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Cake day: June 27th, 2023

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  • From Nate Silver’s write up on this poll:

    Yesterday, I complained about how so many pollsters are “herding” by publishing results that are almost an exact tie in a way that is incredibly statistically improbable given the unavoidable sampling error from surveying a small number of voters. I also noted a handful of prominent exceptions — rouge pollsters like the New York Times/Siena College that practically exist in an entirely different universe and imply a much bigger political realignment.

    Another such maverick is Ann Selzer of Selzer & Co. (Selzer and NYT/Siena are our two highest-rated pollsters.) As my former colleague Clare Malone wrote in 2016, Selzer — like NYT/Siena — has a long history of bucking the conventional wisdom and being right. In a world where most pollsters have a lot of egg on their faces, she has near-oracular status.

    Emphasis mine. While polls were decently off in 2016 and 2020, Selzer’s were not, and reflected a significant underestimate of Trump by nearly every other pollster. This poll suggests Harris is being underestimated. If Selzer is correct, Harris wins very comfortably.

    It’s hard to explain how unexpected this result is. Harris proponents like myself were hoping for Trump +8-9 or less, which would correlate to a Harris win in the electoral college. You can still see this on r/fivethirtyeight from the bad site. I’m not optimistic and my best hope was Trump +7. People misread this as Trump +3 and were still celebrating. Headlines aren’t exaggerating here: this is a truly shocking poll. If the real result is even Trump +5, he is likely to have lost handily. If this is as accurate as Selzer has been since 2012, he will have lost in a true landslide. (Let’s not get ahead of ourselves, of course.)

    I’ll link again Silver’s article on herding because it makes a strong case that most polls are not currently reliable due to self-preservation. Selzer releasing these results is not a self preserving move and would be a large pockmark on her otherwise “near-oracular” record.

    You can scroll through my history and see that I am not an optimistic person. I initially assumed a Harris loss before Biden dropped out because RFK was still polling too well, a traditional indicator of loss when dropping incumbent status. I was pleased with her upward momentum— and still am, she deserves a great deal of credit for an excellent campaign— but she has always been the underdog in my mind. This is the most positive sign I’ve seen all season. It helps that Siena’s most recent PA poll was also quite positive at Harris +4 if I recall.

    I’m too worried to be hopeful, but this has made it harder to doom. It’s so unexpected that I take it with a grain of salt, but if she’s even half right, things are a lot better than they feel.


  • Okay so I haven’t heard about her before this but, from this thread and a quick google search, I feel like I know enough. Anyway. I’m hopeful then that the fame will pass— lots of internet fad celebrities fade and become more or less normal people again soon— but she pockets enough money to live a good life and keep paying it forward.


  • Recorded speech about engaging in crimes is often acceptable evidence. It’s probably the same with written messages.

    I guess it’s up to the accused to prevent law enforcement from acquiring what they said, whether it be preventing recording, preventing police from sifting through mail or unsecure communications, or preventing police from acquiring the accused’s copy of potentially illegal communications. Which he is currently attempting.

    I don’t blame him for trying, and would agree on a lesser extent that he is right to prevent self incriminating now. But copied communication as acceptable evidence is pretty settled in law by now.









  • I see it the other way, 8 was an alright movie if it was standalone and not part of SW. The things most people disliked are fine if it was some generic sci-fi action movie. “Jake Skywalker” is a nonissue if you don’t think he’s supposed to be Luke, the quippy lines were common, the weird bits like the Mary Poppins scene or the Holdo maneuver are acceptable in some other sci-fi movie. Wouldn’t have been a masterpiece, but it’s still relatively put together.

    9 struggled to be a film. Remove it from SW and it’s almost worse— 8 could feasibly be greenlit and released by lazy execs, but 9 would’ve been cancelled in production. Pacing was jarring to the point of feeling unfinished, plot was one of the least coherent in a mega blockbuster, and story conveniences were nauseatingly poor even if it wasn’t Star Wars. It feels like they just put something together real quick without the editors and it got leaked. None of it was serviceable. And god, not to repeat myself, but the pacing and story were horrid.

    Add it back to SW, and the Sith life transfer/dyad nonsense is as much an affront to Lucas’s story as TLJ Luke. Possibly more: sure, doing that to Luke was shit, but TRoS butchered basic Force principles. It’s like a bad DM fucking up a pivotal NPC vs fucking up the entire game system.

    I dislike both of them nearly equally, but I could probably watch 8 again. 9 is like an indecisive amateur’s attempt at Lego Star Wars machinima, down to poor editing and an inability to order scenes. Didn’t see another movie so sloppy until Thor: Love and Thunder.






  • I mean maybe, but I assume that by the time it was named, people mainly remembered the staring at oneself until death thing. The story is old enough that it’s been simplified many times, I’ve heard it more without the curse bit than with. The authors aren’t really around to correct the record.

    I’m curious, were you more familiar with the particulars of the story than the actual disorder, and just applied it? I’m confused about the point of the orignal comment. It feels like you’re more interested in Greek myths than the actual discussion that was happening.

    Which is fine— there’s a place for that, even if that wasn’t the way to introduce the subject. I’d have been (and really, still am) interested in other not-entirely-faithful myth inspired names. But by beginning with an inaccurate take on the contemporary term narcissist, it mostly just led to confusion.


  • Like others here, I gotta say it’s super weird that this comment is focused on Narcissus the character’s specific death rather than the actual disorder. It’s like getting caught up on Oedipus’s platonic relationships. The disorder references the character but does not demand that every detail of the story is relevant.

    NPD is diagnostically defined in the DSM-5 (APA 2013; pages 669-672) as a pervasive pattern of grandiosity, need for admiration, and lack of empathy, with interpersonal entitlement, exploitiveness, arrogance, and envy. Five out of nine of these criteria need to be present to meet the diagnosis of NPD.

    (The nine can be found online from many sources. None mentions sexuality.)

    There’s good reading on sexual selfishness or sexually addictive behavior from narcissists. One from the American Journal of Psychiatry, emphasis mine:

    In addition to the grandiose and vulnerable subtypes, there is a healthier group of individuals with narcissistic personality disorder, described as “high-functioning,” “exhibitionistic,” or “autonomous.” These individuals, illustrated by Mr. A, are grandiose, competitive, attention seeking, and sexually provocative, while demonstrating adaptive functioning and using their narcissistic traits to succeed.

    For a more contemporary comparison, it’s like seeing the trope of the Starscream and insisting that for the archetype to fit, they must be disintegrated by the guy they backstabbed reborn and renamed. The disorder is named after the self obsessive behavior, not the less important particulars.