I spent most of my election day -- 3pm to 11pm Pacific time -- trading on Manifold Markets. That went about as well as it could have gone. I doubled the money I was trading with, jumping to 10th place on Manifold's all-time leaderboard. Spending my time trading instead of just nervously watching results come in also spared me emotionally.[1]

It's been a week now, and people seem to be in a mood for learning lessons, for grand takeaways. There is, of course, virtue in learning the right lessons. But there is an equal amount of virtue in not learning the wrong lessons. People seem to over-learn lessons from dramatic events. And so this blog post is intended as a kind of push-back: "Here are some lessons that people seem to be learning, and here is why those lessons are wrong."

The seven most important things I [...]

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Outline:

(00:54) The seven most important things I didnt learn

(00:59) 1. No, Kamala Harris did not run a bad campaign

(05:30) 2. No, polls arent useless. They were pretty good, actually.

(12:13) 3. No, Theo the French Whale did not have edge

(18:30) 4. No, we didnt learn which campaign strategies worked

(19:23) 5. No, Donald Trump isnt a good candidate

(20:44) 6. No, spending money on political campaigns isnt useless

(21:55) 7. No, my opinion of the American people didnt change

(23:14) One thing I did learn

(23:23) Foreign-born Americans shifted toward Trump

The original text contained 6 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

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