The Big Alien Theory - <AUTHOR> http://www.thebigalientheory.com/ <comment><USER2> >No matter what degree of variability is chosen, alien planets are very unlikely to be much larger than the Earth. To be specific, we can say with 95% confidence that another planet with intelligent life, such as our nearest neighbour, will have a circumference no more than 20% greater than that of the Earth.

Huh? I see no justification for this.

I'm firmly in the "We know nothing about aliens and won't until we get some hard data" camp.

Alien life will, by definition, be alien. We have no basis for assuming it's even going to be recognisable as life.

Life essentially seems to be a persistent self-reproducing dissipative structure that responds to evolutionary pressure. There is nothing in the manual that requires liquid water, gravity, a planetary surface, carbon, or any of the other ingredients that define life on Earth.

<comment><USER3> > There is nothing in the manual that requires liquid water, gravity, a > planetary surface, carbon, or any of the other ingredients that define life > on Earth.

On carbon, this is from [a recent Astrobiology textbook]([http://books.google.com/books?id=x83omgI5pGQC&q=%22there%20m...](http://books.google.com/books?id=x83omgI5pGQC&q=%22there%20may%20very%20well%20be%20only%20a%20single%20element%22)) which probably does count as a manual : )

"There are, after all, only a finite number of elements in the periodic table, and many of these are very poorly suited to support life for any of a fair list of reasons. Consequently, many of the 90-odd naturally occurring elements can be ruled out. So many, in fact, that in the end there may very well be only a single element--carbon, the basis of all life on earth--that is able to support the complex chemistry presumably required to create any self- replicating chemical system. The easiest way to appreciate the special, perhaps even unique, qualities of carbon is to compare it with silicon, its closest cousin.

Many of the properties that suit carbon so well to its central role in Terrestrial life are shared or even exceeded by silicon. For example, silicon, like carbon, is tetravalent--that is each atom forms four bonds, allowing for the formation of a rich array of complex molecular structures. And, while silicon-silicon bond is weaker than a carbon bond, the discrepancy is only about 25%. Consistent with this, both silicon and carbon can form long molecular chains, For example, compounds of silicon and hydrogen, called silanes, with up to 28 consecutive silicon-silicon bonds have been reported in the scientific literature. Likewise, while carbon is the fourth most common element in the Solar System as a while, silicon is many orders of magnitude more common on the surface of Earth. Indeed, silicon is second only to Oxygen in terms of its abundance in the Earth's crust. Nevertheless, silicon simply cannot support the same rich chemistry as its "upstairs" neighbor in the periodic table. The problem lies in both the thermodynamics (equilibrium stabilities) of silicon's interactions with other atoms and the kinetics (rates) of these reactions...

So carbon wins over silicon. But what of the 90 or so other naturally occurring elements? They fare even worse than silicon."

<comment><USER4> > "There are, after all, only a finite number of elements in the periodic > table..."

That's because we've only discovered or figured out how to make a finite number of them. Is there a reason that other (alien) elements can't exist that we've never been exposed to?

<comment><USER5> The structure of elements/atoms is well understood based on their subatomic constituents. Naively, you might think that can you just keep combining increasingly larger numbers of electrons, protons, and neutrons to create new elements. However, the stability of an atom becomes problematic when the size of the nucleus approaches the interaction length of the strong force (i.e. the nucleus is too large for the strong force to hold it together). These elements are unstable and therefor not relevant as far as organic chemistry is concerned.

Furthermore, the formation of elements in the Universe is also a fairly well understood process. For elements lighter than Fe it generally occurs through nuclear fusion in the center of stars. For elements larger than Fe it generally occurs through the r-process and s-process. With these we can model nucleosynthesis extremely well and it gives us a very good idea of the elemental composition of the Universe. That being said, there could be some crazy unknown element out there but it would contradict almost everything know about atomic physics.

<comment><USER6> Good answer, but I think you mean Fe, not Pb.

<comment><USER5> Good catch! It has been corrected in my comment.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> So they do something like this: Let's choose a human in random - he is more probable to be from Pakistan than from Slovakia. (OK) Now let's choose a country - now an average country like Slovakia is more probable than a country as big as Pakistan. (OK)

So if you are a human - then it is most probable that you live in a country that is more populous than the typical country. (OK)

Now they say - ok - so now instead of choosing humans let's do the same thing with sentient beings. If you are a sentient being it is more probable that you live on a planet where there are many other sentient beings rather than on a planet that there are few of them. But if you go to some random planet with sentient life - then the expected number of sentient beings there would be average.

Then it goes on that "Physically larger species will on average have lower population densities." \- so most probably the random alien planet will have fewer and larger sentient beings than us.

I don't know if I buy that whole argument - but I am too lazy to write the bayesian equations to nail it down.

<comment><USER8> My only gripe is that he's only used vertebrates in his dataset (based on [http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal....](http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0078733)). It's "only human" to include close members on the phylogenetic tree, but I see it as a flaw.

What if our imaginary aliens are plant-like, squid-like, or something we can't even begin to fathom, like symbiotic unicellulars? Sentient, self-replicating machine clusters the size of planets? Take a minute to think about this.

I think his conclusion should then have been worded like: the random alien planet will have fewer and larger VERTEBRATES than us. And that's a probably very meaningless conclusion.

I'm not saying his intuition is wrong, though. In fact I quite like it. But in this scenario, I don't think "whatever remains, however unlikely" lifeforms can even begin to be imagined by our tiny little human brains.

<comment><USER9> The statistics really doesn't care what type of sentient species we are.

If you're confused by the examples given [for the approximate size], that's understandable, but the examples don't change the analysis. That's like saying "All of the countries in the example are in the northern hemisphere, so the analysis is flawed."

<comment><USER10> Well yes the location of the country doesn't matter, but that's not at all what he said. He said that it's all based on vertebrates which is ridiculous. We can't begin to imagine what type of life form constitutes an alien, and if what we'll ever find will constitute a life form as we know it.

We know what a country is. And there's very (very, very, trust me I'm an engineer) little chance we'll find new countries with characteristics unknown to us...

<comment><USER9> My point is that the initial discussion wasn't limited to anything except "sentient life." It wasn't limited to vertebrates or mammals or any such thing.

Thus, the statistics are purely for the discussion of "what should other sentient life look like?"

Finally, it's ridiculous to complain in a discussion about aliens "that we can't begin to imagine what type of life form constitutes an alien." You have to make some fundamental assumptions. For instance, we should be able to assume that they obey the physical laws of the universe.

Anything else puts you in a totally unscientific world of discussion [your claims are no longer falsifiable], and that's not one I care to participate in.

<comment><USER8> >[W]e should be able to assume that they obey the physical laws of the universe

I don't think anyone is assuming otherwise... all I see is statistics and sampling being argued. You'll have to endure my wall of text, though, sorry XD.

Let's take the planets again. We don't know the size of every single planet in the galaxy (i.e. the planet size histogram), so we need to make a guess. So we've been using Kepler's exoplanet observations, knowledge of planetary geology, etc. to fit a model, and it's well developed ([http://exoplanetsdigest.com/2014/07/25/exoplanet- statistics-...](http://exoplanetsdigest.com/2014/07/25/exoplanet-statistics- and-demographics-update/)). The size distribution is quite well understood, its bounds and modes are well defined. It's unlikely that our best guess of what the average size of exoplanets is will change drastically the more we know about planets. _That_ is why the article's first conclusion is legitimate.

Now back to (sentient) species, and my original point. The definition of life in the SETI context has to be VERY wide. It has to encompass any scenario for a species that we might consider "intelligent" \-- and not just little green men. It might have (some would say, inevitably) evolved beyond the biological, and still be considered sentient. After all, life on Earth has only existed for ~4By, compared to ~13By for the Milky Way. As a base for extrapolation, just think how different to humans extreme life on Earth is. ([http://www.livescience.com/13377-extremophiles-world- weirdes...](http://www.livescience.com/13377-extremophiles-world-weirdest- life.html)) In any case, there are bound to be some weird-as-shit species out there, whose composition still obeys the laws of physics. In other words, there is almost certainly many _statistical modes_ of life out there that are, or can become, sentient.

With that in mind, there's a very good chance that the overall size distribution of (sentient) species does not match the one the author used (that of vertebrates only). In statistics-ese: if the distribution is multimodal, the average of our unimodal sample is not a good guess as to what the true average really is.

Maybe we can agree upon that?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> This is a bit like the sleeping beauty paradox. [1] We have to be careful what we're sampling.

Is it individuals or civilizations?

An average civilization will be average sized. An average individual will belong to a larger-than average civilization.

It's also a bit like the problem that in average, your friends have more friends than you do. (That's easy to understand. It's because they are not a really random sample of all people. People with more connections are over- represented in your friends.)

If we assume that observation doesn't depend on civilization size, then we're sampling civilizations, and on average would find average sized civilizations.

If we assume that we observe individuals and not civilizations, then we're sampling individuals and are likely to see individuals of a big civilization.

Now, if I look at myself, if I'm a random sample from all individuals in the galaxy, it's likely that I'm part of a large civilization. That would mean other civilizations would on average be smaller than mine.

