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Didn't Nate Silver acknowledge that this was a tough election for his methods because of the highly unusual nature of Trump's campaign, among other things? EDI

Didn't Nate Silver acknowledge that this was a tough election for his methods because of the highly unusual nature of Trump's campaign, among other things? EDIT: found some indication of this from May of this year: http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/how-i-acted-like-a-pundit-and-screwed-up-on-donald-trump/ http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/how-i-acted-like-a-pundi...

zzalpha 10y ago
And he was getting flack for giving Hillary only 2-1 odds. And he also indicated there was error bars that work in both candidate's favour. IMO, if anyone was at least sorta close, it was FiveThirtyEight.
- Someone 10y ago
  You can't claim they were wrong at all. If you throw a die and I say there's a 67% chance you wil throw a three or higher, and you throw a one or a two, you cannot claim I am wrong. It's true that you cannot claim I was wrong if I said that probability was .00000000001%, either, but it sure feels different, and statistical tests will also bear that out.
simonbarker87 10y ago
I've been listening to the 538 daily podcast for the last couple of weeks (as a Brit it's been a great way to get an insight on how the US system works rather than just the politics on the surface) and, when on the show, Nate would not be drawn on saying who he thought was going to win. He really seemed to be going out of his way to say that the model is based on polls and those polls can be off, the model is only as good as the information that's put into it. The model had a pretty low Hilary chance a few days ago and then it ticked up at the end to over 70% for her but Jody Avirgan and Harry Enten were warning about pollsters' tendency to herd (I think that's what they called it) at the end and so the final polls can be less reliable due to this. I'm looking forward to their wash up podcast and then I'm checking out of politics, between Brexit and this it's been a bumpy year.
- zzalpha 10y ago
  Also notable that they mentioned repeatedly that: 1. Polls in key swing states like Michigan have been consistently bad over the years, and there hasn't been a lot of high quality polling in those states during the election, which meant there was a lot of uncertainty in those states. 2. State polls tend to be correlated. That means if the polling is off in Michigan, it'd probably be off in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin as well, and in the same direction. And, what a shock, all of them were tipping point states, and all of them had polling errors that swung in Trump's favour. 3. Trump was well within the polling error of winning by election time. That is, while FiveThirtyEight had Hillary with 2-1 odds, that was with significant errors bars due to uncertainty, and it runs both ways. To be honest, listening to their podcast and reading their posts, I was preparing myself for a potential Trump win.

zzalpha 10y ago

And he was getting flack for giving Hillary only 2-1 odds. And he also indicated there was error bars that work in both candidate's favour. IMO, if anyone was at least sorta close, it was FiveThirtyEight.

Someone 10y ago
You can't claim they were wrong at all. If you throw a die and I say there's a 67% chance you wil throw a three or higher, and you throw a one or a two, you cannot claim I am wrong. It's true that you cannot claim I was wrong if I said that probability was .00000000001%, either, but it sure feels different, and statistical tests will also bear that out.

simonbarker87 10y ago

I've been listening to the 538 daily podcast for the last couple of weeks (as a Brit it's been a great way to get an insight on how the US system works rather than just the politics on the surface) and, when on the show, Nate would not be drawn on saying who he thought was going to win. He really seemed to be going out of his way to say that the model is based on polls and those polls can be off, the model is only as good as the information that's put into it. The model had a pretty low Hilary chance a few days ago and then it ticked up at the end to over 70% for her but Jody Avirgan and Harry Enten were warning about pollsters' tendency to herd (I think that's what they called it) at the end and so the final polls can be less reliable due to this. I'm looking forward to their wash up podcast and then I'm checking out of politics, between Brexit and this it's been a bumpy year.

zzalpha 10y ago
Also notable that they mentioned repeatedly that: 1. Polls in key swing states like Michigan have been consistently bad over the years, and there hasn't been a lot of high quality polling in those states during the election, which meant there was a lot of uncertainty in those states. 2. State polls tend to be correlated. That means if the polling is off in Michigan, it'd probably be off in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin as well, and in the same direction. And, what a shock, all of them were tipping point states, and all of them had polling errors that swung in Trump's favour. 3. Trump was well within the polling error of winning by election time. That is, while FiveThirtyEight had Hillary with 2-1 odds, that was with significant errors bars due to uncertainty, and it runs both ways. To be honest, listening to their podcast and reading their posts, I was preparing myself for a potential Trump win.