“Activities that seem to represent choices are often inert reproductions of accepted practice.”

-Shoshana Zuboff

If the universe is completely deterministic as scientists insist (and it may well be), then causality doesn’t exist. It’s an illusion. No “choice” means no causality. The concept just doesn’t work and can’t work with complete determinism assumed.

Leibniz in the 1700s was arguing essentially the same thing with his concept of monads.

Science and its religion of complete determinism only reinforces this, not refutes it, a trap sprung on itself.

One major problem with science as we conceive it is that it attempts to sweep problems like this under the rug and deny they exist, when in fact they are foundational problems.

She really is.

What kind of brain injury does Nate Silver have, exactly?

But the result was not some sort of massive outlier; on the contrary, the polls were pretty much as accurate as they’d been, on average, since 1968.

On average is worthless. Just worthless. This is simply the geek tendency to proclaim, “Even though I was wrong, I was actually right!”

The only value of site like 538 is that it’s supposed to have better predictive power than me engaging in some tasseography or haruspicy. If it doesn’t do better than that it’s simply pointless intellectual ostentation. As I pointed out a while ago, many of the polls where it was most important were drastically wrong no matter what Silver says, or even Andrew Gelman claims (whom I usually like).

Think about it this way. I’m playing Russian Roulette. One in the chamber; six chambers. On average, I am alive.

Now wouldn’t you like to know which chamber that fucking round is in before you pull the trigger?