This comment says it better than I could. The debate was a disaster for Biden. Which sucks.

ITT: People not understanding probabilistic forecasts.

Nate Silvers models are not perfect, but pretty close. You can do retro analysis on them to see. If someone with a 5% chance to win actually does win, that doesn’t mean the model was wrong… That just needs to actually happen only 5% of the time.

Getting elections"wrong" as people are talking about here shows they don’t really know how these models work. If you haven’t looked at the retrospective analysis on these results, then you are likely unqualified to declare that they are useless or wrong.

Saying polls are garbage is a straight bad take. The differentiation between polls is immense, and people treat them like they are just one thing.

They do adjust, and if you don’t know that I’m not likely to believe you have the knowledge to say they are bad.

Polls are still very indicative. Democrats are not magically beating them by 9 points. That’s just flatly untrue, unless you are just rolling every poll together with no regard for methodology, funding source, sample size, or track record.

Starting with a declaimer of being fairly far left…

Biden is not looking like he has a winning chance. He’s barely leading in national polls, but those polls are misleading, as, because of the senate, democrats typically need to win by 2.5-3 points in order to have a shot at the electoral college. So he’s behind there.

He’s behind in several key states where he needs to win. If you count states where he’s down 2 points or less, he BARELY has enough to win. Can’t miss a single state.

The debate hurt Biden. This is not a logical contest, it’s a popularity one, and Biden is not doing well. I think he’s done some great policy things, but that’s not how people vote. Democrats have to learn that it’s not enough to be “right” if you’re going to lose elections.

Mountain Goats right?

I’m never sure how to approach crypto on these platforms, because it’s rare to get a nuanced take.

I’ve moved past bitcoin to ethereum, I think it answers a lot of the criticisms.

I try not to get caught up on whether or not it’s a currency, store of value, or most other definitions. I just approach it from, is it a good product?

I’m in the middle on things such as money laundering or criminal activity. On one hand, the ledger system makes it incredibly easy to trace back transactions if someone ever messes up. On the other it serves a similar function as cash except you don’t have the physical weight, which is non trivial to transport. I know some criminals have to have used it successfully.

Crypto is hard. There’s so many goddamn scams and stuff like NFTs that could be a good idea if they got the weight of enforcement, but there’s no real enforcement mechanism. We have silly slips of paper that say whether we own things, I don’t think it’s a stretch to say we could make them digital with the right implementation. But those silly slips of paper hold the weight of law behind the. NFTs have no one to enforce anything, thus are useless.

I’m always afraid to open this up on this platform because there’s so many non nuanced takes, and people writing just the same criticisms. I’m hoping to have a good discussion, and I’m open to other opinions on it. But I haven’t found an argument that makes me think Ethereum is a problem or something to avoid. It’s certainly risky, but I think that risk is justified to the level of which I hold it.