CDC gets list of forbidden words

If I answer truthfully I'm going to be down voted and shamed, so I won't answer.

Instead, I'm going to continue to be part of the silent majority that supports him, but doesn't speak out because we are often falsely labeled as deplorables or worse.

Edit: people like me are what you get when society stifles free speech: unwilling to engage and so continuing in our beliefs silently. maybe you coastal elitists should stop shaming people for having different opinions and mental models of how the world works.

And if you dummies think that speech isn't being stifled, look no further than James Demore being fired for trying to figure out root cause analysis of why there aren't more women in tech

Edit 2: someone is going through my post history and downvoting. Good job, ladies, you're proving my point.

Edit 3: and now I'm not allowed to respond to people because I'm posting "too fast". Great.

I'm downvoting you anyway, not for supporting him, but for the faux martyrdom that contributes nothing to the discussion. We actually really need to hear from thoughtful people who support Trump if they're out there, because 99% of the vocal supporters I hear are batshit crazy. That could just be my bias, of course :)

Also, "majority"? He lost the popular vote and I believe he has the lowest 1-year approval rating of any modern President? What majority are you referring to?

You're going to be downvoted either way, because a post that just complains about theoretical downvotes gets downvoted on this site. So you might as well take the opportunity to explain.

It's also worth mentioning that the question GP is asking isn't really "how can people support the administration", as there's many, many answers to it. The real question is "how can people support this?".

And frankly, enlighten me. Do you support this?

Edit: I should also remind you that Trump is not supported by a "silent majority". Quite the opposite: Trump is supported and was elected by a vocal minority. His approval rating today is the lowest it's ever been according to 538's aggregations. It's time americans get their head out of the sand on this topic.

so you are willing to publicly support demore but not answer the original question?

The "majority" that believe voter fraud is massive and the deep state is real. Have you seen the comments on Trump's facebook posts?

Yes I support Demore.

It's not my fault you are purposely misunderstanding my comment in order to paint me as an idiot. You've obviously got an agenda.

>silent majority that supports him

To be clear, Trump lost the popular vote (which is conducted with closed ballots so the silent majority can voice their opinion); and by all available measures has gotten less popular since then.

>And if you dummies think that speech isn't being stifled, look no further than James Demore being fired for trying to figure out root cause analysis of why there aren't more women in tech

Were you around HN when this happened. In my reccolection, there was a significant portion of HN that disagreed with the firing; and even many of those who defended the firing argued not that Damore was wrong, but that the PR against him justified the firing.

I am certain that my comments against the firing were well received (eg. upvoted) here.

Having said that, you are certainly correct that the left has its own anti-intellectual movement. It just hasn't penetrated into the political party as badly as it has on the right.

> were you around HN when this happened

Dude I've been around HN for almost 9 years.

And in that time this site went from pro free speech to downvote anything that isn't super left-wing progressive

i do not misunderstand what you wrote. and you still haven't answered the original question.

1. Why are you not answering my question?

2. Why are you saying something patently false about 538? They gave Trump the highest chances to win across most polls pre-election. They wrote several articles about how Trump could still win despite the polls.

3. Why are you equating election predictive polling with aggregation of approval ratings?

4. What's with your hostile tone?

You're a very unpleasant man, aren't you, calling people "you dummies", being overtly aggressive and playing the victim? Maybe it's time for you to face that you're being downvoted not because you "have different opinions and mental models of how the world work", but simply because you're a nasty person. After all, you haven't actually expressed any opinion yet, and you're still being downvoted, so it can't be because of your opinions.

Here's something for you to think about: I have different opinions and mental models of how the world works. I often enough say controversial shit, and yet I manage to do so mostly without getting flagged. Clearly, your approach is wrong.

>Edit 2: someone is going through my post history and downvoting. Good job, ladies, you're proving my point.

I just checked your post history. The only comments still eligible to be downvoted are in this thread.

538 doesn't do polling. They aggregate and analyze others' polls.

538 gave Trump a ~30% chance of winning, where virtually all other outlets (Princeton, NYT, HuffPo, etc.) were giving him a 1-5%. They appear to have had the best handle on Trump's chances.

> They though Hillary was gonna win in a landslide.

Actually, 538 was pointing out why other poll-based predictors were overrating her likelihood of winning (because, unlike 538 and contrary to historical evidence, thet were largely assuming deviation from polling averages in the election would be independent between different states rather than correlated.)

HN is still pro free speech. Downvoting comments does not curtail free speech. Flagging them does (unless your definition of "free speech" stops at the First Amendment), but only for those who don't have "showdead" on. Maybe HN's way of highlighting downvoted comments encourages conformist behavior, but you can still write anything you want. You just might not find anybody willing to listen and agree.

That illustrates how useless such predictions are. What "Trump has 30% chance of winning" means? If Trump won, did this prediction work or not? If he lost, did it work or not? How one could distinguish successful prediction from a failed one, even post-factum? I don't see any way. Now, if we had 100 identical Trumps running in 100 USA elections, and 30 of them would win and 70 of them would lose, we'd say good work 538, you were spot on. But since we have one Trump winning one election - I do not see any way of seeing how 538 was "better" than NYT since I can't see how you can say whether both were successful or not. NYT gave Trump 1% to win, he won - so that 1% worked. Big deal, people win lottery all the time, with much lower chances. So maybe NYT was completely right and 538 is full of it, maybe it's really an one in a 100 event? How would you know?

As you well know, you can't cross into this kind of personal attack here. I don't want to ban you, so please fix this and stop doing it, regardless of how wrong or unpleasant the other person is.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Would you please stop violating the site guidelines and posting ideological rants to HN? We've asked you several times, like https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15023452 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14334771.

If you can't control yourself we're going to ban you, not because of your views but simply because you didn't control yourself. Please control yourself.

It might help to re-read https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.

We know 538's model was better because of what happened on election day.

Their model gave Trump a dramatically higher chance than other poll aggregators for a variety of reasons (detailed at http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/election-update-why-our-...) and #4 there (correlated polling errors between states) wound up being very significant.

Now, you're right that we can't perfectly determine if 99% or 70% (or something else entirely) was Hillary's actual chance of winning. We can, however, look at the assumptions made by each model and evaluate those on their merits.

Over many predictions we can apply a proper scoring rule to judge calibration. It's certainly the case that we don't learn much from looking at a single prediction.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scoring_rule#Proper_scoring_ru...

Sure, if we have many predictions, that makes sense. But there are not that many presidential elections, even less - ones that 538 predicted on, and even less - ones that 538 predicted on used the same methodology. So how does one evaluate?

If we have fewer predictions, we need to be correspondingly less confident in our assessment of the quality of the predictor, to be sure. 538 has made hundreds (at least) of predictions, and across those has seemingly performed well. You can quite reasonably make a claim that most of those don't translate perfectly to the specific setting of a presidential election. But at the worst we should treat them as irrelevant and conclude that we don't know much about 538's quality. That's a far cry from a demonstration that their predictions are poor, which is what was claimed.