If I look at my civilization, and assume it's a random sample from all the civilizations in the galaxy, it's likely that it's an average sized civilization. A random other individual in the galaxy would be likely from a larger civilization.

I don't think either way of thinking is really justified.

You can extend this to a doomsday argument by the way. Since I am alive now, it's most likely that most people are alive now. Hence in the past and in the future, there will be less people alive.

1: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10149286](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10149286)

<comment><USER12> This is good reasoning.

Can you expand on the "waking amnesiac problem"? Google is coming up with nothing.

<comment><USER11> Edited the original to include the actual name, sleeping beauty paradox.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> "Not even wrong". This entire analysis is built on reasonable statistics which are predicated on dubious and unprovable assumptions, which invalidate the entire thing.

Consider "the size of alien species". Okay... so we are extrapolating about the size of beings we know nothing about based on those beings that have come to existence in our particular situation? Assuming that the distribution of weight across animals on Earth is the same as the distribution of weight across beings in the universe is dubious.

This is a wonderful example of Brandolini's law.

<comment><USER14> That is not an example of Brandolini's law. It took a whole website to spew the bullshit but only 3 or so sentences for you to refute it.

<comment><USER15> garbage_stain is only refuting a very small part of the entire website. Imagine the amount of effort to properly refute the entire website addressing each BS point.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I'm unclear on why the author posits that we should assume a smaller population necessarily means the average being will be larger.

For example, if a human did this thought experiment 2000 years ago - a blink of the eye in the scale we are talking about - we would have perhaps 500,000,000 humans on the planet, or something along those lines. We have 14x as many humans now.

Yet we have not shrunk in size as the species has grown in population, and if anything, have grown larger.

If we look at the total biomass on earth, we are a fairly small portion of it. So shouldn't we assume, as we are assuming our situation is average, that intelligent aliens are also a fairly small portion of their planet's biomass? And if so, wouldn't the size of the aliens themselves be something that has very little to do with the total energy reaching the planet surface?

I get that it's just statistical probability and math, and it's fun, but this particular thing stuck out for me.

It was a fun read regardless, so thank you for the break from work!

<comment><USER9> They actually respond to you in the FAQ:

> "What if people who lived several centuries ago did a calculation on how > many births there would be?"

> This appears to be one of the most widespread misconceptions on the topic. > Many scientists have fallen into this trap, such as Lee Smolin's article > from 2004 . In science there is never absolute certainty, only varying > degrees of confidence. We should never be 100% sure of anything. When > stating the degree of confidence in a result, typically 95%, it should be in > full knowledge that one time out of twenty, we will be wrong. 5% of the time > we will be misled by statistical chance.

> Now if someone who lived tens of thousands of years ago estimates the total > number of human births, based on how many there had already been, they will > underestimate the truth. Because we now know there has been many more. But > those first 5% of people who ever lived represent the 5% of the time we > expect to be wrong. This is a basic premise of how science functions, how it > uses statistics. We must be wrong some of the time. In reality, we are wrong > much more frequently than statistical chance suggests, because of human > error or misunderstanding.

<comment><USER17> > several centuries ago

> tens of thousands of years ago

This appears to be blatantly moving the goal posts.

> those first 5% of people who ever lived represent the 5% of the time we > expect to be wrong

This implies that for only 5% of human history the calculation would be wrong, and the reset of the time it would be 100% correct.

I'm not sure that is how statistics work.

<comment><USER18> That's exactly how statistics works.

You make a statement with some degree of confidence (often 95%) and fully expect to be wrong 5% the time.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Interesting use of inference. Kinda feels like it ignores many of the discussions (or my limited understanding of them) around the Fermi paradox [http://waitbutwhy.com/2014/05/fermi- paradox.html](http://waitbutwhy.com/2014/05/fermi-paradox.html)

In summary: "We're rare, we're first, or we're fucked."

The article seems to assume that there are lots of populations just because there are lots of planets. But the time that those planets have been around matters too.

<comment><USER20> That's only if there's a great filter though

<comment><USER21> There's no accepted resolution to both Sagan's posited frequency of life and Fermi's paradox other than filters.

<comment><USER22> I would argue that this article posits a new, compelling filter.

If most species are large, and from small planets, they will have much stricter resource constraints than we did.

As a result, they are unlikely to have industrialized the way we did, as it would have depleted their resources too quickly. As a result, they are unlikely to be a silicon-age species.

Drawing from the author's biological/size argument, they're likely to have longer lifespans than we do, and considerably fewer births.

Given their resource constraints, and longer lifespans, they are likely to have strong communal systems of resource allocation, and are unlikely to have moved towards Capitalism.

Given their longer lifespans, they are probably more risk averse than our own species -- as willingness for an animal to die is strongly related to size and lifespan. This suggests they may be less war-faring than ourselves, and thus less likely to have nations.

Given their closer relationship with nature, due to their resource constraints, they're likely to have developed a Pagan system of thought, rather than a monotheistic theology.

As a result, they are unlikely to be motivated towards large infrastructural, imperial or technological projects as a result of: profit motive, national motive, or religious motive.

I'd argue then, that it is unlikely they have produced a civilization of significance.

\--

Long story short; local alien species are likely to be tribal, communist, non- technological, and environmentalist.

If through some strange force a species of this kind managed to become technologically advanced, they would likely look down on a species such as our own as a sort of vermin, because of our numbers, hunger and short lives.

<comment><USER20> interesting view that bypasses a great filter. Advanced without technology. Highlights that technology really might be an anti-pattern.

But Carl Sagan would probably refute that - "It is perfectly possible to imagine civilizations of poets or (perhaps) Bronze Age warriors who never stumble on James Clerk Maxwell's equations and radio receivers. But they are removed by natural selection. The Earth is surrounded by a population of asteroids and comets, such that occasionally the planet is struck by one large enough to do substantial damage." [http://gencodesignal.info/the-abundance-of- life-bearing-plan...](http://gencodesignal.info/the-abundance-of-life-bearing- planets/)

<comment><USER23> To be clear, I'm not arguing they'd become advanced. I'm arguing they'd never become advanced.

I think the Drake Equation solution that Sagan proposes puts values that are orders of magnitude too large for most variables. In this case fi (where he confuses intelligent life with civilization) and fc.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> I can't wrap my head around the "we should expect to be in a large group".

We, as a single species, found to the question "is there alien life besides us?". I'm no individual independent from the culture of our species. I don't come up with this question randomly, you pointed me to this today.

The other way around: I have to expect to be in the large group only, if the large group makes it more likely that someone in it has questions about his group (more members -> more random thoughts -> greater total of thoughts about which group one is in). This is true for blood types (unless people with weird blood types commonly get in to issues making them wonder about their blood type...). But for aliens, probably either more or less all wonder collectively through cultural exchange, or it wasn't part of a public debate.

Hm, you get the knot in my brain? can you solve it?

<comment><USER25> I do get the knot. My gut feeling would be that the definition of an individual in this case is "an entity that is capable of independent thought". So if all our thoughts as a species were perfectly in sync (borg-style), we would count as a species of population 1. Because of cultural exchange, one would probably have to count us as a species of effective size less than that of the actual population size.

</comment></comment><comment> pi-err Great thought experiment.

I would have thought that a planet's life form, shape and variety would be determined by:

1- the energy output of nearest star

2- the planet's gravity

He barely mentions gravity which is surprising. Earthlings probably wouldn't be as tall with 1.3x more gravity. Maybe life wouldn't even have made it out of water, or much more slowly.

Evolution would mean "heavier" eggs would be harder to carry. The entire evolution process hangs around reproduction so what would that mean?

Same for less gravity - except it would _probably_ be on a smaller planet. Gravity correlates with planet size in the solar system. Would <0.8G be enough to retain water, atmosphere, etc?

Somehow I'm not surprised to find out one day that an intelligent alien life would look a lot like us, on a planet that looks a lot like Earth.

<comment><USER26> They'd look a lot like us except they'd all be 1930s gangsters or ancient Romans.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> > Within the context of the animal kingdom, our species' position is clear. > Aside from a disproportionately large brain, we're fairly ordinary mammals.

Oh yeah? :) [http://prokopetz.tumblr.com/post/57702943181/mikhailvladimir...](http://prokopetz.tumblr.com/post/57702943181/mikhailvladimirovich- bogleech-its-funny-how)

</comment><comment><USER28> This analysis is based on many unjustified assumptions. I don't think we can go reliably very far on this route.

However, I do think that we can scientifically study some aliens today, or more precisely what we can see from them, through the UFO phenomenon. Yes, that thing! For me the only paradox in the Fermi paradox is that the UFO phenomenon is boycotted as a manifestation of Aliens on earth.

The following three articles are a product of such study. They present a new electromagnetic propulsion system called PEMP inspired by the data of UFO observations. It also present a totally innovative method to produce the intense EM fields required by this propulsion system. These are currently only theories waiting for an experimental validation. The author is a physic theorist, not an experimentalist.

"Pulsed EM Propulsion of Unconventional Flying Objects":[http://www.meessen.net/AMeessen/Propulsion.pdf](http://www.meessen.net/AMeessen/Propulsion.pdf)

"Evidence of Very Strong Low Frequency Magnetic Fields": [http://www.meessen.net/AMeessen/Evidence.pdf](http://www.meessen.net/AMeessen/Evidence.pdf)

"Production of EM Surface Waves by Superconducting Spheres: A New Type of Harmonic Oscillators": [http://www.meessen.net/AMeessen/Production.pdf](http://www.meessen.net/AMeessen/Production.pdf)

So there is no need to speculate. Just open your eyes and look at the data we already have for so many years.

