In the Network of the Conclave

It’s interesting but also reminds me of US presidential predictors. All the models that guess right come out saying they have the magic formula but are often refuted by future elections.<p>This model needs a few more popes under its belt to build confidence in it.

Was this published before the Pope was elected?<p>The article byline indicates <i>08 May 2025</i> but response header shows <i>Last-Modified: Fri, 09 May 2025 13:39:02 GMT</i> and the earliest entry in the Internet Archive is <i>Fri, 09 May 2025 12:28:01 GMT</i>.<p>The white smoke emerged from the Vatican <i>Thu, 08 May 2025 16:07 GMT</i> and Pope Leo XIV was announced shortly thereafter.

Why is &quot;guessed&quot; in quotes in the HN headline. That word does not appear in the article. They even say the following:<p>&gt;The Bocconi team is the first to point out the limitations of the model. “We do not claim to predict the outcome of the Conclave,” Soda points out. “As the great statistician George Box said: ‘All models are wrong, but some are useful.’ Ours is intended to be a tool for reading the context, not an oracle.”<p>Trying to take a victory lap on something like this seems to fly in the face of the statistical thinking that goes into creating a model like this.

I have tried to estimate when the Pope will be elected with a bayesian model, but it&#x27;s failed predicting that the Pope will be elected at 7th ballot.<p>Proof: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;old.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;Catholicism&#x2F;comments&#x2F;1kgst9c&#x2F;conclave_megathread&#x2F;mr9ih2e&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;old.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;Catholicism&#x2F;comments&#x2F;1kgst9c&#x2F;concla...</a><p>Maybe I can make a blog post, just for the sake of whom that are curious

Their model had 15 slots spread across three lists, with Prevost appearing on one list in the top spot (and not in the other two lists at all). I am not sure we can conclude a ton about their predictive power.

Shoutout to the Pope Crave (@ClubConcrave) account on Twitter&#x2F;X. They somehow went from a fandom account posting yaoi&#x2F;BL content for the movie Conclave to an actual journalistic outfit who posted the results of the actual conclave before mainstream news outlets did

This article lists likely candidates for three categories and only one even contains Prevost.<p>I think the value lies in the mapping of heterogenous sources to one network that can be queried. How you arrive at conclusions derived from the information is human interpretation.<p>I’d be interested in how the facts were validated against the sources. Like debugging the mapping process.

&gt; Informal relationships: mapped through authoritative journalistic sources, these include ideological affinities, mentoring relationships, and membership in patronage networks.<p>So a key part of this is impressionistic stuff: labels like &quot;soft conservative,&quot; &quot;liberal,&quot; and so on. Doesn&#x27;t sound very rigorous.

This is textbook survivorship bias. Out of 133 electable cardinals, someone was bound to guess Robert Prevost. If they were wrong, no one would remember. You could probably find 132 others who guessed wrong.

The person who was elected Pope is meaningless if he does not clean house of sex abusing priests - past and present - as well as the cardinals and bishops who covered it up.

This is particularly impressive because polymarket failed harder than I can remember it ever doing at predicting the Pope <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;slatestarcodex&#x2F;s&#x2F;PRqb1nBVhA" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;slatestarcodex&#x2F;s&#x2F;PRqb1nBVhA</a>

Should have hit the Polymarket. tbh good predictive models give you money nowadays and money lets you do more science. So if you have good model, you should use it.

I wonder if predictions of various models are spread more or less evenly across the candidates. Like one out of then knows the last digit of pi.

All they said about Prevost is that he had the highest status, which is just reporting a fact.

It will be interesting to add Pope Francis to this graph OR study similar graph as of 2013.

It would be interesting to backtest this to see if it can predict previous popes.