#in both directions!

[tanadrin]

This might sound like a gotcha but I promise it's an honest question: do you think you're better at analyzing polls than Nate Silver? Or do you think he sees the same weirdness that you do but isn't talking about it for some reason?

The stuff you're saying sounds superficially plausible but my priors give him a lot more weight than you, especially without a specific case for why he might be getting it wrong.

I think some of the premises of this ask are weird. Bullet points for clarity.

You don’t need to be Nate Silver to look at a poll’s crosstabs and go “20% of African-Americans saying they will vote for Trump seems super unlikely.”

Nate Silver’s whole thing is modeling elections based on (in part) polls. This is a useful exercise. Even if polls are being weird, doing this may provide some nonzero amount of useful information.

While I couldn’t remotely do what Nate Silver does, Nate Silver’s job relies fundamentally on the assumption polls are an accurate metric to some extent. There are reasons to think, however, that this year they are unusually inaccurate (see point 1)

You didn’t need to be a particle physicist to doubt that the faster-than-light neutrinos result from a few years ago was in fact an error. As it turned out to be. Basic contextual knowledge like whether FTL particles are likely to be a thing—or how various American demographic groups historically vote—means you do not have to approach all subject-specific questions with total Pyrrhonian skepticism, even if you do not have expertise in them.

Lots of people who do this shit for a living *are* talking about the weirdness in the polls, including the new guy running 538, and Nate Cohn over at the NYT. Silver may be too, I haven’t been following him since he left 538.

They may be factoring in the weirdness to some extent in their own modeling, but this is risky! You don’t wanna engage in arbitrary “unskewing” like amateurs tried to do in 2020, and pollsters don’t always release their full data and methodology. So it’s hard to figure out exactly what’s going on.

Nonetheless we do know that poll response rates are at an all time low—much lower even than they were four years ago.

None of what I have posted about the polls and polling is original; these are all points people much smarter than me in this area have talked about and continue to debate. I know what arguments I find persuasive, but if you disagree, that’s cool. I don’t think we will have any solid answers until the election actually happens.

[druid-for-hire]

[image id: a four-page comic. it is titled "immortality” after the poem by clare harner (more popularly known as “do not stand at my grave and weep”). the first page shows paleontologists digging up fossils at a dig. it reads, “do not stand at my grave and weep. i am not there. i do not sleep.” page two features several prehistoric creatures living in the wild. not featured but notable, each have modern descendants: horses, cetaceans, horsetail plants, and crocodilians. it reads, “i am a thousand winds that blow. i am the diamond glints on snow. i am the sunlight on ripened grain. i am the gentle autumn rain.” the third page shows archaeopteryx in the treetops and the skies, then a modern museum-goer reading the placard on a fossil display. it reads, “when you awaken in the morning’s hush, i am the swift uplifting rush, of quiet birds in circled flight. i am the soft stars that shine at night. do not stand at my grave and cry.” the fourth page shows a chicken in a field. it reads, “i am not there. i did not die” / end id]

a comic i made in about 15 hours for my school’s comic anthology. the theme was “evolution”

[infernal-lamb]

Searching your eyes for the saint is an act of futility

something that's just been on my mind recently!

[antariies]

astarion is like one of those little crusty white dogs to me. yknow

[dear-ao3]

[notherpuppet]

This is why his character is so compelling

[commsroom]

the u.s.s. horrible unending nightmare 💥 (once again from the incredible @hehearse)

[qiinamii]

quite the poet, quite the inspo

[helpimstuckinafandom]

The fact that we got both Brennan and Lily's reactions in the same shot

[ofswordsandpens]

adding to the "there should have been more genuine tension within the seven" train of thought, it would have been funny if the Argo II, technically being a ship, meant it fell under Percy's power domain and he could control it all at whim, rendering all the carefully crafted controls Leo built useless if Percy felt like being an asshole

[tanadrin]

My most reactionary opinion is that a well-rounded education is actually a good idea, and you should in fact be forced to sit through subjects you aren’t necessarily interested in in school sometimes.

This is in substantial part nakedly self-interested: I see way too many people with an excessively one-sided education with absolutely nonsense dogshit takes on fields outside their experience, and I would prefer if there was less of that sort of thing in the future.

[demigods-posts]

something about percy nearly dying at luke's hand at the end of tlt ruffles my bones. because imagine feeling like a burden to anyone who dared to care for you. imagine blaming yourself for the death of your mother. imagine grieving in black and white amid a world of color. and then an older brother sees you for all of your sorrow and pain. your cries for help that go unanswered. your longing for a reason to breathe again. and becoming someone you look forward to confiding in when the dust settles. only to discover that their source of light was merely a flame. and the summer air was always meant to burn you alive. truly haunting.

[chloesimaginationthings]

Micheal feeling comfortable enough around Vanessa to show her his scars:

Then Vanny struggling to not make every single interaction with Mike awkward or stressful:

It’s so funny their interactions are totally the opposite

[framblebee]

INTERVIEW WITH THE VAMPIRE 1x3 vs. 2x6

Lestat & Louis & telling their lovers shit they absolutely do not mean

[incomingalbatross]

Love how in the Hunger Games Peeta will be like "Obviously you're Haymitch's favorite because you guys are so alike and you understand each other," and Katniss will go "no I KNOW you're Haymitch's favorite. because Haymitch and I are so alike and understand each other"

There's a lot going on there.

[phoenixtakaramono]

【TIMESKIP】

I think the Princess of Hell and her devoted knight make a great powerhouse couple

Higher-Res Version: Twitter