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The whole 2016 situation feels like many people are borderlining on delusion, Nate included. The Comey thing certainly helped Trump, but even the day of the ele
by 013a 8y ago
The whole 2016 situation feels like many people are borderlining on delusion, Nate included. The Comey thing certainly helped Trump, but even the day of the election 538 was still forecasting a massive win for Hilary. How can the probabilities be that wrong?
Because the polls were wrong. Or, at least, incomplete. It doesn't matter how good your algorithms are if the data isn't there. And 2016 proved that 538, and really most media outlets, don't have a grip on America.
In other words, the existence of a black swan event in that particular system didn't really matter.
Silver is a glorified modern fortune teller, who seems to have deluded himself into thinking that simply having data means you can prescribe meaningful probabilities to the future. Assigning probabilities to a coin flip is easy. Figuring out the most likely winner of a game of baseball is a little harder; there's a whole movie about a guy who was basically doing that in 2002. Politics is a completely different field. You can't possibly assemble all of the data necessary to be remotely confident in the probability of outcomes. And let's not forget unpredictable black swan events.
But the readers love it. And, especially during the elections, the media would bring him out like a golden boy computer whiz, because he was saying the same things they were, but he's really smart and has the data and magic algorithms to back him up. And he was right that one time 8 years ago. He's about as pointless as Sean Hannity, with the one exception that, at least recently, Hannity was actually more correct about the future than Nate. It doesn't matter if you are right or wrong, if the reasons are wrong.
- wslack 8y agoI don't think delusion is a fair take: FiveThirtyEight Prediction: 48.5% to 44.9% Real outcome: 48.2% to 46.1% I agree that the horserace coverage is silly (especially given how polling operations use sampling and such), but its better to look at aggregate trends in polling than to ridiculously overcover outlier polls. I also certainly don't think its fair to say "28.6% chance he wins" is a "massive win" prediction. Silver's take was regarded as indefensibly right-leaning and attacked.
- nsgoetz 8y ago538 had almost a 1 in 3 chance that Trump won in their final prediction before the election. https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/2016-election-forecast/ https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/2016-election-forecast/
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- dragonwriter 8y ago> but even the day of the election 538 was still forecasting a massive win for Hilary It was predicting a large electoral win as the median scenario, but only a 70% chance of Clinton winning at all, because discrepancy between actual outcomes and polling were likely to be correlated across states, and many states were very close. This is where Silver differed from the other forecasts that were saying Clinton 90%+ based on the (historically false) idea that differences between votes and polls were independent across states. > You can't possibly assemble all of the data necessary to be remotely confident in the probability of outcomes. You often can be more than remotely confident, but it's true that the national result of the 2016 Presidential election wasn't one of those times. OTOH, Silver’s forecast reflected that, since ~70% is extremely low confidence.
- VintageCool 8y agoFiveThirtyEight also predicted a 10% chance that Clinton would win the popular vote while Trump won the electoral college.
- rurp 8y ago>Figuring out the most likely winner of a game of baseball is a little harder; there's a whole movie about a guy who was basically doing that in 2002. Nate was literally one of the core people working on Sabermetrics around the time that Moneyball was written.