Note that this is the product of an inductive research process. The initial working hypothesis was that UFO are real and witnesses report real data on them. Now see if we can derive a valid propulsion system matching the described artifacts using only conventional physics law.

It was initially a test, an experiment on a pure theoretical ground. The test is apparently conclusive. We now have a theory we can test in our lab and we could validate a disruptive discovery.

Objectively, we still don't know if UFOs are real and they are aliens visiting earth. But we now have an opportunity to indirectly test that possibility with pure solid ground science and engineering. Thanks to these theories.

<comment><USER29> Poe's law?

<comment><USER28> I'm very serious.

Is that all you have as "argument" ?

Supposing you referred to my comment on the big alien theory, as a biologist, I would say that this pure statistical analysis ignores the possible existence of yet unknown factors that could modulate the probability of existence of alien civilization of different size, planet size or intelligence.

This is why I concluded that this work is based on a pure speculation that these unknown factors don't exist. I didn't say this work is false or bad. I said it won't move us reliably forward on this research topic.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> I don't get the stats here:

\- I am an ordinary sentient being (for the sake of argument... just nod)

\- I am a member of an ordinary species.

according this theory one of these statements is wrong.

<comment><USER9> Analogy time:

\- I am an ordinary human

\- I live in an ordinary country

One of these is wrong, and it's the second one.

<comment><USER30> yeah OK that makes sense.

So what about:

\- Humans are an ordinary species

\- Humans live in an ordinary galaxy

Does that change our relative height?

<comment><USER9> I see what you're trying to do, but it doesn't work. Our arguments need to be like the Doomsday argument, presented here: [https://what- if.xkcd.com/65/](https://what-if.xkcd.com/65/)

If most species looked at themselves and said "my species is ordinary" the majority of them would be right; however, it doesn't give you any statistical reason to think that _humans_ are ordinary.

<comment><USER30> that was fascinating, thanks :)

The counter-intuitiveness of it all is really intriguing. We really are evolved to think in small numbers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Serious question; why are people willing to seriously entertain the idea of aliens, but not gods?

<comment><USER32> First, you probably need to define "god". Does a biological being like us but with extremely advanced technology count? Or do they need to be able to exist beyond conventional physics and have apparently limitless power in our universe, like Q? Or do you mean specific gods, namely the ones which various groups of humans worship?

If it's #1, those are just aliens. If #2, I don't think you can discount the possibility entirely, but there's no evidence for their existence, but it's entirely possible. But spending any energy on the question seems a bit pointless, since no members of the Q Continuum have made their presence known to us yet. If #3, the problem there is there's no good evidence for their existence, only ancient stories passed down from oral tradition, and the old "telephone game" shows how reliable that is, plus the well-known phenomenon of hallucination, which can happen to people when they eat certain tainted foods.

The question of aliens is worth considering seriously because we do know that life is possible (look in the mirror), we know under what conditions if can form (look outside; we have a planet to study that formed life), and now we know that lots of other planets are out there, and some of them may very well be similar to our own. If we can evolve here, it's quite possible some other beings evolved elsewhere under similar conditions. And with many billions of stars out there (just in our galaxy and nearby ones), the probability of other planets existing with conditions similar to ours is high. Furthermore, as our ability to detect exoplanets improves, it's quite possible we may detect signs of alien life: radio signals, industrial emissions in their atmosphere, weird starlight patterns indicating a possible Dyson swarm, etc. There's no way to detect any kind of god (whether it's one from some old book or the Q).

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> I think some of the math going on here is interesting and probably has some interesting consequences for people's expectations about means. But I'm not sure about that paper...

I want to be generous here and assume I'm misunderstanding, but it does seem a bit like the argument begs the question a bit.

The intended conclusion is that we should consider non-earth-like (i.e. non- earth-sized) planets as just as likely to be inhabited as earth-like planets. Which is to say that we shouldn't expect that population density is strongly correlated with planet size.

And this is shown starting from a model where "mean population density is invariant to planet size". Hmm...

</comment><comment><USER34> Something not mentioned here is the relationship between oxygen levels in the atmosphere and the size of animals on a planet. During the era of giant creatures (dinosaurs) the atmosphere was around 35% oxygen, today it is about 21%.

</comment><comment><USER35> This strikes me as very similar to the simulation argument. That is most beings probably exist in simulations, and therefore you are far more likely to exist in a simulation than be a living person. Or similar anthropic arguments could be made about many things. You are more likely to be living in a bigger country, you are more likely to be living in the period of time where Earth's population is the largest, etc.

</comment><comment><USER36> Interesting analysis, but after reading the FAQ at the bottom, it rests upon quite a few important hidden assumptions. For example:

>However if there is any hope of finding life on other planets, there must be a huge number of planets with life in the Universe. Therefore, for the case we're interested in...

So during the entire analysis, we were limiting ourselves _only to those universes in which we do make alien contact_ , regardless of how likely _that_ event is.

</comment><comment><USER37> Reminds me of Joe Polchinski's calculation[1] that the probability of the multiverse is 94%.

Unbridled Physics-ism (as in [2]) and Bayesianism definitely don't mix well.

[1] [http://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?p=8149](http://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?p=8149)

[2] [https://xkcd.com/793/](https://xkcd.com/793/)

</comment><comment><USER38> What is the process by which "samples" are drawn from the population of intelligent beings? This is a keystone of the article's argument, but it entirely hand-waved. It is not as if "intelligences" are created in the void and then assigned with some random distribution (uniform or otherwise) to bodies on planets-- each intelligent being in the universe is itself with probability 1.

</comment><comment><USER39> A couple of weeks ago I read a more compelling theory, that also is an interesting solution for the Fermi Paradox. It said something like this IIRC:

The normal evolution of a civilisation of smart species is to arrive to a point where they experience an Intelligence Explosion [0]. (or how Elon Musk puts it: _Chances are we 're the biological boot loader for digital superintelligence_) [1].

In a cosmic scale, given the fact that the timespan to go from industrial/high technology civilisation to a SuperAI is like a drop in the ocean (1000 or 2000 years), it'd be impossible to establish contact unless they co-exist at the same point of evolution, in the same (or near) star system, and in the same period of time.

Something far from probable...

I think that this is the most plausible solution for the Fermi Paradox, we haven't been contacted by Aliens for the same reason that we haven't "contacted" with ant colonies or microbes. We simply can't, we're in a different state of consciousness.

We are probably living among Aliens, but they're too advanced for our reasoning and live in a different dimension/cosmic state.

[0] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligence_explosion](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligence_explosion)

[1] [https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/496012177103663104](https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/496012177103663104)

</comment><comment><USER40> Couldn't a hypothetical Big Alien make exactly the same argument? There are plenty of exoplanets larger than Earth.

<comment><USER9> Of course they could. And they should! Statistically, if every single sentient being makes this argument, more sentient beings will be right than wrong.

To quote:

> Given the prevalence of the four different blood groups in the cartoon > above, the most profitable strategy here would be to bet on "A", as that > gives you the greatest chance of winning. Another way of looking at it, is > that if everyone adopted that strategy, the bookmaker would lose the most > money.

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> This article strikes me as a man who lives entirely inside a black and white room insisting that if he thinks hard enough, he can infer what colors in the world outside are like.

It is true though, that if you spin a black and white patterned disk, you will see colors.

<comment><USER42> It's more like he can say what the colors outside the room are PROBABLY like.

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> This essay would benefit from making the particular anthropics used like the Self-Sampling Assumption explicit (and the paradoxical implications of it which leads to rejection by many) and explaining examples like the Doomsday Problem.

</comment><comment><USER44> In 'Solaris' by Lem the whole planet is an alien life form.

</comment><comment><USER45> What is less worthwhile for a person to think about than the existence of aliens? Sure, solve world hunger, figure out inter-space travel, light-years distant communication mechanisms, prevent cancer, war, poverty.... Last I checked, aliens weren't threatening the continuation of our species, or even leaving the lid up after a visit to the john for that matter.

How did this tinfoil-hat ridiculous article even make it into Hacker news!?

<comment> guard-of-terra If aliens are indeed to be found, this will readily become number one important event in human history.

<comment><USER45> I bet!, And if a meteorite strikes my home and kills me, that will be the most important event in my life. Nevertheless, I've got more pressing issues than to debate the statistical likelihood of the size of the rock or it's expected mineral composition.

<comment><USER46> Yes, and those more pressing issues are among spending time debating why it's not worthwhile to spend time debating a topic that is less pressing than the debate about the time it takes, apparently.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Why isn't the conclusion "our population size is the most frequent" versus "largest"?

<comment><USER47> I think he's approaching it from the assumption that a sentient being should assume itself to be a random individual out of all the sentient beings in existence, across all sentient species.

<comment><USER21> Doesn't that ignore the obvious (and known _a priori_ ) correlation between sentient beings in a species?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> The idea of interplanetary species seems to invalidate this website in one fell swoop.

