively that this is why military insurgencies tend to be stronger in societies where kinship groups are fairly strong (and there's a strong possibility atomized societies wouldn't be able to follow suite).
I played it for the first time a few years ago and was pretty impressed. I haven't played a lot of modern games, but are there many that have a real time living world/branching story like this? It seems like that was more of a 90's trend (Colonel's Bequest, Exile III, The Last Express), and efforts since then have gone in the direction of everything being an amusement park (IE, everyone in the game world waits around for you to show up before they do anything).
And just to reiterate what others have said, the writing is superb.
25%, 15%, 5%, even 2% chances happen with a decent amount of frequency. I don't understand how people can say that people don't understand probability because they think a 25% chance won't happen, but then turn around and treat a 15% chance the very same way.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/upshot/presidential... [2] https://web.archive.org/web/20171120175008/https://election....