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.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."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.[1] https://twitter.com/DineshDSouza/status/1059147114826162177[2] https://twitter.com/nntaleb/status/1059202026184282113