My political leanings are similar to yours and I agree that the Trump administration is a disaster, and that many people around here seem not to have predicted this, and that its disastrousness gives some evidence for Team Left over Team Right (which suits me fine since Team Left is my team). But I have some concerns about your presentation here, and in particular about how you set forth your claim that Team Left’s doing better at making correct predictions than Team Right.
First, looking backward, your “ledger” of implicit predictions. (1) I am not sure you get to ascribe predictions to people who didn’t actually make those predictions. (2) These look cherry-picked, in that you’ve picked specific bad things that turned out to happen and complained that people didn’t expect them, without showing predictions of those specific bad things from your side of the table. I think if you’d asked me about several of those things before Trump took office I’d have said “I wouldn’t put anything past those guys but I don’t know whether they’ll do that in particular” rather than “yes, a Trump administration will definitely do that”.
And then you say “look at those probabilities”. Those probabilities which … you just made up? If you’d picked smaller numbers, would the case against some LWers’ past complacency magically be much stronger?
Second, looking forward, your “forward predictions” are unfortunately not such as to provide much evidence for or against your position whatever happens. The odds ratio for “David is right about everything” versus “David is wrong about everything” is only .65/.35 .6/.4 .6/.4 .75/.25 .55/.45 or about 15:1, and the biggest factor there is from your prediction that the Deputy Director of the FBI will not be replaced, within a year, by someone with a better background; what do the base rates look like on that? (My guess: much the same as your prediction.)
At least one of them doesn’t seem like it’s “about” the relevant political issues. “At least 2 additional states formalize independent public-health compacts beyond current ones”: if this happens, as you predict with probability 0.6, I don’t see how that’s evidence that the Trump administration is worse than if it didn’t (it’s a matter of how people who are very much not the Trump administration behave), nor evidence that leftish political views are more accurate than rightish ones (it’s maybe evidence that the Trump administration’s treatment of healthcare is disastrous, but I doubt many people around here would dispute that anyway).
Those are fair critiques and I’ll admit that I’m not the best writer and that I could have structured this better or maybe tightened up this essay. As far as my ledger I would say that implicit predictions are there and valuable because we all implicitly predict that the sun will rise the next day just because we don’t articulate it doesn’t mean that prediction isn’t real and we don’t make decisions based off of it.
And here’s the thing we couldn’t have predicted the exact issues that would arise but there were lots of people on the left and liberals who did successfully predict that these things and many other parts of our government would go badly under the Trump term and they aren’t explicit rationalists they just projected based on what he did in his first term. At least the tariffs were well known to be a terrible idea way before he started and he somehow made them worse than what he told us on the campaign Trail.
Same thing with Elon Musk and d o g e and the national debt. Lots of people on the left predicted this would cause huge institutional problems and not really save us that much money and it turns out they were correct about that as well.
My political leanings are similar to yours and I agree that the Trump administration is a disaster, and that many people around here seem not to have predicted this, and that its disastrousness gives some evidence for Team Left over Team Right (which suits me fine since Team Left is my team). But I have some concerns about your presentation here, and in particular about how you set forth your claim that Team Left’s doing better at making correct predictions than Team Right.
First, looking backward, your “ledger” of implicit predictions. (1) I am not sure you get to ascribe predictions to people who didn’t actually make those predictions. (2) These look cherry-picked, in that you’ve picked specific bad things that turned out to happen and complained that people didn’t expect them, without showing predictions of those specific bad things from your side of the table. I think if you’d asked me about several of those things before Trump took office I’d have said “I wouldn’t put anything past those guys but I don’t know whether they’ll do that in particular” rather than “yes, a Trump administration will definitely do that”.
And then you say “look at those probabilities”. Those probabilities which … you just made up? If you’d picked smaller numbers, would the case against some LWers’ past complacency magically be much stronger?
Second, looking forward, your “forward predictions” are unfortunately not such as to provide much evidence for or against your position whatever happens. The odds ratio for “David is right about everything” versus “David is wrong about everything” is only .65/.35 .6/.4 .6/.4 .75/.25 .55/.45 or about 15:1, and the biggest factor there is from your prediction that the Deputy Director of the FBI will not be replaced, within a year, by someone with a better background; what do the base rates look like on that? (My guess: much the same as your prediction.)
At least one of them doesn’t seem like it’s “about” the relevant political issues. “At least 2 additional states formalize independent public-health compacts beyond current ones”: if this happens, as you predict with probability 0.6, I don’t see how that’s evidence that the Trump administration is worse than if it didn’t (it’s a matter of how people who are very much not the Trump administration behave), nor evidence that leftish political views are more accurate than rightish ones (it’s maybe evidence that the Trump administration’s treatment of healthcare is disastrous, but I doubt many people around here would dispute that anyway).
Those are fair critiques and I’ll admit that I’m not the best writer and that I could have structured this better or maybe tightened up this essay. As far as my ledger I would say that implicit predictions are there and valuable because we all implicitly predict that the sun will rise the next day just because we don’t articulate it doesn’t mean that prediction isn’t real and we don’t make decisions based off of it.
And here’s the thing we couldn’t have predicted the exact issues that would arise but there were lots of people on the left and liberals who did successfully predict that these things and many other parts of our government would go badly under the Trump term and they aren’t explicit rationalists they just projected based on what he did in his first term. At least the tariffs were well known to be a terrible idea way before he started and he somehow made them worse than what he told us on the campaign Trail.
Same thing with Elon Musk and d o g e and the national debt. Lots of people on the left predicted this would cause huge institutional problems and not really save us that much money and it turns out they were correct about that as well.