</comment><comment><USER49> Wrong. We have no notion if we are more or less populas than other species, so we should assome that we are one of the many smaller (in number) by virtue of that being the more common, thus drawing the exact opposite conclusions.

<comment><USER50> That's what we should expect to see when looking for other _planets_ with intelligent life. But _you_ , andrewclunn, should expect to live among one of the more populous species.

<comment><USER49> That's the point, from the individual's perspective the correct prediction is completely contrary to that from the species' perspective based on this approach.

<comment><USER50> Right. So _you_ , the individual reading the article and posting on HN, should expect to live among one of the more populous species of life in the universe.

e: Maybe you are implicitly assuming that the workflow for "determining" who you are born as goes: 1. pick a random species 2. pick a random individual in that species. But it's more like: 1. pick a random individual.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER51> Please, for all our eyes' sake, change the color of the font to something darker! Light-grey on white is just terrible.

<comment><USER18> Thanks, I've fixed it now!

<comment><USER51> Thank you! I didn't mean to come across as overly critical, but I really think it is a much nicer reading experience now. Very cool that you considered my criticism :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> I'm of the opinion that life doesn't exist elsewhere. That said, I don't care enough to even try to support my own bias. I'm not going to spend time trying to get anyone to believe either way, because we've got bigger issues right now. Aliens aren't here, starvation is.

How did this ridiculous tinfoil-hat article even make it into Hacker News!?

<comment><USER52> Is it tinfoil hat? I was not under the impression that it was suggesting any sort of conspiracy or anything.

Even if the arguments it makes are wrong I'm not under the impression that they are particularly kooky.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: How could an introverted coder join the marauders? - <AUTHOR> I recently saw a comment suggesting that a good course of action during a collapse would be to join the marauders. Now, hypothetically speaking, if modern society were to collapse how could an introverted coder join a group of marauders to survive? Where would the marauders be located? What skills would this entirely hypothetical person need to be deemed valuable enough to be accepted? What possessions should this person carry with them during the interview? Are there any online tutorials or books dedicated to teaching introverts on how to join the marauders? Could knowledge of certain technologies improve their chances of acceptance?<p>It's just a thought experiment. <comment><USER2> Go to Hogwarts, learn how to become animagi, figure out how that map works and fight death eaters.

Oh, you don't mean those kinds of marauders.

Well then, I guess you'd have to use your tech skills in a way that's useful to them, or even build up your own group. Assuming tech knowledge hasn't somehow returned to the dark ages, someone who knows how to build and fix machines is going to be invaluable to one of those groups. Could be a chance to write some sort of communication app too, assuming smartphones still exist (or something much simpler, if you'll have far more outdated technology to work with). Something like Signal or Telegram seems like it'd be rather useful to work with in the event of a civilisation collapse.

</comment><comment><USER3> What do you need to survive? Food, water, and shelter.

If society collapsed how would you acquire those, and how would you stop others from stealing them from you?

Answer those two questions and you'll have somewhere to start.

If this ever did come to pass (which I think is highly unlikely) you'll want to be fit, strong, and intelligent. I don't expect "interviews" would ever be a thing, but who knows. Watch some horror movies, see how individuals join/form groups, and stop over-thinking!

</comment><comment><USER4> write an algorithm for optimal mauradery.</comment>


Toyota's killer firmware: Bad design and its consequences (2013) - <AUTHOR> http://www.edn.com/design/automotive/4423428/Toyota-s-killer-firmware--Bad-design-and-its-consequences <comment> daniel-levin >> The Camry ETCS code was found to have 11,000 global variables. Barr described the code as "spaghetti." Using the Cyclomatic Complexity metric, 67 functions were rated untestable (meaning they scored more than 50). The throttle angle function scored more than 100 (unmaintainable).

>> Toyota loosely followed the widely adopted MISRA-C coding rules but Barr's group found 80,000 rule violations. Toyota's own internal standards make use of only 11 MISRA-C rules, and five of those were violated in the actual code. MISRA-C:1998, in effect when the code was originally written, has 93 required and 34 advisory rules. Toyota nailed six of them.

How the ACTUAL FUCK did this happen!? The article makes Toyota's engineering team seem egregiously irresponsible. Is it typical for vehicle control systems to be this complicated? I would love to hear the other side of the story (from Toyota's engineers). Maybe the MISRA-C industry standard practices are ridiculous, out of touch and impractical.

<comment><USER2> I'm going to go out on a huge limb here and am prepared to get shot down. I've seen this first hand as inheritor of spaghetti firmware.

The limb is: don't let EE's lead a firmware group.

It's a natural division of labor. The hardware guys are familiar with all the component datasheets and the bus timings and all the other low level details. If the prototype is misbehaving, they'll grab a scope and figure it out. They're probably the only guys who can. Software is an afterthought, a "free" component.

Those same EE's who have performed that role get promoted to buck stoppers for hardware production. They're familiar with hardware design, production, prototyping, Design for Manufacturability, and component vendor searches. They might cross over with production engineering and that six sigma goodness. They're wrapped up in cost-per-unit to produce which is direct ROI. Software remains a "free" component; you just type it up and there it is.

The culture of software design for testability, encapsulation, code quality, code review, reuse, patterns, CMM levels, etc etc is largely orthogonal to hardware culture.

<comment><USER3> As a hardware designer I agree that hardware people are typically not very good software engineers.

I find we can reliably write small programs that will do everything they need to. But as the program grows, we are not adept at managing the explosion in complexity.

However I don't believe that's because hardware culture doesn't _value_ software or anything like that. We just have no proper education in software engineering.

Speaking for myself, I grasp most fundamental software concepts. Memory structure, search algorithms, that sort of thing. I appreciate the value of abstract code qualities like testability, simplicity, reusability, etc.

I just have no actual education in how to design large programs from scratch that will achieve those goals.

<comment><USER4> I don't think it's about education. It's just that software isn't what hardware people mostly work with and you only get experienced in what you mostly work with. And when you're experienced, you gain some insight into how things will work.

I know some basics of EE but I have no gut feeling of how to build or analyze any hardware for real. It's just something I've read and made my mind to understand but it's not something I know.

Conversely, I've been writing software on the lowest to highest levels for decades and I have a hunch of how to start building something that will eventually grow really big and complex. I don't know exactly how I do it but depending on what I want to achieve I have, already at the very beginning, a quite strong sense of what might work and also _what will definitely NOT_ work.

My take on hardware is that it's mostly a black box that usually _does most of_ what's advertised (but workarounds are regularly needed, and I guess it must be really difficult to build features into silicon and have it work 100% as designed), and these quirks had better be encapsulated in the lowest levels of the driver so that we'll get some real software building blocks sooner.

This would be no basis to design hardware. I would make such a terrible mess out of it that even if I managed to design a chip and make it appear to work somewhat, it would fail spectacularly in all kinds of naive cornercases that a real EE would never have to solve because s/he would never venture to build any of them, just because s/he would know better from the start already.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> How much code reuse is there between the firmware in a manufacturer's different car models? I'm surprised there isn't a consortium (like Symbian was) to create a standard firmware kernel to share the benefits (and costs) of testing and auditing the code.

I'm also surprised C is still so commonly used for mission critical software. I understand that C is familiar, has many static analysis tools (to make up for the language's deficiencies), and has a straight-forward translation from C to object code (though only when using simple optimizations). For example, if MISRA-C's coding guidelines disallow recursion, why not design a language that only supports DAG function dependencies?

<comment><USER6> OSEK is a an industry standard rtos that is used by almost all automotive players. It is specifically designed for use in the automotive environment. Toyota actually claimed to use an OSEK compliant rtos, but it later surfaced in this lawsuit that they had written their own implementation that was never certified by an outside organization. OSEK is in the process of being superseded by AUTOSAR, which defines much more than just the os, and included a large hal that allows for plug and play middleware libraries. Unfortunately it isn't economical for every ecu to make use of AUTOSAR: it has heavy resource requirements (> 2Mbyte RAM) and so many applications don't use it.

Also on the horizon is ISO26262, which mandates quality assurance for automotive embedded code in the form of paper trails. Unfortunately due to the huge amount of work required by the standard, some automakers are choosing to ignore it and hope it doesn't become mandatory.

<comment><USER5> Thanks! I'll read more about OSEK and AUTOSAR.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I have been upset with Toyota's designs, product quality, and business practices since I bought my first (and last) Toyota vehicle. Mr. Barr's testimony reassures me that I've made the right decision in writing them off.

One item I'd like to point out is that Mr. Barr criticizes the lack of hardware logic to close the throttle if the driver rides the brake.

In 1987, BMW introduced the 1988 model year 750i, with a V12 engine that has two intake manifolds and two throttle valves. The engine controls and electronic throttle system was made by Bosch. Whether the logic is in hardware or software, I don't know, but it doesn't take long for it to slam the throttles shut if you hold the brake pedal down. When this happens when the engine is delivering power, it's a very severe shock as engine power is removed and stops working against the brakes.

Due to the time it takes to go to manufacturing from the design stage, obviously the Germans had this figured out in the middle of the 1980s decade. BMW went on to use the electronic throttle system in a bunch of 90's model 5 and 7 series cars with normal six cylinder engines. The only problems that I know this system, called EML, caused were for owners and technicians who did not understand how the system works. In other words, when this failed, the result was that the car would not go anywhere.

