Categories
This is how polls should be reported – politicalbetting.com
This is how polls should be reported – politicalbetting.com
My wish for the next election is that poll trackers look like the one on the right ? not the leftThis was yet another election where the polling showed it could easily go either way, but most of the charts just showed two nice clean lines, one leading and one trailing. Bad! pic.twitter.com/kCLyl0TGhO
0
Comments
Edit: and first. In fact, a second first in a row!
The US presidential election had the polls, in general, predicting the result, *within their historic margin of error*.
That is, they were saying “on knife edge with an advantage to Trump”.
Oh sorry, this is Safer Gambling Week. Not safe but safer.
https://safergamblinguk.org/
World leading ballet dancer, "loses his balance" on a fifth floor Moscow balcony.
What were the odds?
https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2024/nov/18/vladimir-shklyarov-russian-ballet-star-dies-aged-39-after-falling-from-building
The US polls showed a coin toss, but as the seven swing states were likely to swing together rather than independently, that made it look like a landslide.
Scotland already has Sheriffs, though I can't quite imagine them delivering 'summary justice' in the same way as an American Sheriff from the bench, giving them a six-shooter might change the dynamics in court somewhat. Perhaps @DavidL is in a better place to comment.
Social media polarisation at its worst again this morning. Bluesky, which I'd thoughtful, literate and considered on topics like literature and photography full of posts on Biden's missile policy along the lines "Let's go ! Now let's go faster and harder."
Meanwhile, TwitterX has thousands of posts along the lines that it's all the work of Soros and the regime of "Sodom and Gomorrha".
In the US, city police and county sheriffs have jurisdiction over different areas: the police look after incorporated cities, while the county sheriffs enforce the law in unincorporated areas of a county. So they don't really work alongside each other.
In any case, the system is often a mess, as they often don't talk to each other meaning that lower level criminals can get away my moving jurisdiction. It's also expensive, especially in lightly populated areas, because there is lots of unnecessary duplication, with both maintaining separate facilities, like jails or forensic labs.
So I don't think it's a model to be followed here.
In the end, the party political system meant that we got a string of third rate political hacks. Who often take the salary and let the system do what it wants.
1) to display your beliefs like a mating peacock.
2) to find a group of others to approve your beliefs
3) to find a group of those opposed to you, so you can hate them.
Since pollsters herd in methodology, the way that car designers produce similar looking cars, the average only removes “rogue instance”.
So 9/10 polls showing a 2 point lead doesn’t mean what it apparently says.
1. To show off your wares/attributes/CV/pout
2. To find a group of people who are sufficiently impressed
So either that few % is not correct, or they can correct for it reasonably well.
Was he on Putin's possible death list for any reason?
IIRC from my past reading of the Mitrokhin Archive, the KGB plotted to do things to Rudolf Nureyev after he defected.
We need to remember and remind ourselves how evil are these regimes. (Yes, that's a moral judgement.)
F1: if the track's as slippery as last year then some crashes and VSCs/safety cars seem eminently possible.
Just as likely some random oligarch did it, rather than the state.
I'm more with social media is what we collectively make of it, with a whole spectrum of variation.
My local Sutton Living Memory Facebook Group (16k members) tells me oodles of recent local history.
This morning Nottingham Cycle Chat (private, 1000 members) has told me about a new cafe in Shipley Country Park and which Nottingham Cycle Parking facilities have a history of scrotes stealing things.
Cycling UK Canals and Rivers (50k members iirc) has told me other things.
And the Omnipod 5 user group (4k and growing rapidly) is educating me about the wrinkles of my new capsule insulin pumps.
The Leeanderthal Man's group is obviously full of Leeanderthal men.
And my various family and friends networks keep me in touch. Too many adoring photos of one relative's Shit-Pooh dog, however; it even has a name from the Six Million Dollar Man (slinky spring sound effect).
The issue with Twitter is systemic, with all pretence of being a neutral service provider abandoned. It's like swimming in a river where the water company is forever releasing raw sewage. There is an opportunity to make something better without the sewage, so I will support it with my small contribution. If Elon Musk wants me to be his plaything, he can go and fuck himself.
Not every pollster was off either, Atlas polls were actually very close to the national and swing states result. Tipp was also closer to the national popular result than other polls, as it was in 2020 and 2016
Yesterday was fun. The party (and me) discovered that fighting a behir can be rough.
(Caveat, it's only a small study, so far from conclusive.)
https://x.com/kimmonismus/status/1858208537869951318
Study Finds ChatGPT Outperforms Doctors at Diagnosing Illness
In a surprising small-scale study, ChatGPT-4 outperformed doctors at diagnosing medical cases, even when those doctors had access to the same chatbot. Published in JAMA Network Open, the study tested 50 physicians on six challenging medical cases. The chatbot scored 90%, compared to 76% for doctors using ChatGPT and 74% for those relying only on conventional resources.
