Nassim Talebs case against Nate Silver is bad math
As I understand it, the feud in its current form started from a tweet from Dinesh D'Souza [1] in which he interpreted Nate Silver's statement that "Dems, GOP winning House are 'both extremely possible'" to mean that they had gone from an 80% chance of winning to a 50% chance.<p>Taleb inexplicably chose this as the hill to die on [2] and wrote a lengthy and technical paper to refute, and replied (on the [2] thread) "When someone says are event and its opposite are extremely possible I infer either 1) 50/50 or 2) the predictor is shamelessly hedging, in other words,  BS."<p>I've often found Taleb's ideas to be profound and interesting, and unfortunately offset by his arrogance and occasionally cryptic pronouncements and colorful colloquial "Brooklyn-ese" intentional misspellings of words (like "gabish" for "capisce"). But in this case I'm having trouble following what his criticism even is -- forecasts, especially probability forecasts, are hard, and evaluating them is hard -- the dimensions of skill vs. calibration vs. precision are hard to evaluate, and Nate Silver does a fairly good job of describing the tension.<p>[1] <a href="https://twitter.com/DineshDSouza/status/1059147114826162177" rel="nofollow">https://twitter.com/DineshDSouza/status/1059147114826162177</a><p>[2] <a href="https://twitter.com/nntaleb/status/1059202026184282113" rel="nofollow">https://twitter.com/nntaleb/status/1059202026184282113</a>