How many times a day do you see someone here say “this will happen” or “that will happen”? How may of these comments are smart analysis or well-informed intuition, how many of them are throw-away lines, and how many of them are wishes?
Accurate forecasting helps win elections, by focusing attention and effort where they can do some good. Inaccurate forecasts do real harm by wasting time and energy. Wishes are only as good as the work put into making them actually happen. This series of stories is about collecting up as many predictions and forecasts as possible, to see which ones turn out to be accurate, and to find out how the good predictors among us come to their conclusions.
Topics of interest today:
Your predictions for Super Tuesday. Try to be as specific as possible, and say something about your methods. Gut instincts are OK too, since most of us are seasoned observers of election outcomes and some of us are experts on election processes.
Violence at Trump events and at polling places. We all have a strong interest in preventing it, and in catching the perps if it happens. Once again, be specific.
Other problems at polling places, that interfere with people voting or that interfere with accurate vote counting. The most important items are where and what, so we can begin to zero in on places that will need election protection volunteers at polling places, and attorneys standing by to intercede.
The missing North Korean submarine. Anything about this is of interest: cause, location, possible North Korean responses.
The random numbers game:
This starts today, and the first batches of random numbers will be generated on Tuesday night after all polls are closed.
Batch “A” will be deterministic, pulled from the last digits of residential phone numbers in a column in the White Pages telephone directory. Batch “B” will be nondeterministic, generated by a physical random number device that uses background ionizing radiation as its source. Each will consist of a string of 20 digits, grouped into 2-digit clusters for legibility, for example: (nonrandom but shows the format):
12-34-56-78-90-09-87-65-43-21.
Scoring will be based on how many individual digits you match in each string (as if the string is not broken up into two-digit numbers). If you make any other predictions or forecasts, take a minute to guess the random digit strings. Also state your position on free will: that it does or does not exist, and if it does exist, roughly what amount of human decision-making and behavior is freely-chosen vs. causally-determined.
Pundit Watch:
Got any good quotes from televised pundits or other highly-paid predictors? Post the quotes, who said them, and when. Let’s see if any of them are any good, or any better than we are here.