And a colleague of mine with a late 90's Volkswagen also proved that the throttle slams shut if he rides the brakes while requesting engine power with the gas pedal.

Mr. Barr points out that in 2005, the Camry had no such logic. I seem to remember a youtube video where Consumer Reports guys test this out in some kind of Toyota, and they could have gone all day long until the brakes melted.

Toyota did not include this logic for safety even though it had been in cars released to the market decades before. The ways that Toyota handled this situation, everything they've done from blaming the operators, the potientometer supplier, the floormats, to their brazen delays in producing discovery, reinforce my bad experiences owning a Toyota and my conclusion that they are a bad actor.

<comment><USER8> _> And a colleague of mine with a late 90's Volkswagen also proved that the throttle slams shut if he rides the brakes while requesting engine power with the gas pedal._

Maybe automatic cars do this but when driving a stick shift a common advanced driving technique is to heel-and-toe on downshift so that you can rev up the engine to the correct RPM to not upset the car. That requires revving up the engine under braking. As far as I know this is still possible in most cars.

The usual guarantee is that the brakes are always specified to be able to overpower the engine even at full throttle. So even if you have a stuck throttle for some reason you should always be able to safely stop just by standing on the brakes, even if it takes you a little longer. Naturally in a manual car you should just stand on the brakes and clutch for emergency braking and then the engine is completely disconnected no matter what the throttle is doing.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heel-and- toe](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heel-and-toe)

<comment><USER9> blipping the throttle while clutched to match RPM between the forced road speed and given engine RPM during a gear shift to alleviate weight-shift(heel- and-toe) is still possible on modern cars, but that is not the technique that is being mentioned.

the technique being mentioned is more akin to 'left-foot braking', a technique used to pivot the weight balance from the rear to the front in order to induce certain driving characteristics that may be beneficial in a turn. It is a common technique to balance out the inherent understeer of a front-wheel drive car to a more neutral balance mid-turn in an effort to reduce lap times. It's quite common in rally.[0]

and as was said, _many_ cars disallow left-foot braking now; with the worst responses triggering semi-permanent CELs (CELs which require mechanic intervention, as opposed to being clear by more drive-cycles).

Probably not a bad idea, as it's an advanced technique that quite easily upsets a car mid-turn, and is often just compensatory for an ill-setup race car.

[0]: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Left- foot_braking](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Left-foot_braking)

<comment><USER8> > the technique being mentioned is more akin to 'left-foot braking'

Both heel-and-toe and left foot braking require revving up the engine under braking. The difference between the two is if the car is in gear and the clutch engaged at the time. Maybe modern cars have enough sensors to know if the engine is actually driving the wheels so they can disable the throttle under braking in those situations.

<comment><USER7> > Maybe modern cars have enough sensors to know if the engine is actually > driving the wheels so they can disable the throttle under braking in those > situations.

This is possible, any car with traction control has wheelspeed sensors for all wheels, and manual shift cars have a pushbutton switch on the clutch pedal arm (for enabling the starter, or for a car with electronic throttle, for cancelling the cruise control.)

<comment><USER8> Those are not enough. You need a sensor in the gearbox itself to know if you are in gear. Otherwise you can have the clutch engaged and the wheels spinning but not have the engine connected to the wheels as naturally happens in the middle of a double clutch shift.

<comment><USER7> Couldn't it work by checking that crankshaft speed increases remarkably without any corresponding increase in wheel speed?

I don't know how racetrack drivers do this, but when I downshift, the crankshaft has some opportunity to fall a little while I get the gearbox in neutral and engage the clutch again. Then the crankshaft speed rises to 4000 rpm or more.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> i didn't get whether they were able to show an actual path of how UA could have occurred (like for example in case of Arian 5 or that Canadian radiation machine - that is what makes those cases useful and supports all the good recommendations produced as result), nevertheless the slant seems to be clear ... Google self-driving car has just become significantly more expensive and several years more further into the future. And Toyota i guess is going to have much more people hired into its engineering department who isn't going to do actual engineering (Senior rule 62 compliance engineer) and produce a lot more and better TPS reports NASA-style instead :)

<comment><AUTHOR> The problem with comparing it to the Arianne 5 or Therac-25 is that those were situations where there was a single bug that you could blame. Toyota's software had so many bugs that it was impossible /to/ tell what paths would lead to UA, just that there was no accountability and quality assurance.

Regarding your second point, similar complaints were made about other safety features, like mandatory turn signals or airbags. Yes, there will be additional time spent ensuring that they are compliant with safety standards. But in this case, a lot of that time should have already been taking place. Some code needs more review time, a second or third or even fourth set of eyes on it. When people can die because of a bug, then the bar for what is acceptable code can and should be higher.

<comment><USER10> >Toyota's software had so many bugs that it was impossible /to/ tell what paths would lead to UA,

your statement sounds kind of contradictory to me. If there many - just choose any path. It may be impossible to say which one actually happened, yet should be possible to show an actual path, at least one, that could plausibly lead to UA.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> For systems that are so critical to the safety of human life, I'm surprised that there isn't a mandatory third-party review of the firmware source code.

<comment><USER12> Is there evidence that auto firmware issues are a major cause of injury, enough to mandate such a thing? There is already a heavy burden to comply with standards.

I recent called our city's public works dept to propose changing the traffic signage/signals at an extremely confusing and potentially dangerous intersection (every person I've talked to about it hates making the turn there...). The lead traffic engineer was very understanding and agreed it was a terrible intersection. But the hard stats showed few accidents there, so he'd never be able to redirect money from more problematic areas...

<comment><USER13> Interestingly, the fact that the intersection feels confusing forces people to pay close attention to figure out what's going on. That can lead to fewer accidents in some cases.

I can't currently find it, but I once read about a roundabout that had accident problems, but had very good signage. People felt entirely in control going into it and weren't paying as much attention as they could be. By removing the signage people wouldn't inadvertently take for granted the behavior of the other drivers, they'd slow down more, they'd pay closer attention, and as a result the accident rate dropped.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> One of the fortunate things about driving an older car is mechanical accelerator and mechanical steering.

I fear for when I have to upgrade someday to all drive by wire.

As coders we all know how bad some code can be or even how the best code has flaws.

</comment><comment><USER15> Recursion, though it gives me a big programmer woodie because of the beauty of the code, in my opinion is a poor programming practice. You can always use a loop in lieu of recursion.

<comment><USER16> Why do you say that recursion is a poor programming practice (curious)? What if the solution using recursion results in more readable or declarative code? (especially with languages/compilers that do tail-call optimization properly?)

<comment><USER17> It's the most optimal if readability is the goal, but not if reliability is the goal. Programmers often assume ideal interpreters/compilers and runtime environments. This is often not the reality, especially as the environment gets closer to hardware. Recursive implementations in particular can more easily expose peculiarities in the stack implementation, yes?

<comment><USER18> Readability is a very important contributor to reliability -- minimizing WTFs is important.

That said, writing code that fits the construction of the language is probably more useful than siding between "loops or recursion". If I'm writing Scala, my code is usually chock-full-of-recursion. If I'm writing C, not really as much, because I'm thinking "which bits go into which memory". With Python I tend to think in terms of list comprehensions, etc.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Text of the Trans-Pacific Partnership – TPP - <AUTHOR> http://www.mfat.govt.nz/Treaties-and-International-Law/01-Treaties-for-which-NZ-is-Depositary/0-Trans-Pacific-Partnership-Text.php <comment><USER2> This one was submitted first but discussion seems to be happening over at: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10512882](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10512882)

<comment><USER3> Yeah sorry. I figured dupe detection would pick it up but this one uses a different link.</comment></comment>


Nate Silver correctly called 50 out of 50 states - <AUTHOR> https://plus.google.com/114613808538621741268/posts/LfoYJdWSK71 <comment><USER2> It's clearly great work by Nate and the rest of the 538 team. However, as has been pointed out, it's not that hard to build a model that gets close to predicting everything correctly.

I built a model in a couple of hours on Sunday afternoon, which simply takes all the most recent polling data, takes an average, does a quick fudge to adjust for the number of polls, and then runs 10,000 simulations to get a probability for each state. The source is on Github:

        https://github.com/chris-taylor/USElection

and the predictions are in this gist:

        https://gist.github.com/4012793

The result? My model gets 50/51 correct if Florida eventually goes DEM (which looks likely) or 51/51 correct if Florida goes REP.

\--

Edit: full disclosure - with all data up to 6 Nov 20120 it predicts Colorado to be a toss-up, and I manually broke the tie in favour of Democrats, based on earlier models favouring them in that state.

<comment><USER3> Nice work.

The success, though, isn't his specific model. It's that Silver was able to market the idea that using statistical models is better than a table full of talking heads at predicting an outcome. And that a "dead heat" doesn't mean it's a coin flip. In hindsight, it seems almost ludicrous that it hasn't gained greater traction before.

He deserves a ton of credit for championing analytics into pop/political culture, but I'm sure we'll see many more models and a lot more statisticians during the next election, some of which will be better than Silver's models (if he's still doing them). I'm all for people asking to see the data instead of the media sound bites.

