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In my opinion (and I disagreed with Nate in late October, and early November), Nate is great at trees, but horrible at forests. For instance, he never took int
by MR4D 10y ago
In my opinion (and I disagreed with Nate in late October, and early November), Nate is great at trees, but horrible at forests.
For instance, he never took into account the high bias of the media. Tons of people saw it - I'd even argue that most Trump voters saw it.
But he never saw it, nor the effect that it had. I contended that the polls did not make sense - one candidate was pulling huge crowds and yet was hated by everyone? Didn't make sense to me.
But that's one opinion. I fault him for not saying, "hey, wait - the media is really biased in this - could their polls be too?"
That's what I thought. No, I didn't have the statistics horsepower available, but I saw the forest. So did many others.
One (much smarter than me to be sure), was Nicholas Taleb, who excoriated Nate on his lack of statistics knowledge. His critique was well above my understanding, but I'll trust someone who made money off of statistics more than any pollster.
- ZeroGravitas 10y agoI followed the election via Nate Silver's site and remained frightened of a Trump victory the whole time. How does that square with all the people like yourself who have a different recall? Quite a lot of it seems to come down to people just boiling everything he said to a binary Hillary will win message. Humans are after all famously terrible with stats. What does it mean for example to have disagreed with him in November? My only interpretation of that is that you thought Trump would win. But he never said Clinton would win, he's making a statistical prediction. It's like arguing he's wrong because a dice roll came up 2 and he only gave it 1/6th odds. I can say for definite that he talked repeatedly about the possibility of the polls being wrong, specifically saying that if the polls were off by the same amount that they have historically been off and in his favor, then Trump would win. Again, I don't understand why people want to pretend he never said stuff like this. Is it part of their own media bias narrative?