Absolutely disagree. People have a tendency to think forecasting is simply making a binary prediction: something will happen or it won't. That simply is not the

Absolutely disagree. People have a tendency to think forecasting is simply making a binary prediction: something will happen or it won't. That simply is not the case. It's more than that. It's quantifying uncertainty. In actuality, reducing a prediction to a simple "X will happen/won't happen" statement throws away information. I can predict the sun will rise tomorrow, and can also predict that the Denver Nuggets will beat the Dallas Mavericks tonight, but the probabilities associated with those predictions are vastly different. The quandary that FiveThirtyEight and Silver are in is that the general public is stupendously bad with probabilities. Prior to the the 2016 election, Silver was personally being attacked, in some cases by major media organizations like the Huffington Post, and accused of tipping the scales towards Trump (for some inexplicable reason), since their models were giving him approximately a 1 in 4 chance of winning. Then, in the months following the election, the narrative somehow switched, and the fact that Trump won despite only being given a 1 in 4 chance by FiveThirtyEight meant that Silver was now a hack and the model was wrong. So now, fast forward to this year's election, Silver is doing his best to drill into people's minds that, yes, their model showed a Democratic win in the house as the most likely outcome, but that absolutely doesn't not mean their model says it is an absolute certainty, or that other outcomes would be unusual. It isn't "covering his ass", its educating the public on how probabilistic statements work.