Psychoactive Substances: Rolling UK Politics in The Neo-Con Era

The odds are narrowing at a rate tho. Was way more comfortable even a week ago.

― japanese mage (LocalGarda), Monday, June 6, 2016 4:36 AM (4 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

this is true in the sense that they've narrowed, but it's still around 70% remain, which is more than it was a couple of months ago:

http://predictwise.com/politics/uk-politics

individual polls should not be reported as news stories. it's professional negligence on the level of the "thing gives you cancer" stuff in the daily express, which always based on a single study, not a meta-analysis. the only things worth paying attention to are polling averages and the betting markets.

apart from the betting markets.

The money in political betting is pretty tiny in the bookies scheme of things though, it's basically just for publicity they even bother.

apparently it's enough for bookies odds to be far more predictive and reliable than individual polls

Who (the fuck) Are You.

Wish I'd put £20 on Corbyn to win when the stupid bookies had him at 200/1.

the money on the exchanges is not remotely tiny

'far more predictive and reliable than individual polls' is, as you say, a pretty low bar. You don't become more all-knowing just because you've put some money on - generally the opposite in fact.

But presumably the betting shops that define the odds are doing so based on their own research re: who might win, and stand to lose £££s if they are wrong? [I have never bet on anything so forgive me if this is all wrong]

But also on the betting they receive - if lots of folk bet on one side it shifts the odds.

In a liquid market like Brexit that's all that matters. This is not some William hill people reading the papers and estimating probabilities based on the tone of the guardian editorial section. It's just supply and demand of bets.

I'm not saying they (or poll average trackers) are perfectly predictive but they are both much better than individual polls (and light years ahead of pundits).

Assuming both sides are equally likely to bet, in equal sums, no?

but that assumes that people only bet how they will vote...

these markets are mostly people betting with their head rather than with their hearts/personal preferences. we know this because the average better does a good job of predicting the outcome.

remember how the markets work: people bet on odds that are too long (or shorting odds that are too high, which you can do at betting exchanges) until the odds on offer on the market match the consensus estimate of the probabilities. so the betting markets are ways of getting at the consensus probability. the consensus is not necessarily the true probability, but it's a but better estimate than that of an individual poll or pundit.

fwiw i don't bet myself but i do work in probabilistic programming/machine learning, etc.

Ah, yes, it does x-post

How did the bookies get on at the last General Election? I don't recall them predicting a Tory victory - did they?

(I mean, I don't recall them being closer to the eventual outcome than the published polls, I guess - I think that's a difference I'd have noticed.)

(I'm not stanning for individual polls either, btw, and what Caek says is all quite right, I'm just pessimistically wary of taking too much comfort from the bookies' odds.)

Put it this way, Betting is a combination of "attractive odds", and "let's not lose money"

So, for example, they'll offer low odds for "England to win the world cup" because England supporters are quite likely to bet, so they don't have to make it too attractive. (Say if Eng were vs Germany in the final, would Eng supporters bet on Germany, so at least if England lose, they can cheer themselves up with the money)

Anyhow, if you have a bunch of people who are not invested either way, but will place a bet based on what they think will happen, the odds have got to get it right.

they predicted a tory victory, yes

http://fivethirtyeight.com/datalab/think-you-know-who-will-the-uk-election-want-to-bet/

CB: Your odds imply a roughly 80 percent chance the Conservatives win more seats than Labour, compared to a 66 percent chance according to the forecasters who created the FiveThirtyEight model. With your markets backing the Tories more than the poll-based models, are you taking more bets on the Labour side?

MS: Nobody wants to back Labour at pretty much any price. When we get to the odds we have now, the rational thing for us to do is to take the money.

Since we opened up the betting, something like 90 percent of the money we’ve taken has been on the Conservatives to take the most seats, our biggest market, and 92 percent on the Conservatives to win the most votes. That’s even though half the time since the last general election, Labour have been the favorites.

So, if loads of brexiteers pile into Ladbrokes and place bets on "Exit", this will not shift the odds if the 'intelligence' suggests that the "non-exit" will win.

That was a 2 part post, obv.

any large group piling in for any reason is going to shift the odds.

what is "intelligence"? why would people pile in if the "intelligence" contradicted that?

yes there are people who bet on who they are going to vote for, not who they thing is going to win. empirically though it turns out there aren't enough of them to mess up the odds.

That article is on about biggest single party and share of the vote, though. According to this, about a week out from the election you could get 7-1 on a Tory majority:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/general-election-2015/11571601/Pensioner-places-30000-bet-on-Conservative-majority-at-general-election.html

I realise the referendum only has two outcomes and so is simpler, but a tightening 5-2 is not all that reassuring to me.

Having said all that, if I had to bet, I'd bet on Remain, but I'm not confident at all.

yes there are people who bet on who they are going to vote for, not who they thing is going to win. empirically though it turns out there aren't enough of them to mess up the odds.

If everyone bet on who they voted for rather than who they thought was going to win, then it'd be 100% accurate*! It's people who vote for who they think is going to win (based on no better information than anyone else) that make the betting markets worthless.

