Bet On Biden

Only the first article in the comment is by Silver, on whose expertise the original poster is basing his recommendation. That article doesn't discuss mail-in ballots or voter suppression, and in fact his main point is that the time remaining until election day (almost three months when the article was written) combined with uncertainties due to Covid-19 meant that the race was still open back then. Those considerations have much more limited force at present, when only 16 days remain, and Biden's lead has widened considerably. 

If you've been at all listening to Silver recently, you'll know that he thinks his model probably underestimates Biden's chances. This shouldn't be surprising, since as Silver acknowledges, in this new version of the model he has made a special effort to build conservative assumptions into it.

In any case, I would encourage people hesitant to bet for Biden to resist the temptation of "throwing in a bunch of considerations" for why the models may be wrong, and instead try to calculate what the correct forecast should be in light of those considerations. For example, if you think mail-in ballots will be a big factor, try to estimate the magnitude of this effect.

Following my own advice, I just built a simple Guesstimate model of the impact of mail voting on the popular vote. I created the model very quickly, so if anyone spots any errors, please mention them below. And if you think some of the parameters should be different, simply copy the model and adjust those parameters to your satisfaction. Note that the effect of "rejected" in-person ballots is not modeled. This effect favors Biden, since a greater proportion of Trump votes will be in person, and hence susceptible to being "rejected" (i.e., not cast due to failure to bring an ID, long lines, inability to find a polling station, etc).

ETA: The upshot of the model is that mail voting shrinks the expect popular vote gap between Biden and Trump by about 2%. If we assume that the electoral college gives Trump a ~2% popular vote advantage, the model implies a drop in Biden's chances of winning the election from 87% to about 79%. [I modified the model and improved some of the estimates, and now the effect is less than 1%.]

(Disclosure: I have bet a total of USD 12k on Biden, mostly back when his odds where roughly equal with Trump's.)

This is total misinformation; mail-in rejection will probably be cancelled out by increased turnout from low-propensity voters (it's much easier to vote by mail than to vote in person). In any case, the effect of a 1-3% rejection rate is minimal and indistinguishable from general noise/uncertainty. 

Most of the claimed "GOP voter suppresion" either has a minimal effect or hurts the GOP, because the nuts and bolts of election administration are implemented on a county level. In most states, urban counties have the resources and inclination to counter the voter suppression, while rural (predominantly GOP) counties do not. 

For what it's worth, 538's final predictions have (narrowly) outperformed betting markets in 2008, 2012, 2016, and 2018 (I haven't looked at 2010 or 2014). Also, almost every consistently profitable politics bettor is putting massive bets on Biden this cycle, and my impression is that they either believe 538 is ~accurate or biased in favor of Trump. As an example, here's the twitter account of one of the best professional politics bettors around; he believes Biden has a ~96% chance of winning. 

Agreed. The best prediction would have been to assign Biden 100% credence. A defence of their position might say that "Given the information 538 had at the time, the best possible prediction machine would have less certainty than Nate", but this is too hard to prove, and it's inconsistent with the fact that Nate is a calibrated forecaster who (as far as I know) consistently beats the market.

Yeah, I think the OP's argument requires a good explanation of why the markets have failed to adequately price in Silver's prediction. I'm not saying markets are always right and impossible to beat no matter what, but the EMH is a pretty good default starting point, requiring strong evidence to overcome in any specific case. 'I trust this guy's public prediction, based on equally public information about his methods and track record' doesn't seem nearly enough.

The arguments here have convinced me to bet some money on Biden

Which ones convinced you? I still haven't seen a serious explanation for why everyone is apparently leaving so much expected value on the table. It seems to me that the market is big enough to be worth the attention of serious people, but not so big that it would take a huge number of them to snap up all the 'dumb money' and push the odds somewhere reasonable.

Older discussion of the Economist's model and betting markets by Gelman:

https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2020/06/19/forecast-betting-odds/

I would say Biden is conservatively 80% to win from here. Polls are incredibly good. The election is in sixteen days. When I made the thread you could get Biden for 0.65. 

