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> The worst part is that a lot of this is predicated on the idea that giving something a 1 in 3 chance is the same as saying it'll never happen, when it's almos

> The worst part is that a lot of this is predicated on the idea that giving something a 1 in 3 chance is the same as saying it'll never happen, when it's almost the opposite. There are some critical misunderstandings of statistics going on here, on all sides. On the morning of the election, FiveThirtyEight said that the chances of Trump winning were roughly equal to the chances of a random coin flip coming up heads twice in a row (25%). In that situation, a good statistician would certainly say that the expected outcome is for at least one of the coin flips to land on "tails" (75% chance). But if the coin lands on heads twice, you wouldn't say that "statistics is broken"[0] or that the statistician predicting the outcome was wrong. Similarly, let's say that you had a separate person predicting the probability of the double-heads coin flip to be 90%. If it does happen, that doesn't mean they made a good prediction, just because the outcome was correct. They predicted the correct outcome, but the degree of confidence they expressed in it was completely wrong. Predictions aren't just about getting the outcome right - they're also about expressing the right degree of confidence in the results. [0] Which is literally what some otherwise-respectable journalists complained after the election

ivraatiems 10y ago
You're totally right. The trouble is that when 538 was saying "wait, hold up, we're not sure," and in all their commentary being very clear that that 25% chance was a real, important possibility, people were taking it as, "oh, they think Hillary has it in the bag." People are taking their being rightfully less certain than anyone else using the same data as meaning they were just as wrong as anyone else, when the data itself was lacking. They weren't. (Of course, the degree to which the data was lacking and the reasons for that lack is another issue in and of itself.)

ivraatiems 10y ago

You're totally right. The trouble is that when 538 was saying "wait, hold up, we're not sure," and in all their commentary being very clear that that 25% chance was a real, important possibility, people were taking it as, "oh, they think Hillary has it in the bag." People are taking their being rightfully less certain than anyone else using the same data as meaning they were just as wrong as anyone else, when the data itself was lacking. They weren't. (Of course, the degree to which the data was lacking and the reasons for that lack is another issue in and of itself.)