in short, i have fattie potential

Me too, Vez. Me too. I’ve been a chocolate junkie since childhood.

Snickers Peanut Butter – possibly the greatest candy bar ever, definitely out of newer creations.

Those things are dangerous. I like danger.

/Why would a Hebrew god tell you how to marry is he speaks Hewbrew, Yank?

peter piper

did you snort some coke?

Some people say cucumbers taste better pickled.

did you snort some coke?

That’s what Nate Silver’s model says are the odds that President Obama will win the Electoral College (as of 1:55:05 P.M. EST.) Not 78.5 percent. Not 78.39 percent. Not 80 percent or 60 percent. 78.4 percent.

However you come down on the soundness of Silver’s model. — FWIW though I’m a layman, I was a fan of Silver the baseball statistician, and think his model, from what he’s written about it publicly, is plausibly built, even if I suspect that he’s following in sabermetrics godfather Bill James’ footsteps by assigning weights to inputs based on what produces outcomes that feel right — Where was I? Oh yes, however you come down on the soundness of Silver’s model, I’m irked by how both supporters and detractors seem to be interpreting it.

Let’s be clear. When Nate Silver says there’s a 78.4 percent chance Obama will win the Electoral College, he’s expressing a degree of confidence in a prediction. He’s not inventing a new verb and saying “President Obama will be seventy-eight-point-four-reelected” or creating a hundred parallel universes wherein “78.4 percent of Barack Obamas will be reelected.” He’s making a prediction about a binary outcome, based on his reading of the data, and then stapling on a measure of confidence to that prediction.

So one can think that Silver is probably right about the Electoral College, and simultaneously think that the 78.4 percent number is basically meaningless. Or rather, that it is impossible to formulate the epistemological difference between “There is a 78.4 percent chance that Obama will win” and “There is a pretty good chance Obama will win.” A lot of Silver’s credibility counts on somehow elucidating the distance between those two propositions, in somehow explaining how his model adds value to what amounts to an expression of the conventional wisdom. As I understand it, Silver runs a very large number of simulations and the 78.4 percent number reports the distribution of outcomes in those simulations. If this is a way of saying “Obama has more paths to victory than Romney”, that’s, again, probably true, but it’s also the same thing that every two-bit pundit with a humanities degree (myself included) has been saying for a while.

UPDATE: Generalizing hugely, Silver’s electoral model works like PECOTA — the career-modeling algorithm developed for Baseball Prospectus. It incorporates past election outcomes, and most crucially the correlation between actual outcomes and what the polls predicted. The issue there, for me, is that PECOTA had a pretty good N of playeer careers to work with. If you want to know what kind of year Robinson Cano is likely to have in 2013, PECOTA has a lot of actual prior career trajectories, weighted for era, home ballpark, and the like, to compare with Cano’s, and the resultant predictions, and especially “similarity scores” are intuitive — they usually “make sense” to baseball fans. But as one of the commenters pointed out, presidential electoral dynamics (and demographics) are fluid enough and quality, extensive polling so recent a phenomenon, that the number of comps is maybe four or five — or maybe zero.

Anyway, that’s spitballing. I hope no one takes me to think myself qualified to appraise the validity of Silver’s model. What the original post was about is how we should characterize the relationship between Silver’s technical work and the vaguer, layman-speak we use to talk about the election.

plus his bug eyes and as you said, the effeminate aura. in short, i’d rather be me than him, except for the riches

in short, i have fattie potential

srod, i did have some malted milk balls, whoppers, if you will, that seemed ‘fresh’, and i was pleasantly surprised

still, they are on the outside looking in for most chocolate lovers

Now, I’m always down for Snickers or Kit-Kat. Bring it on, brotha.

Yeah. I grew up in Western Kansas. No Jewish people. The white person jewfro was unsettling. Rattails and mullets were what I grew up with.

this means either good candy with teeth marks or malted milk balls

Who was that, Chief? Blackledge?

Correct. You earn a piece of leftover Halloween candy.

I was in the loo, so if they mentioned the answer on NFLN, I missed it.

it was his jewfro, plus his Willie Wonka was disturbing. Blazing Saddles dislike also has kept me from seeing young frankenstein

it’s more of the same no?

i’ll wear it, as long as I never have to see black folks punching horses

/fletch is 10 times funnier