You need to pay 3.5 cents tax on winnings if you buy at 0.65. There is also a 5% withdrawal tax. So if you win you get (100/0.65)(0.965)(0.95)(0.8) = 112.8 . 12.8% returns in 16 days is nothing to laugh at. You are still getting almost 6% expected returns if you think Biden is only 75% to win. This all assumes you immediately withdraw your winnings from Predictit which is obviously bad for your expected value. 

If you are not in the US you can both get better odds than 0.65 and you don't have to pay the insane rake. 

Bet 100% of your upcoming charitable donations. Even if you are loss averse the charities are not. Donate the winnings if the bet pays off. 

You could try using Augur using a VPN I think. Though you need Cryptocurrency (Etherum). Which is the reason I didn't use it so far (too much effort to set up).

Betfair.de should work. Besides sports, there is a politics section. 

We are in a scenario Nate Silver explicitly described:

But what’s tricky about this race is that — because of Trump’s Electoral College advantage, which he largely carries over from 2016 — it wouldn’t take that big of a polling error in Trump’s favor to make the election interesting. Importantly, interesting isn’t the same thing as a likely Trump win; instead, the probable result of a 2016-style polling error would be a Biden victory but one that took some time to resolve and which could imperil Democrats’ chances of taking over the Senate. On the flip side, it wouldn’t take much of a polling error in Biden’s favor to turn 2020 into a historic landslide against Trump.

As of writing this comment Biden has several paths to victory and is heavily favored to hit at least one. I think he is about 75% to win at this point, despite all the bad news. We are in a world where Biden might win despite losing all of PA FL OH NC. Very little had to go right for Biden to win. Neither myself nor Nate Silver made any statements saying the election would definitely be a landslide. I told people to bet on Biden to win not to bet on Biden winning in a landslide. I will say there were some people pushing more aggressive Bets (Rainbow Jeremy comes to mind) and we should definitely update against their point of view. But Nate remains credible.

People were quoted who thought Biden's P(win) was 96%.

Please provide actual quotes. I don’t know anyone who held that belief. Not even Nate Silver held that belief if you take into account election shenanigans. Nobody in the thread mentioned anything close to that probability. Most expressed probabilities I’ve found by rationalists are something in the 70-80% range for Biden, which at this point still doesn’t strike me as unreasonable.

Aren't most of Biden votes on mail votes, which are counted later? 

From what I'm seeing this still doesn't tell us that we aren't in a "Biden wins without a huge margin", which was the largest chunk of those 80%/90% estimates. I expected waking up at this time and seeing that the votes were momentarily favouring Trump (in fact I had to order my brain to expect and prepare for that).

"Biden wins" hypothesis has narrowed without those "Biden wins by a large chunk" scenarios being likely anymore, but in the "Biden wins" hypothesis I wouldn't have called seeing that unlikely. 

So far there's not so much "Trump wins" evidence I'd assume something was wrong with the prior odds, I'd think that if the remaining votes would be expected to be evenly distributed, but they are not.

My estimate 2 days ago was Biden at 85% to win, because a lot of things had to go in a very specific way for it to not happen or there had to be an error without any precedent in the polls. I felt like I was supposed to go at least 90%, but couldn't bring myself to do that because I felt overconfident in doing so, even if I was pretty sure my estimate was erring in the opposite side.

I think that a lot of rationalists assumed that the most common odds they were hearing (80% or so) had been too cautious because pollsters were afraid to make the same wrong call they made last time, so they augmented the odds a bit. What convinced me to go from 80% to 85% was seeing that Biden lead was three time the lead Hillary had, so that kind of fluke was really unlikely. 

If rationalists had been overconfident I'd expect this correction from pollsters excessive under confidence played a large part on anyone who wasn't just calculating odds on sheer polls data.

If Trump somehow wins... I think we'd have either witnessed something previously unknown that made the polls a lot less reliable (this seems to be a very particular election for lots of factors), which usually doesn't happens so betting on Biden then at those odds was still the intelligent thing to do, since you'd make money most times you did that, or that we simply got the unlikely result with things going in a specific way. 

But I can't think of anything rationalists should have done differently.

Here's what would make me question Nate's credibility: If we look at the 538's former projections and compare them to the betting markets prior to election, make Kelly bets, and lose money.^[1] Note that 538 can be on the wrong side of the market some of the time and still be profitable.

