4 ms·

Let's keep it simple; it wasn't Silver and 538 who did the piece on USC/Dornsife and why it was an outlier, it was Nate Cohn and the NYT. I think Silver and his

Let's keep it simple; it wasn't Silver and 538 who did the piece on USC/Dornsife and why it was an outlier, it was Nate Cohn and the NYT. I think Silver and his org know more than 95% of the others about polling, but you'd think that this would be an obvious one for them to break since it is ostensibly their specialty. Not that there's anything wrong with getting scooped. But it is an indication that his nose is too far in the meta-model and not in the real world. That's a class of mistake that can lead you to drive off a cliff.

jocro 10y ago
> but you'd think that this would be an obvious one for them to break since it is ostensibly their specialty. Silver's already touched on this poll and its unusual methodology: http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/election-update-leave-the-la-times-poll-alone/ http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/election-update-leave-th... He didn't get scooped; explaining the technical details isn't his ostensible specialty, adjusting for them is.
- firebones 10y ago
  Good point. Although I think Cohn's speciality is more valuable to me here. I came away from the Silver piece when I first read it with the problem merely being a fixed population of voters; the Cohn piece was much more illuminating since it showed the specifics of how that pre-condition has been affecting all kinds of aggregation methods. So Silver was the early warning, but Cohn had the nitty-gritty. I'm just used to Silver providing that--they seem spread pretty thin. As you point out, you have to specialize in something, though...
- ianai 10y ago
  And so what if he were to be scooped? No ones all knowing.
ajross 10y ago
Cohn is the Times's data journalist geek. He's, frankly, just as good at this stuff as Silver is. They seem to like each other, even. It's a good article. And yeah, 538 got scooped on this one. But it's not because they weren't paying attention, they just had other stories to write.

jocro 10y ago

> but you'd think that this would be an obvious one for them to break since it is ostensibly their specialty. Silver's already touched on this poll and its unusual methodology: http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/election-update-leave-the-la-times-poll-alone/ http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/election-update-leave-th... He didn't get scooped; explaining the technical details isn't his ostensible specialty, adjusting for them is.

firebones 10y ago
Good point. Although I think Cohn's speciality is more valuable to me here. I came away from the Silver piece when I first read it with the problem merely being a fixed population of voters; the Cohn piece was much more illuminating since it showed the specifics of how that pre-condition has been affecting all kinds of aggregation methods. So Silver was the early warning, but Cohn had the nitty-gritty. I'm just used to Silver providing that--they seem spread pretty thin. As you point out, you have to specialize in something, though...
ianai 10y ago
And so what if he were to be scooped? No ones all knowing.

ajross 10y ago

Cohn is the Times's data journalist geek. He's, frankly, just as good at this stuff as Silver is. They seem to like each other, even. It's a good article. And yeah, 538 got scooped on this one. But it's not because they weren't paying attention, they just had other stories to write.