The findings highlight three critical issues:
1. Human Bias: Many doctors clung to their initial diagnoses, even when the chatbot suggested alternatives with better reasoning.
2. Underutilization: Most physicians used ChatGPT for targeted questions, failing to exploit its ability to analyze entire case histories comprehensively.
3. Trust Gap: Despite ChatGPT’s superior performance, skepticism remains about integrating A.I. into clinical workflows...
But Twix is rapidly becoming a Torx screwdriver that has become mangled after an idiot has tried to use it on too many Phillips heads screws. It's still a tool, but pretty useless for anything other than a shank.
"Opinion polling for the 2024 United Kingdom general election - Wikipedia" https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opinion_polling_for_the_2024_United_Kingdom_general_election
5% chance ?
Lords Reform has been going on in 94 or more baby steps since about 1025.
I exchanged information and met up with industry peers at a few IRL events, bonded with people over similar music tastes, shared random memes and funnies.
Then the rot set in. And by rot, I mean politics. It corrodes everything it touches. Once twitter hit the tipping point of being mostly politics, slowly, all the people using it for other reasons left. Eventually it just became arguments and porn bots.
Bluesky is useful because of its blocklist feature. Meaning you can have, say, a discussion on queer literature without some knuckle dragger turning the thread into a DID U KNO THER R ONLY 2 GENDARS? and turning the whole discussion into a flaming dumpster fire. Not everything has to be about politics, all of the time. Sometimes, you just wanna talk about books.
Where Bluesky is bad is that it's 2014-Tumblr redux. A coterie of hard-left radicals who pile on to anyone who doesn't share their views who are the second cheek of the same arse of the MAGA types who make Twitter unusable. Bluesky has a "this is a space for leftists" culture and if you don't meet the purity test, you'll quickly end up blocked.
It's worth pointing out that the second most blocked person on Bluesky at the moment is Brianna Wu, who you may remember as the trans woman who got brigaded on twitter a decade ago by far right morons in 'gamergate'. Now she's getting hassled by the far left for daring to suggest that their absolutist views are harming trans rights. She's also pro-Israel. Truly, the revolution eating its own children.
I like PB because it enables me to compartmentalise political debate - I don't talk politics elsewhere online, or ever in real life. The problem is everyone wants to turn everywhere online into a political slanging match. Imagine everyone turning every forum everywhere into non-stop football talk. When you just want to share recipes for cake. Eventually the politics corrodes everything, making 'general purpose' public spaces utterly useless for anything other than politics, forcing people into highly moderated niche forums, subreddits, discord channels, etc, to discuss other topics.
TL;DR. Even with strong moderation, social media is probably dead as a means of communicating *anything* except political hatred for the other side.
How did he piss Putin off ?
https://x.com/Hromadske/status/1858246230570393958
https://www.politico.com/news/2024/11/17/republicans-trump-win-economy-election-security-confidence-00189941
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Messenger-at-arms
Like the old adage - if you meet one arsehole in your day, bad luck, you met an arsehole. If you meet lots of arseholes, then maybe its you? I don't see the issues with twitter that others do, and Facebook etc seems fine.
Presumably this is also with the clear say-so of China. Using North Korea as a proxy for direct support to Russia in Ukraine.
In the last GE, polls indicated that Keir Starmer was going to win a vote percentage higher than Tony Blair but what he achieved was 33%.
The IOWA polls just before the US election indicated that Kamala Harris was doing extraordinarily well in the mid-west and this bore no resemblance to the actual result.
Unfortunately in the run-up to an election, the media seems to concentrate on polls more than policies or content and this is subject to a lot of manipulation by the dark arts.
These alleged false CV claims by Rachel Reeves are serious. Unless she can produce a good explanation, she should resign as Chancellor & MP - or be sacked. I know that won't happen, but brushing the allegations aside will only encourage others to make false claims.
Cow *Orkers*
This Is Known.
It may well be as impressive as it sounds, but I hate accuracy as a measure when you don't know the underlying distribution of things.
Also, how did ChatGPT score 90% on six cases? Or did it get 300 goes (50 physicians x 6 cases) like the physicians?
Just ban Russians from staying there, I guess.
Then market it to Russians.
The problem with Twitter is it's impossible to have a civil conversation about anything as a) all the people who don't want to argue politics left long ago and b) all the people who do want to argue politics think because it's an open forum, they can just wander in and start bombarding you with their pet obsessions. Effectively derailing what could have otherwise been interesting discussions. Imagine Leon brigading this forum with AI posts constantly when you're trying to talk about politics. That's what Twitter has become, but in reverse. Bluesky is going the same way, but with a more leftist bent.