To keep this HN relevant: it was the marketing that drove his startup success. The product (the model) isn't quite perfect and an excellent substitute product was created by someone else in very short order (you). But he put together a great blog, grew out his brand, and eventually saw hockey stick growth.

<comment><USER2> Yep, I agree with this. I really built the model for fun, just to see how close it was possible to get with a few hours work.

A lot of forecasting problems have a structure like this one did:

\- There is a lot of publically available data, and simple statistical models based on that data give pretty good predictions with very little effort.

\- If you're an expert with a lot of time on your hands, you can put a lot of effort into improving the forecasts by 1-2%.

\- In the end, it comes down to the effective business use of your model. Nate Silver had an excellent brand around his model.

In fact, I'd wager that he knows his model is more complex than it needs to be, but part of his brand is "rogue genius with a complex model that's far too difficult for mere mortals to understand".

<comment><USER4> A slightly less cynical take on the last point is that it also lets him rebut many objections with, "nope, the model already takes that into account". By having a piece of the model devoted to most possible talking points: convention bounces, whether undecideds break for/against the incumbent, effect of the economy, etc., he can claim he's addressed those critics' points, even if the net effect of addressing them is close to nil.

<comment><USER5> And an addendum, that 1%-2% accuracy is crucial in close elections like this one, so it's more than worth putting the extra time and effort into getting.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Nate Silver's calculations are certainly more sophisticated that a simple time-weighted average of legitimate polling numbers, but are they more accurate?

His baseball projection system, PECOTA, was _extremely_ complex, but barely, _barely_ outperformed a simple 3-year weighted average with an age component (Marcel), and some years was worse. Other projection systems that didn't take player comps into account were better overall than PECOTA (CHONE being the best, before the creator was hired away by a team).

<comment><USER7> I think I speak for everyone when I say thank god politics is not like baseball :)

But seriously, congratulations to Nate Silver. I think this vindicates his method, at least for America. He was badly wrong with the last British election, whether because of bad polling data or an insufficient understanding of the system, so I was apprehensive going into this one. But it seems like, for America at least, he's cracked it. I think it's inevitable considering the absurd quantity of polling data available that someone would eventually.

<comment><USER8> 2010 British Election (Number of seats)

Silver predicted: Conservative 312, Labour 204, Libdem 103 Actual result : Conservative 307, Labour 258, Libdem 57

<comment><USER9> 103 for the libdems! that's one of the funniests things i've seen for ages.

how did he get it so wrong?

<comment><USER10> In reading his analysis of the election here, he repeatedly mentions that having only two candidates makes things much more predictable.

In any case, we don't know if he got it "wrong" unless we know what % chance he gave this outcome. (He tries to account for the likelihood that polls are misleadingly biased, and that would correlate across multiple seats.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> So, Nate Silver seems to deserve the even higher profile he'll have after this election, but his model is pretty explicitly _not_ predicting the outcomes of any individual states. They're giving estimated probabilities of the various outcomes, and the (presumptive) outcome that happened was given a probability of ~20%, which was more likely than any other particular outcome, but a far cry from "calling the states."

The big difference is that if this were to happen over and over again ("this" meaning that the most likely predicted outcome actually materializes), that would be (weak) evidence _against_ his model -- if the model's right, he should "correctly call" the states only about 20% of the time. No more and no less.

But good for him, because he's had a lot of unjustified criticism for the last month or so, so he's due some (slightly) unjustified praise.

<comment><USER12> Huh?

<http://fivethirtyeight.blogs.nytimes.com/>

"State-by-State Probabilities"

<comment><USER13> Take Florida, for example. He predicted a 50.3% chance of an Obama win. If Romney actually wins it, he's only a little bit wrong - counting him as 0/1 on Florida in this case wouldn't be accurate. If Obama wins it, he's only a little bit right - counting him as 1/1 on Florida here wouldn't be accurate.

It's hard to quantify just how close he was. I give him props because his prediction was that Florida was very close and that turned out to be true no matter which way the state actually ends up going in the final result.

Now take Virginia, which was one of the later states to be called. He had Obama at 79.4% chance to win. But it turned out to be reasonably close -- which makes me wonder if we really had enough data to justify such a large %. It's a highly polled state, so maybe we did and we just came somewhat close to hitting that 20% of the time where all the polling was inaccurate. Or maybe he had Obama's chances too high.

Another way to judge a prediction model like this is to credit him with .794/1 for Virginia, rather that 1/1. For Florida he gets .503 if Obama wins, and .497 if Romney wins. That doesn't capture it perfectly, either, but at least it doesn't give him 0/1 in Florida if Romney wins even though he successfully predicted that the state was super close.

<comment><USER14> > It's hard to quantify just how close he was.

It is hard to do with the final, "chance of winning" numbers, but it is much easier with his share of the vote predictions, and you can check those predictions for all states that way, even the ones where the winner was certain.

Say Nate predicts that candidate A will get 80% of the votes in a particular state, with a margin of error of 2%. Then, after the results are out, if that candidate got 81% of the votes, then it was a good prediction, if they got 90% of the votes, it was a bad prediction.

To quantify that, you want to compare the actual error with the predicted error. There are better ways than this, but I'll make one up on the spot: score = 1 / (actual error percentage points * predicted error percentage points). In the first case, the score would be 1 / (1 * 2) = 0.5. In the second, 1 / (10 * 2) = 0.05. The bigger the score, the better the prediction. (This isn't a great model, since it rates a prediction with a large margin of error which happened to be bang on higher than a roughly right prediction with a narrow predicted error, but this is the general idea.)

<comment><USER13> Excellent point. In that case he only had one state outside his given margin of error in West Virginia.

I didn't do any error analysis aside from asking if it was within his margin of error, and all but one were. Hawaii was also exactly on the line.

<http://pastebin.com/0RB5GRjQ>

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I've got to say that I've been a cynical admirer of Silver since the last election.

Why cynical? Because I began to notice throughout the Republican nomination process that his observations varied wildly on which Republican candidate presented great values on intrade. I think over time he gave a nod to every candidate, save Michelle Bachmann, Tim Pawlenty, and John Huntsmann. From the outset, Romney was the favorite to win, and not surprisingly, he won. But throughout the nomination process where much less was known, many of his projections proved to be wrong. So despite all of the contrarian opinion on which candidates may pull it out against popular opinion (or perception) these faded away until Romney was the clear favorite, Silver predicted him to win, and eventually he carried the nomination.

Once in the Presidential election, Obama was the favorite. Incumbent Presidents rarely lose, and Mitt Romney was not exactly a compelling candidate.

All that said, he's clearly a brilliant dude, and I give him a lot of respect for the accuracy of his predictions. I just haven't found them to be hugely useful for any practical purposes. I guess people tend to be enamored by the things they don't understand (statistical analysis), and I don't think there's anything wrong with that.

<comment><USER16> I'm not from or in the US but can I ask a slightly off-topic question?

Is Romney really the best the Republican's can offer? It seemed from here (UK) that he was not a compelling candidate from the start but most the others in the nomination process were massively flawed in some way or other and/or their political views were just too far from the mainstream to really fly.

Romney might still have won if Obama had made a mess of something in the last days before the election as a couple of percent swing would have changed everything but it just seems like the Republicans should be able to do better.

Two questions:

1) Do the Republicans have people who would make compelling candidates in the Presidential election? (Who?)

2) If not is there a structural problem in the Republican party that means extreme views (or massive personal cash) is required to reach the position to become a candidate and it somehow weeds out the compelling candidates?

<comment><USER17> As a liberal American, my thesis is that the Republican party is extremely fractured between fiscal conservatives (who are largely centrist or even liberal on social issues) and the straight-up social conservatives. Which means that finding a single individual who can coherently represent all of them is basically impossible.

So enter Romney, who seemed willing to be mercurial - literally adopting different positions in front of different audiences and scoffing whenever anybody pointed it out. But that cynical strategy was necessary to have any viability whatsoever in such a diverse party.

<comment><USER18> > _"Which means that finding a single individual who can coherently represent > all of them is basically impossible."_

And by the time the Republican nomination was over, the strength of the social conservatives had dragged the rhetoric so far right that it was difficult for Romney to get back to the centre for the election.

<comment><USER19> These two comments very completely and eloquently sum up the problem. The divide between social and fiscal conservatism is something that gives the republican party the biggest disadvantage.

<comment><USER17> I should also mention that the big-L Libertarians, as instantiated in the U.S., are _not_ the fiscally-conservative socially-liberal party that centrists would even entertain. They're far too radical to be at all politically viable (abolish Fed and Education, open borders, legalize drugs, etc.).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Hard cold numbers won again.

The venom directed at Nate Silver before the election was astonishing. I guess the pundits had sensed their careers of predication were numbered and fought back hard, but Nate was proved right again. Kudos.

<comment> mkr-hn There will always be a market for uninformed jabbering. Pundits wouldn't worry if they looked at their own record.

<comment><USER21> Is there a "pundit prediction tracker" anywhere? Somewhere that tracks the predictions made by talking heads and shows how often they're right or wrong?

> uninformed jabbering.

And for informed jabbering. It's frustrating that analysis is being replaced with opinion, especially when it's clear that opinion driven prediction is garbage.

