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Yes but that's not how the proles understand the blog. They take it as "x has a y % chance of happening". Which is Taleb's beef with it. The commoner thinks it

Yes but that's not how the proles understand the blog. They take it as "x has a y % chance of happening". Which is Taleb's beef with it. The commoner thinks its Silver putting his money on something, but when it doesn't happen he says "well I didn't say _that_". And it in the day and age of more robust machine learning models, that the 538 models are so volatile is a pretty weak excuse.

mercutio2 8y ago
Humans are volatile. Politics even more so. Our options aren’t “high confidence converging predictions, or 538”. The options in the current era for understanding of the electorate’s mood are “overly confident individual polls, poorly analyzed with completely inadequate models”, vs “538-style epistemically humble models accompanied by discussions of their confidence, which can be scored in aggregate after each election”. I’ll take 538 any day.
- huffmsa 8y ago
  But it's not about you. Just being on this forum puts you in the critical thinking 1%. 538 fails in that most people think that the daily stats are Silver's betting positions. He "predicted the 2008 election." We understand the difference, but the crying campaign staffers last November did not.
  - dragonwriter 8y ago
    > We understand the difference, but the crying campaign staffers last November did not. Campaigns aren't relying on Silver’s model.
- dragonwriter 8y ago
  > The options in the current era for understanding of the electorate’s mood are “overly confident individual polls, poorly analyzed with completely inadequate models”, vs “538-style epistemically humble models accompanied by discussions of their confidence, which can be scored in aggregate after each election”. Also, “politically motivated actors selling narratives that reinforce their preferred outcome largely without data or with cherry-picked data.” Don't forget that option

mercutio2 8y ago

Humans are volatile. Politics even more so. Our options aren’t “high confidence converging predictions, or 538”. The options in the current era for understanding of the electorate’s mood are “overly confident individual polls, poorly analyzed with completely inadequate models”, vs “538-style epistemically humble models accompanied by discussions of their confidence, which can be scored in aggregate after each election”. I’ll take 538 any day.

huffmsa 8y ago
But it's not about you. Just being on this forum puts you in the critical thinking 1%. 538 fails in that most people think that the daily stats are Silver's betting positions. He "predicted the 2008 election." We understand the difference, but the crying campaign staffers last November did not.
- dragonwriter 8y ago
  > We understand the difference, but the crying campaign staffers last November did not. Campaigns aren't relying on Silver’s model.
dragonwriter 8y ago
> The options in the current era for understanding of the electorate’s mood are “overly confident individual polls, poorly analyzed with completely inadequate models”, vs “538-style epistemically humble models accompanied by discussions of their confidence, which can be scored in aggregate after each election”. Also, “politically motivated actors selling narratives that reinforce their preferred outcome largely without data or with cherry-picked data.” Don't forget that option