4 ms·

I'm not sure I get this logic. If I told someone they had a 16.6% chance of rolling a die and getting a 6, and then they proceed to roll the die and get a 6, wo

• akjainaj 10y ago
  I get your point but that's not a fair comparison because there were 2 choices, not 6.
  • SixSigma 10y ago
    Ok. If I told you you had 80% chance of flipping a coin to a head and you got a tail, would you say I couldn't predict things ?
    • deleted 10y ago
      [deleted]
  • dagw 10y ago
    6 and Not 6 are two choices
• forgetsusername 10y ago
  I think many people would, yes. Which is frightening. I just read an anecdote about Sid Meier dealing with this in the Civilization games in Michael Lewis' Undoing Project: people couldn't stand losing battles of 33% 3 times in a row.
• pavelrub 10y ago
  If it was your job to measure all the things that affect the roll of a die, and this is the result of your prediction, then I would indeed say that you failed to do your job properly. You could defend the result by claiming that it is impossible to get better measurements, and that the 16.6% chance is a reflection of our unavoidable ignorance of the system, but this doesn't really seem applicable to predicting election results. What you are essentially saying is that every prediction that doesn't claim certainty is always correct. If I "predict", by looking at a crystal ball, that there is an 80% chance of an asteroid destroying Earth tomorrow, and no asteroid destroys earth, do you think that it makes sense to say that I was correct in my prediction, because I said there was a 20% chance of it not happening? Surely you must agree that there some sense in which my prediction was wrong, or at the very least more wrong than NASA's prediction. The election predictions were wrong in the same sense.
  • gareim 10y ago
    A lot of words to say very little. >What you are essentially saying is that every prediction that doesn't claim certainty is always correct. This seems to be the crux of it. No, what I am saying is that when you want to laugh at the polls/pollsters, you should be arguing how their methodology was wrong and what they could have done to find the true proportion +/- some standard error with however much confidence level. Simply laughing at pollsters when the minority wins is not good enough. 20% chance of winning and then actually winning does not seem all too unlikely to any reasonable person.
    • pavelrub 10y ago
      > you should be arguing how their methodology was wrong and what they could have done to find the true proportion +/- some standard error with however much confidence level There are countless of arguments about how their methodology was wrong and what could be improved, all over the internet. Almost nobody disputes that the models were bad. I thought this part was obvious. > 20% chance of winning and then actually winning does not seem all too unlikely to any reasonable person. It seems about 80% unlikely. But the question isn't whether it seems unlikely or not, but whether it makes sense to call the prediction results "wrong". 20% chance of an asteroid not hitting Earth and then not hitting Earth might not seem extremely unlikely, but the prediction that it had an 80% chance of hitting Earth is still a bad prediction.
      • Jarwain 10y ago
        Is it really a bad prediction? Or just a wrong one? Sure, you could say wrong predictions are bad. However, maybe it was the best prediction given the data available before a given event. Its weird assigning a kinda subjective good/bad to an event when it is just an assigned probability based on what is known. All we can really conclude is that the improbable happened; we didn't have enough data or the right methodologies to make a more accurate prediction. Learn what we can, and apply it to the next event.
        • pavelrub 10y ago
• delinka 10y ago
  That's not a prediction of the outcome. That's a statistic. A prediction of the outcome would be "you won't roll a 6."
  • Jarwain 10y ago
    The article doesn't claim that Cambridge Analytica predicted the outcome. The only factual claim about the outcome made by the company, according to the article, is that statistic. The article, however, took that statistic and implicated it as a prediction when all it really was was a statistic.
  • dagw 10y ago
    If you asked me to predict whether you will roll a six or not, then I will predict that you won't. Is that a bad prediction?
    • delinka 10y ago
      It's certainly an incorrect prediction if I roll a six. You didn't simply state the odds and leave it at that, you actually made a prediction. Is it a "bad" prediction? Depends on how you're defining "good" vs. "bad" predictions. If the quality of the prediction is not based on the outcome (i.e. whether the prediction is correct), but is instead based on the odds themselves, then that's a conversation that leads to "bad but correct" predictions.
• arrel 10y ago
  The difference is that the roll of a die is random, but the outcome of an election gets more deterministic as it approaches. Election prediction is figuring out what people have already decided they are going to do.
• BigJeffeRonaldo 10y ago
  Well, the model at least does not maximize likelihood