<comment> mkr-hn I found a couple of things that look useful at a glance (I googled for pundit prediction tracker):

<http://www.pundittracker.com/>

[http://nymag.com/daily/intel/2012/11/exhaustive- collection-o...](http://nymag.com/daily/intel/2012/11/exhaustive-collection- of-pundit-predictions.html)

I remember hearing about Pundit Tracker before it launched, but I didn't look into it after that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I've been a huge fan of Nate Silver since forever, and I must say, I really regret his "acquirement" by NY Times. When it was his own website, it was a much more user-friendly experience.

For instance, though I have an NYT account, every other page view I get redirected to a login prompt if I don't press Esc fast enough (this page has expired? WTF?). It also made him more of an independent, though he is (falsely) discounted on many counts by other parts of media, his affiliation with NYT is yet another facet for them to criticize.

<comment><USER7> Disagree with this. NYT brought a much better user experience and much nicer data presentation, and leant him a feeling of legitimacy too. There's a reason the NYT has the reputation it does.

<comment><USER23> I disagree. Here's an archive from post-2008 election: [http://web.archive.org/web/20081106113055/http://www.fivethi...](http://web.archive.org/web/20081106113055/http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/)

The old page contains more information yet looks friendlier. The nytimes style is more streamlined, but it became too sanitized. The content became sanitized too; Nate Silver could be more himself when it was his blog. He gave personal accounts, he was more honest, etc.

<comment><USER24> I think the answer here is that it was better for Nate to join NYT- I imagine he was compensated well for the move. We can complain about it, but.. well, it isn't in our hands.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Doesn't that destroy the allegations of voting fraud in the US? (Not a US- citizen here)

If there was widespread fraud with the voting machines as alleged elsewhere, the voting outcome should have diverged widely from the predictions. The predictions are so close to the actual outcome, and because from what I understand the predictions are mostly based on polling, there couldn't have been much fraud, or am I wrong?

Flippant edit: Assuming of course that Nate Silver wasn't in on the fraud and didn't adjust his predictions accordingly.

<comment><USER26> Not on it's own, no. At most, is shows that fraud wasn't widespread enough (or equally widespread on both sides) to skew the election away from the will of the people.

Also, fraud is much more effective in smaller races - of which there are lot, many of them too small to have as good poll coverage as the presidential one - so if there is fraud, those races are probably where to look for it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Nate Silver seems like a pretty smart guy, wouldn't it be better if he spent his time doing something more productive? Predicting the outcome of an election may have practical applications in gambling or for a hedge fund, and yes he gets mad publicity and attention from women sure, but aren't there more useful ways to apply statistics?

EDIT: Haldean, your point is excellent and cancels out mine absolutely. Good thinking, you are entirely right. I would add that his attention and publicity itself should increase the credibility of rational analysis in the news, and that alone would be a great accomplishment.

<comment><USER28> He has utterly discredited the horse race scam of big media political coverage. That is a significant contribution, because such coverage has been so influential in managing public opinion and how people think about politics.

He did it first and more dramatically in the 2008 primaries, but this time feels more like the watershed.

It's not all Nate's doing, of course; this is a long term trend and many people are working on it.

<comment><USER29> Now here's a bet I'm willing to take.

The horse race coverage of the next political race will be just as strong as it was this time. This isn't the triumph of data over narrative, it's just data showing it can be more predictive.

Narrative still has more mass popularity, and it always will.

<comment><USER28> Hmm, I'm not sure how my point got turned into a claim that narrative will henceforth have less mass popularity than data. I'm talking about a shift among elites. Political media are going to be forced to adapt, in a direction I think most people here would consider a good one. If they don't, they will look ridiculous, which will weaken them even faster; appearing serious and important is their trump card, after all.

But tell me how you propose to measure "just as strong" and I might take your bet :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> <http://isnatesilverawitch.com/>

<comment><USER31> Ahem, he would be a warlock.

<comment><USER30> He should have the right to self-identify as a witch if he wants. You have no right to take that away from him.

<comment><USER32> Self identification is a ridiculous concept if it's not based on fact. They put people in the nut house for proclaiming they're a farm animal or Teddy Roosevelt.

<comment><USER33> Transphobia in the software industry? Shocking

<comment><USER32> Phobia? Hardly. You don't call an ftp client and ssh client do you? Likewise you would and should never call a man a woman, unless you're tying to insult him and vice versa. It's called logic and not some ridiculous concept of accepting a mental disorder as something to be celebrated.

<comment><USER33> "it's called logic"

Actually, It's called not knowing what the fuck you're talking about

The logical thing to do would be to educate yourself.

P.S. trans people's brains objectively show non expected neural activation. And this is just one of the many ways for people to understand trans. It's a real thing and you need to EDUCATE YOURSELF instead of acting like bill oreilly. Ignorant asshole.

<comment><USER32> It's what's called a defect such as when a system doesn't perform as expected. Sorry. No amount of emotionally supported bullshit is going to change facts.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> Keep in mind, however, that we could not have expected Nate Silver's own model to predict 50/50 states. Given that Nate predicted that there was a 50.3% chance that Florida would go to Obama, the only difference between this being a story of predicting 50/50 states and this being a story of missing at least one state is _a coin toss_. The reasons his model turned out to be 100% accurate is sheer _luck_.

</comment><comment><USER35> Doesn't that mean he undercalibrated some of his predictions?

If you say 50 events should happen with a 60% probability, and they all happen, shouldn't you have upped your confidence?

That said, since most his naysayers were saying he was OVERconfident at the time, kudos to him for proving them wrong.

<comment><USER36> If the predictions are independent, then I agree with you. I can think of reason why they would not be independent (trying to account for non-random polling samples, for example).

<comment><USER37> They aren't independent. The developer of the 512 paths to the White House lamented this in getting conditional probabilities into the path choices. The simulations take into account the national popular vote polls and similar- state demographics (if one state goes one way, it's more likely that a similar one will, too).

Look at his EV histogram; 332 EVs had the highest probability of occurrence at nearly 20%. While there are other ways to get to 332, I'd imagine most of that percentage is from a map like last night. That's clearly not the partial probability of each state multiplied together.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> Nate's Prediction and actual results side by side [http://twitter.com/cosentino/status/266042007758200832/photo...](http://twitter.com/cosentino/status/266042007758200832/photo/1)

</comment><comment><USER39> I think it's realatively easy, for a smart guy with a solid understandings of statistics to come up with a reasonable model (weight polls by sample size, come up with probability distribution for each state, run x Monte Carlo simulations and take the average of the result...).

But a thing is coming up with a good model, another is to defend it publicly putting your reputation on the line, while it would have been a much safer bet simply to say 'it's too close to call', as many so-called experts did.

Full credit to Nate, he made math cool for a lot of people.

</comment><comment><USER40> Even with an incredibly exact model, to actually get ALL 50 right really does require a lot of luck in addition to skill. Even if he's 98% accurate for each state (which seems amazingly high to me), that's still only a 1 in 3 chance to get all 50 right.

<comment><USER41> He really only got 7/7 right. The other 43 states were not really in contention.

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> Once California has its results in, I'm guessing his prediction on the popular vote will make it 51/51.

<comment><AUTHOR> He predicted that Obama would get 50.8% of the popular vote.

Currently Obama stands at 50.3% of the popular vote. However the majority of the currently uncounted ballots are in Oregon and Washington. Therefore Obama's share is likely to go up a smidge.

Still getting the popular vote to within 0.5% is pretty good. Especially considering that many national polls going in were consistently calling for a Romney win there.

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> It's a little much to claim that this guy called it. The minor detail of actually conducting the polling was done by others.

<comment> Tuna-Fish The point isn't that Silver is some superhuman guessing machine. The point is that Silver explicitly did nothing particularly special over applying sound statistics over publicly available data, came out with very different predictions than the traditional media did, took a _lot_ of flak from them for it, and turned out to be exactly correct in every meaningful way.

538 is a statement against the traditional election coverage, in effect saying that math is better than pseudo-objective talking head bullshit. From his blog:

 _Nevertheless, these arguments are potentially more intellectually coherent than the ones that propose that the leader in the race is "too close to call." It isn't. If the state polls are right, then Mr. Obama will win the Electoral College. If you can't acknowledge that after a day when Mr. Obama leads 19 out of 20 swing-state polls, then you should abandon the pretense that your goal is to inform rather than entertain the public._

[http://fivethirtyeight.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/11/03/nov-2-fo...](http://fivethirtyeight.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/11/03/nov-2-for- romney-to-win-state-polls-must-be-statistically-biased/)

This is why the more math-literate portions of the internet have erupted with cheers for Silver.

<comment><USER44> _and turned out to be exactly correct in every meaningful way._

Silver himself wouldn't call his predictions correct.

He was not making thumbs-up v thumbs-down predictions. When he said "60% chance of Obama winning this state," it means that 6 times out of 10 Obama would win and 4 times out of 10 Romney would win. If Obama won all 10 times, by his own account he would be wrong.

<comment><USER45> > it means that 6 times out of 10 Obama would win and 4 times out of 10 Romney > would win. If Obama won all 10 times, by his own account he would be wrong.

That's a very frequentist perspective. I think the Bayesian interpretation is a little more sensible. Given a prior estimate, updated with the information we have, it is logical to assume that Obama has a better chance of winning.