*apart from people who don't make it out of the bookies to vote that day.

not only would people have to bet on who they vote for, they would have to bet the same amount.

xxp, true the markets favored the coalition to get back in. that's still better than the polls, which had it as a labour victory iirc. my point is not that the odds are right every time. just that they're more likely to be right than individual pollls or pundits.

Sometimes they'll have to cancel a book outright because they spot someone who shouldn't be involved in wagers, putting a bet on something.

Voter registration statistics show lots of young voters signing up.
https://www.gov.uk/performance/register-to-vote/registrations-by-age-group
Obvs older voters already signed up, but good to see nonetheless.

Remember Paddy Power had Cameron as PM pretty much solidly through the campaign last year - don't think Miliband passed him out for long. The odds in the last week have lengthened for Remain - 2/7 last week versus 2/5 today - and shortened for Leave (11/4 to 2/1).

i'm surprised they didn't allow 16yos to vote like they did in the scottish referendum.

Too emotional and flighty to weigh this important decision objectively

i think that despite Leave gaining some momentum from popular bigotry in the last week, most people are scared of change and Gove and co's crude demagoguery won't have truly convinced them and they will err more towards Remain's equally crude propaganda when the time comes - despite whatever they may say at the moment.

I used to work for an independent bookies in the 90's and if anyone was wanting a bet on any obscure markets I would have to ring the office and got the blanket "tell 'em to fuck off" answer every time. The owner was convinced that anyone who deviated away from Horses, Greyhounds or Football was some type of con artist/shrewdie.

yeah my hunch (lol punditry is bad) is that the undecideds and some who tell pollsters "leave" are going to break for the "safe" option, i.e. remain, in the privacy of the polling booth

I can imagine Boris voting remain in the privacy of the booth

Lol that will almost certainly happen.

Leavers in areas of the country where they are in the majority are also likely to be quite vocal and possibly quite hostile to anyone with the opposing view. It could be a disincentive to some Remain voters to be too vocal about the fact.

Corbyn and Boris are both the most equally dishonest people in this game.

Basically true

IS 'Corbyn secretly wants Leave to win' based on anything pertaining to reality, or is it just laying the ground for another coup attempt against him in the event of a Leave vote? (In which case, lol @ blairite europhiles voting to Leave in privacy of polling booth)

Do they let press and suchlike into polling stations? Johnson might vote 'Remain' in polling booth, then on his way to pop his ballot into the box he bumblingly drops it, it falls face up on the floor to reveal in front of tv and press cameras what he has voted.

Probably wouldn't do him any harm, what a ledge and all that.

IS 'Corbyn secretly wants Leave to win' based on anything pertaining to reality

How about the reality that he's been anti-EU all his life? Not heard much from John McDonnell either.

why would boris want remain to win? surely that'd be the end of his little coup? asking in full awareness of my own ignorance here...

I think boris johnson thinks it's unlikely the uk would vote to leave the eu but wants to come out of the campaign having secured a large amount of conservative support being able to say guys I tried and I'm on your side

I Stood Up For What I Believed In.

Not heard much from John McDonnell either.

not mcdonnell's fault if u don't pay attention to current affairs tbh

http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/john-mcdonnell-warns-eu-referendum-debate-must-be-rescued-from-tory-infighting_uk_573a4e52e4b01359f6874fa1

http://www.cityam.com/242145/eu-referendum-coalition-of-left-wing-politicians-including-yanis-varoufakis-and-john-mcdonnell-make-the-case-against-brexit

http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/john-mcdonnell-warns-tories-would-7990907

http://www.walesonline.co.uk/news/politics/corbyn-mcdonnell-campaign-cardiff-friday-11403479

& c & c & c

Throw an egg at me, why don't you.

I don't throw eggs, I throw shade

Corbyn campaigned on remaining in when running for leader, because a) that's what the majority of the party want, so he's happy to go with that and b) leaving would turn the country into UKIP Island if the right of the Tories won a Brexit. I do not see why this is so difficult to retain as information.

Hague! But this is a pretty good:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/06/06/the-leave-campaign-cant-keep-dodging-the-biggest-question/

love their REMAIN/LEAVE opinion face-off underneath. Barack Obama vs Col. Richard Kemp!

why would boris want remain to win? surely that'd be the end of his little coup?

Boris is fundamentally lazy. A lot of rank-and-file Tories are heavily Eurosceptic so it's the path of least resistance to the leadership. But actually running the country while negotiating a messy withdrawal from the EU is going to be a bigger challenge than anything Cameron has faced in the past six years. I suspect he's making a big deal of being seen to support Brexit while privately hoping to avoid any of the fallout.

Corbyn has been much quieter than McDonnell, but I think McDonnell is likely to go over better in the parts of Britain where Labour voters are more likely to be wavering - or theoretically hostile to the EU while privately worried about their jobs etc. Difficult to tell whether Corbyn's general quietness on the issue is through design or just vague casual incompetence.