I stand by my idea that 'open' social media is dead and political argument drives out all others until the platform is dead. An enshittification cycle, sort of like the 4channification cycle, where something starts out cool and underground, develops a wider userbase, then the nazis and pornbots move in, everyone else moves out, until there's only nazis and pornbots left.
Western deterrence has crumbled*, so we may soon see China's intentions more clearly.
* The response from the West is to allow Ukraine to use ATACMs on targets inside Russia, but only on North Korean troops. It's woefully inadequate pettifogging micromanagement. Perhaps it is a luxury that could be indulged from a position of strength, but in the current circumstance when democracy is losing this war, it's emblematic of why we are losing.
It's possible, but there are other considerations.
NK's value to China is as a client state, and a buffer between it and the west (ie S Korea).
If it drifts into Moscow's orbit, that's an unwelcome development.
From Herd Digital amalysis:
44% of the UK population use Facebook daily.
Facebook has 44.84 million users in the UK.
The average user spends 23 minutes on Facebook every day.
With 11.2 million users, the age group 25 to 34 is the most active on Facebook in the UK.
Users between the ages of 18 and 24 have decreased from 24% in 2012 to 16% in 2020.
The number of users aged 65+ has increased from 4% in 2019 to 9% in 2020.
52% of Facebook users in the UK are women and 48% are men.
Facebook is the most popular social network globally.
Compared to other countries, India has the most Facebook users with 320 million.
In the Q3 of 2021, Facebook had 2.8 billion daily active users.
With 11.2 billion visits, Facebook is the world’s third most popular website.
There's clearly a market for an unshittified platform. So the chances are that one will, in time, evolve.
https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-d&q=millerlite.+he+aint+heavy+hes+my+brother#fpstate=ive&vld=cid:48d1f72d,vid:TvJyZ9fm73M,st:0
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle/2825395
Note "we built on previous studies of structured reflection by scoring the grid itself, not just final diagnosis accuracy" so the assessment was based on a diagnosis grid recording possible diagnoses and reasoning (which may well be a good way to do it, but is not the same as the tweet-implied outcome of getting it correct - at least, that's what I took the figures to mean). I can well believe that ChatGPT produces reams of text on all sensible diagnoses that would bump up the score assessed in this way.
Still an interesting study.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vOB7-dbYuCc
We’re making the system work for Canadians and for newcomers, rather than for the big box stores, chain restaurants, immigration consultants, and sham colleges that exploit it.
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle/2825395
..Clinical vignettes were adapted from a landmark study that set the standard for the evaluation of computer-based diagnostic systems. All cases in this study were based on actual patients and included information available on initial diagnostic evaluation, such as history, physical examination, and laboratory test results. The cases have never been publicly released to protect the validity of the test materials for future use, and therefore are excluded from training data of the LLM...
"Representative samples" here:
https://cdn.jamanetwork.com/ama/content_public/journal/jamanetworkopen/939467/zoi241182supp2_prod_1729527081.368.pdf
It would be interesting to see how it actually performed in a clinical setting, but that sort of trial would take a lot longer.
Surely he’d be receiving a Hero of the Russian Federation medal for his pre SMO Putin rimming rather than an appointment with a balcony?
It is also good for the following things:
1. Reading what latest lunacy your political foes are thinking or pushing (eg James O'B, Owen J);
2. Steve Inman's non-essential commentary; and
3. The odd time spent doom-scrolling as long as strictly time-limited.
But my socials are an overlapping set of interests: guitars, painting little toy soldiers, classic TV, theatre, books, archaeology, business, tech, and some news/politics. The "generalist" ones (Twitter as was, Bluesky as of the last month or so) is a curated feed of all those overlapping interests. I also have a few more focused places, like PB and a couple of Discords.
Aggressively muting and blocking people who were not contributing positively to my happiness on any of those channels makes them an "echo chamber" I guess. But I don't want my every interaction to be an argument. Mostly I just want to be able to chat about things I enjoy.
Twitter reached the point where I couldn't paddle against that tide any more.
Especially ladders.
Unsure if I got all this from that, but 2012 betting on Maldonado/Alonso to lead lap 1 in Spain, 2016 on Verstappen to win in Spain (251 winner), and many 2020 Sakhir bets (including Perez to win at 61) were all based on breaking news.
An absolutely golden rule for older blokes is never go up ladders, still less get onto a roof ffs.
The latest poll from EKOS has the Liberals cutting the Conservative lead from 13% to 10% with the Liberals up to 28% and the Conservatives on 38% which would likely mean a hung parliament with the Conservatives most seats
https://www.ekospolitics.com/index.php/2024/11/race-continues-to-tighten/