That is, Nate Silver's 60% doesn't mean that if the election in a given state were repeated, we'd see different results four times out of 10, but rather that his information in making the prediction was incomplete.

<comment><USER44> Nate Silver _himself_ said (in a radio interview that I cannot locate despite much Googling :< ) that if he said something would happen 60% of the time and it was 10 out of 10 that he his figure was wrong and should have said 100%.

<comment><USER45> But you can't run the same election 10 times. Without hearing the interview, I'm going to guess he's talking about multiple states, all with 60% chance of winning, which puts us in a different place entirely.

I guess I'm not disagreeing with the main point of your post. Just your use of the phrase "something would happen 60% of the time", as being oddly frequentist, when a Bayesian perspective is more appropriate here.

<comment><USER11> > But you can't run the same election 10 times.

That makes assessment difficult, but is irrelevant for interpretation. If something happens 60% of the time, it happens with the same probability as drawing a red ball from an urn with 6 red balls and 4 green balls, whether it happens once or several times.

Trying to determine the quality of a model using some observed data is inherently a frequentist exercise -- a dyed-in-the-wool Bayesian would take the election results, use them to update his or her posterior distributions, and carry on happily. (I know that no one would actually do this; no one who analyzes data is really a "pure" Bayesian or a "pure" frequentist).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> I was looking at the Intrade prediction market a couple of days ago.. I think they got everything correct too.

<comment><USER47> Most markets got the winner right, which isn't a surprise, but they didn't get the margin right. I found Obama to win 310-330 electoral college votes at $8 on Betfair yesterday (and I put it on, and it looks like I won).

The betting markets did believe that Obama would win, but there was a lot of money on the race being closer and not as wide as Silver was predicting. This is probably because the media narrative of the past two weeks was that the race is close.

There is a rumor that some Republican donors were shortening the odds in the margin betting in order to perpetuate the line that the race is closer. I don't know how true that is, but it would be possible to move the market with a few large bets.

<comment><USER48> Where did you hear that rumor? I have all but concluded that on my own based on the bizarrely low prices on obama shares on intrade over the past week. It would be very interesting to hear something more than speculation.

<comment><USER47> I was hanging out and talking to other people who are interested in betting markets online, we were just speculating. We mostly talk about sports betting but the election was such a big topic in betting that you couldn't avoid it and I ended up getting sucked into it.

I should have looked into it further, this has since been posted:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4756229>

I don't have much experience with Intrade, but there must be a way to dump data from the site and investigate the orders and buys being made.

As that post says, putting down $1M to keep the odds more in line with a narrative of the contest being close is small change in the context of political spending today.

I had two people tell me that rumor. One heard it via friends on Wall St and the other read it in another forum, IIRC.

There must be something to explain the spread between Intrade and Betfair, that the market was being manipulated by those with a vested interest makes sense.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER49> I wonder if having such good predictions is ultimately harmful to the democratic process? If I were only voting on the presidential election, I would not have bothered going to the polls because my state was solidly on one side and the chance of my vote being pivotal was basically zero. But some of our local elections were less certain, so I went for those.

As the prediction models get better, get applied to local elections, and get more publicity, I wonder what it will do to people's incentive to vote? I'm much more likely to go out and cast my vote when the outcome is uncertain and I think I have a chance of being the pivotal vote. But if super accurate forecasts tell me my vote won't matter, then maybe I won't bother standing in line for an hour.

<comment><USER50> When the incentive of the people changes, then the outcome will change as well.

</comment></comment><comment><USER51> I wonder how much money he could be (is?) making in prediction markets like Intrade.

<comment><USER2> It's hard to make really significant money on InTrade. I don't think you could make a living at it, for example - there's not enough liquidity.

There were some fun opportunities to arbitrage InTrade against BetFair this election, if you could be bothered with the faff of setting up an account on both of them. InTrade had Obama at 66-66% for a while, whereas BetFair had Obama at 79-80%. You could buy on InTrade and hedge on BetFair, and make a guaranteed profit (even after t-costs).

<comment><USER52> The presidential market on InTrade was quite liquid. $300k of volume with a bid-ask spread of like 0.2%.

Do you know why there was such a persistent gap for arbitrage between InTrade and BetFair? I don't know about BetFair's vig and rules, but InTrade has only a couple of small fixed transaction costs. ($5/mo to have an account and $10 to pull your money out, I think.) Seems like it should have been eaten up.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER53> This remains to be seen. As of this writing, Florida and Virginia have yet to be called.

<comment><USER54> Here's VA [http://electionresults.virginia.gov/resultsSW.aspx?type=PRE&...](http://electionresults.virginia.gov/resultsSW.aspx?type=PRE&map=CTY) Reporting at 100%. 50%/48% in favor of Obama.

</comment></comment><comment><USER55> Silver affirms that public opinion polling is accurate - as long as you know how to read the data.

Not to diminish Silver's work - I'm just saying the data he uses needs to be accurate in order for his models to be accurate.

</comment><comment><USER56> Why do I have to enter my google profile information to open this?

<comment><USER57> It's just a brief G+ post with two links, but if you want to see what it's talking1bout just go here instead: <http://fivethirtyeight.blogs.nytimes.com/>

</comment></comment><comment><USER58> quick image reference on Nate's predictions versus actual results: <http://cl.ly/image/0744432U0S0L>

</comment><comment><USER59> I'd like to see Nate run the numbers which would point to districts where there were statistical anomalies on the lookout for election funny business.

</comment><comment><USER60> I'd love for him to go to past elections and see how well our political voting system works...

<comment><USER48> You might like the economic sub discipline of "Social Choice Theory"

</comment></comment><comment><USER61> I'd like to see the comparison for -90,-60,-30,-15 days from election too.

</comment><comment><USER62> Let's be honest though, the number of likely outcomes was low enough that simply picking the correct one isn't too impressive.

Edit: I meant to say that the prediction itself was unspectacular, however I respect the meticulous-ness of his process.

<comment><USER63> I don't know what you mean by this.

Are you referring to "Obama wins" as a potential coin flip? Because Silver's prediction was more nuanced than that.

Are you talking about his predictions for the 50 states, which represented a potential (albeit naive) 2^50 combinations? Because he called some very close states, including a Florida election that he forecasted as an Obama victory by _hundredths of a percent._

Or are you just trolling?

<comment><USER62> The only highly uncertain states were Ohio, Virginia, and Florida. (Based on the time before results started coming in). So really there were 9 safe predictions, having picked one of them does not make the OP's story spectacular.

<comment><AUTHOR> You clearly were not following the polls very closely.

An average of the polls going into the election put 2 of the three that you name as "highly uncertain" at likely polling within 3%. According to the average of polling data at <http://www.electoral- vote.com/evp2012/Pres/Maps/Nov06.html> all of Colorado, Iowa, Wisconsin, and North Carolina should also be on your list of "highly uncertain states". So now you have 128 potentially reasonable combinations by your criteria.

(Admittedly the one that happened is in the top 4 outcomes. But a naive analysis would not have seen that Florida would be a photo finish while North Carolina would not. However Nate's analysis clearly did see that.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER64> what is the technique he is using? is it something like a generalized linear mixed model? (i.e. like using R's lme4 module)?

</comment><comment><USER65> Quite impressive. Prediction in any form is difficult; more so when there are a million people involved.

<comment><USER66> Actually, I believe when there are a million people involved it's actually easier. As long as you have access to good data that is.

<comment><USER65>
        As long as you have access to good data that is.

This is very difficult in itself. Even once you have it; it is not easy. More data does not lead to better prediction. It's a fallacy which has been proven wrong time and again.

<comment><USER67> I hope you mean "having more data doesn't lead to better prediction _automatically_ ", because, used correctly, it always gives more accurate predictions (e.g. prediction intervals[1] are smaller, one can make better determinations about the distribution of the underlying population, etc).

[1]: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prediction_interval>

<comment><USER65> Let me me correct my statement. More data does not _necessarily_ lead to better prediction. I must add that it is not always about usage as well. In some cases, the data is _insufficient_ to make any kind of prediction.

<comment><USER67> The only data that is insufficient to make a prediction is either no data at all, or data suspected to be wrong (e.g. faulty observation equipment).

Even given a single sample, one can make a prediction of what the next observation will be: the same value. Once you get more samples and more knowledge about the subject, you can bring stronger statistical tools to bear to get error estimates, prediction intervals, improved models, etc.

<comment><USER65> > _Once you get more samples and more knowledge about the subject, you can > bring stronger statistical tools to bear to get error estimates, prediction > intervals, improved models, etc_

Like I said earlier, increase in data does not always lead to improved models.

<comment><USER50> If you have enough data, you have a census and then there is no model, just reality...

In polls like this, the more data the better as long as it is unbiased (i.e. as long as it is DATA).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER68> Including Alaska and Hawai'i, with zero precincts reporting!

</sarcasm>

<comment><USER69> If he's wrong on AK and HI, I will eat my hat, a moose, and a rainbow.

<comment><USER70> While you're eating a rainbow, might I suggest challenging the horizon to a race? ;)

<comment><USER71> way ahead of you!</comment></comment></comment></comment>