4 ms·

Should be titled: "How FiveThirtyEight Desperately Tries to Regain its Credibility"

• godzillabrennus 10y ago
  This! I was tracking their polling aggregator in "real time" daily and all it did was give me a false sense of security. Now we have Trump.
  • detaro 10y ago
    If someone gives you a 1/3 to 1/4 chance of something bad happening, relying on that as "secure" seems ... risky. Criticism of specific mistakes they made are good and well, but just saying they predicted the wrong percentage (when we have no good idea what the real one was) seems to me like faulting somebody because they lost a coinflip. The bigger issue IMHO is how much attention is given to polls and predictions, when they try to amplify useful data from tiny differences in key states. Results that indicate "we can't really know" seem likely, but make for really bad headlines. And worst case, some people actually think 70:30 means they can stay at home and not go vote or something...
  • inimino 10y ago
    As I said in another thread[1], I think this is the psychological explanation for a lot of the heat Nate Silver took before and after the election (being "wrong" both ways according to people who don't understand what a 70% chance means). People saw 70% and rounded up to "Hillary". For a psychological counterbalance, imagine your doctor tells you you have a 70% to be alive this time next week. Yet in the political realm people were calling that a "sure thing". [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12937736 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12937736
• SamReidHughes 10y ago
  I'm confused. Was their 29% chance "wrong"? Would a 40% chance still be wrong? 45%?
  • Hydraulix989 10y ago
    In general, people don't have such good intuition when it comes to probabilities. Their heuristic is that if the predicted outcome doesn't match the actual outcome, you are wrong.