In the Network of the Conclav: How we "guessed" the Pope using network science
63 comments
·May 9, 2025tyleo
CGMthrowaway
The authors do not suggest using this model for prediction. FTA: “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.”
bombcar
The best ones would show how they mopped up in the prediction markets with their brilliant model.
coliveira
This is not different from any exercise in seeing the future: some people will get it right, and they will be hailed as having some secret sauce when in fact it is mostly based on luck.
schiffern
I do appreciate that, on HN at least, the headline writer had the decency to honestly say "guessed" instead of a more certain-sounding word like "predicted."
luqtas
sociology has same weird data showing even the weather can change for who people vote [0] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S09626...
and this is only an example of the multiple and more extensive studies made on this field
the moment people mock data from AI crawlers, this technology is useless?
vasco
If it's so good it could at least predict more past popes already.
qznc
Related recent podcast interview from the Star Spangled Gamblers: https://starspangledgamblers.libsyn.com/the-trader-who-guess...
> In 2016, Blitz (@blizzythegoat24) bet on Donald Trump to win the general election.
> In 2020, Blitz not only bet on Biden to win the election, he guessed the outcome of every state correctly.
> In 2024, he managed to do the same. He bet on Trump to win the election and guessed every state correctly.
nitwit005
From that podcast, it sounds like his predictions were very reliant on his judgement calls: "you could sense that people really wanted a change", "if you could call it a formula, sure", etc.
Clearly it's worked for him, but I'm not sure you can call that a model.
slg
You have a 12.5% chance to correctly predict 3 coin flips in a row. You need a lot more than 3 examples before we can actually be confident that a successful prediction is anything more than luck.
achierius
To be fair "guessed every state" carries significantly more bits of information than 3 coin tosses.
Spooky23
The presidential election is 50 independent events, 20% of which are moderately variable. It’s impressive, especially 2024.
ThePowerOfFuet
What are the chance of guessing 50 coin flips in a row?
What are the odds of doing it again four years later?
baxtr
Most likely the pope will be replaced by AI before there is a new election.
No need to predict.
poincaredisk
This is a pretty wild thing to say. Pope will probably never - or at least for a very long time - be replaced by AI, simply because he's a symbol first and foremost. Actual decisions may be hypothetically made by AI, but you still need the pope to announce them.
dullcrisp
That is a prediction.
divbzero
Was this published before the Pope was elected?
The article byline indicates 08 May 2025 but response header shows Last-Modified: Fri, 09 May 2025 13:39:02 GMT and the earliest entry in the Internet Archive is Fri, 09 May 2025 12:28:01 GMT.
The white smoke emerged from the Vatican Thu, 08 May 2025 16:07 GMT and Pope Leo XIV was announced shortly thereafter.
victorbjorklund
Linkedin post: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/universita-bocconi_a-new-way-...
Posted at Thu, 08 May 2025 08:24:51 GMT according to https://trevorfox.com/linkedin-post-date-extractor.html
losteric
Prevost was at the top of the "status" list. They also published guesses by "information control" and "coalition building".
divbzero
Thank you! That answers my question definitively.
It’s notable, of course, that Robert Prevost was highlighted in this post but left off of many other lists of papal candidates.
leoedin
We’re only reading this particular list because Robert Prevost was at the top of it!
rrherr
Thanks! Also, according to that LinkedIn post date extractor, this post by first author Giuseppe Soda was made on Thu, 08 May 2025 06:22:28 GMT:
https://www.linkedin.com/posts/giuseppe-beppe-soda-414749b0_...
rrherr
Good question!
Leonardo Rizzo, one of the researchers, claimed on X.com that they published before the Pope was elected.
An X user commented:
> “Guessed” after the fact. Interesting nonetheless and worth sharing before the event next time!
Rizzo replied:
> Thanks a lot! We shared it the 8th morning on linkedin, the university website and few other sources (italian press). Next time I’ll also share it on X
https://x.com/LnrdRizzo/status/1920841806096343409
https://www.linkedin.com/posts/universita-bocconi_a-new-way-...
riedel
It is not that unlikely that some model predicts the right outcome. The only question is: can it be reproduced?
SamBam
Forcing the conditions to allow this to be reproduced quickly would probably be unethical.
schrodinger
Interesting observation!