Saying Nate lacks enough credibility when he is well calibrated and on the right side of the market doesn't make any sense and seems like an extreme case of hindsight bias. For example, you use the 2016 election to undermine 538's credibility, but (if I recall correctly) 538's forecast gave Trump a greater chance than the market's odds implied, so if you bet based on 538's forecast you would have bet on Trump and made money. I could be remembering wrong, so if someone links this data, they'd get an upvote from me.

Here are the results we currently have put into 538's interactive map. I've been strictly kind to Trump, meaning I've put him as winning some races that aren't yet called, while only giving Biden races that have been called.

538 thinks this comes out at ~86/7/7 Biden/Trump/Tie (these are simulations and the numbers seem to fluctuate). And I believe Nebraska's second district is also won by Biden (I'm confused about that one, can't find an official source), in which case all the ties to go Biden.

I'm not convinced this looks bad for Nate Silver. We seem to be in the pessimistic half of the distribution (from Biden's pov), but not that far. It's too early to be sure, but there seems to have been a massive polling error in Florida, and some smaller errors in other swing states in Trump's favor. Again, that's worse for Biden than the median outcome, but not crazy worse.

You can use catnip which is built on Augur. Here is a blogpost from the guy who made it and a Discord Channel where you can ask questions when you get stuck.      

I do not know of any safe to do this. If you are found out you risk losing money if they freeze your account. This bet looks a lot worse if you are risking your account when you get found out. If you have outside friends who trust you maybe they will 'bet for you'. 

There are some offshore sites taking American bets. You can also place bets online legally if you are in NJ (I think).

again, watch out for rollover requirements before taking signup bonuses! Unless you're a prolific sports bettor it's almost certainly a bad idea to take the bonus. 

I spent some time. I do not see the smoking gun. Can you post more details or links?

The Texas bet (TX) seems EV neutral to me, and clearly far worse than the nationwide electoral college (EC) bet.

Biden for EC: 95% likely (The Economist model), priced at 62%

Biden for TX: 26% likely (The Economist), priced at 29%

The two Twitter feeds are full of a lot of shitposting, and don't update me much.

I would encourage you to bet on other things too if you think you have a big edge. It is not obvious to me there are any better bets available at this moment. 

538 had reasonable odds in 2016 imo. 27% chances happen. 

Bookies/Sites offer odds based on how much money is on both sides. 

This is extremely false; I know of multiple professional political bettors, and plenty more who make 5+ figures betting on election years. Also, PredictIt has $113m matched on the "Who will be the next president?" market alone, which is a lot of money by any reasonable standard... 

The explanation for the mispricing is really simple: Trump supporters tend to think that the polls are rigged and he'll win, and Biden supporters tend to think the polls are off/Trump will rig the election/voter suppression will cost them the election/ etc etc so 90% of the square money is on Trump and there's not enough sharp money to balance it out. Elections are just too infrequent for biased bettors to lose money quickly enough that prices are efficient, and it doesn't help that Trump unexpectedly won the 2016 election, transferring a lot of money to biased bettors. 

Have you actually tried checking with anyone resembling a 'pro bettor'? I predict the majority of them would say the bet is in fact attractive and you should put money on Biden. I see one person in the thread who is known for regularly making money betting on things other than stocks (Zvi). He said 'yes the odds are insane at this point'. 

Terms are actually better right now outside of Predictit but Americans cannot legally use those. I have not look into all the options for getting millions into the markets (I do not have that kind of money). But you can certainly bet hundreds of thousands of USD easily if you are not American. This seems more than sufficient to be attractive to pro bettors. The things you list in parenthesis do not explain the current situation. 

Let's say Trump actually had a 50% chance of winning last time

What do you mean by this? That human behaviour is non-deterministic? Or that, given the publicly available information at the time, the best guess was 50 percent? If the latter, it's easy to get a better credence after the event happened. Look at Nate's track record. An event that he gives an $x$ percent chance happens pretty damn close to $x$ percent of the time. You could've just as easily said he underestimates the winners when he got it "right" (i.e. he said > 50 percent chance), and therefore Biden has an even higher chance of winning.

Depends on where you bet. If you are in the right country you can make a lot of money if Biden is 70% to win. I emphasized predictit because I believe most people on lesswrong are in the USA.