One explanation:
There’s a “Research” heading at the bottom that links to an article from today: “The Long Hand of Brussels on U.S. Businesses”, 09 May 2025 by Barbara Orlando.
Maybe they have a static site generator or even dynamic with caching that piled this in?
croes
And even if. Just publish multiple versions and keep the one that is right.
slg
Why is "guessed" in quotes in the HN headline. That word does not appear in the article. They even say the following:
>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.”
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.
DSMan195276
I would add, this wasn't really a prediction anyway, they listed 14 total people across three separate top 5 lists. That's a pretty sizeable chunk of the total people who had a chance of being elected pope and they didn't try to make a unified list or assign percentages of getting elected.
rodiger
Also the explicit survivorship bias... this would not be near the front page if their predictions were all wrong.
taubek
I took that “guessed” from their twitter post at https://x.com/lnrdrizzo/status/1920783054181728701?s=46
slg
Fair enough, but I think that makes this a lesson in the importance of context.
When someone uses quotes in their own informal original writing, they will often be received as scare quotes[1]. Knowing nothing about that author, I would assume he is using the word with some detachment. He knows the analysis wasn't trying to guess the pope, but he is having fun with the fact that the analysis pointed in the right direction.
When someone uses quotes to summarize something someone else wrote or said, especially when it is in a more formal context like a headline, it generally comes across as a direct quote. The headline therefore implies that the goal of this exercise was to predict the pope, which the article directly refutes.
The quote in the context of the headline wasn't "guessed" it was "How we 'guessed' the Pope using network science".
lanyard-textile
The real lesson here is that you can’t please everyone.
Quote it literally, some people say you missed the context.
Edit the quote, some people say you editorialized away the true meaning.
Summarize the situation yourself, some people say you took away the essence when there was a perfectly good quote available.
mapt
Polymarket had this guy at something like 1%. Enjoy your winnings, modellers.
caturopath
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.
yubblegum
Look at the graph at the end. Prevost is the largest circle.
lormayna
I have tried to estimate when the Pope will be elected with a bayesian model, but it's failed predicting that the Pope will be elected at 7th ballot.
Proof: https://old.reddit.com/r/Catholicism/comments/1kgst9c/concla...
Maybe I can make a blog post, just for the sake of whom that are curious
oldgradstudent
Why would a bayesian model be better than, say, astrology in pricing that?
lormayna
Bayesian models are working fine when you have few datas, and I have used the last conclaves ballots number to "train" that. It was mostly a toy project to understand better how a Bayesian model is working.
valorzard
Shoutout to the Pope Crave (@ClubConcrave) account on Twitter/X. They somehow went from a fandom account posting yaoi/BL content for the movie Conclave to an actual journalistic outfit who posted the results of the actual conclave before mainstream news outlets did
rafram
Did they post it before the cardinals came out onto the balcony to make the announcement? If so, that’s impressive. If not, I assume they were just watching the livestream like everyone else.
antognini
For anyone interested in more serious journalism about the Church, I can't recommend The Pillar enough. The guys who run it have a lot of connections and know how the Church works inside and out. They had identified Prevost as being one of the top contenders in the days leading up to the conclave [1].
In their final "gut check" analysis, one of the two editors said his gut was going with Prevost. (Unfortunately behind a paywall, but here for reference [2].)
[1]: https://www.pillarcatholic.com/p/why-prevosts-papal-prospect...
[2]: https://www.pillarcatholic.com/p/conclave-day-1-head-check-h...
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alexmolas
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.
xhevahir
> Informal relationships: mapped through authoritative journalistic sources, these include ideological affinities, mentoring relationships, and membership in patronage networks.
So a key part of this is impressionistic stuff: labels like "soft conservative," "liberal," and so on. Doesn't sound very rigorous.
Spooky23
It doesn’t need to be for this type of analysis. Given the information available, you’re looking for ways to bend the odds, not necessarily “know” with precision. Facebook makes billions with similar techniques.
jbellis
This is particularly impressive because polymarket failed harder than I can remember it ever doing at predicting the Pope https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/s/PRqb1nBVhA
micw
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.
mmooss
All they said about Prevost is that he had the highest status, which is just reporting a fact.
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.
This model needs a few more popes under its belt to build confidence in it.