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Presidential Plinko
- rsynnott 6y agoThis is a pretty good idea! The 538 people have mentioned before that they've had trouble with people misunderstanding probability (many people, apparently, believe that things which have a 20% chance of happening will never happen and those with an 80% chance will always happen). Their current solution to this problem appears to be some sort of cartoon fox, but I think this illustration works better.
- jedberg 6y agoI think the cartoon fox was just because they need a graphic. The real way they are combating people's inability to interpret percentages is by dropping them lower down, and replacing the top line prediction with the word "slightly favored" or "favored" or "strongly favored".
- rsynnott 6y agoWell, the cartoon fox also provides narration. But yeah, the rearrangement of the page and better infographics is probably the biggest change. I'd be kind of curious to see if they have any evidence that it actually helps. It seems like it... might? But it's always hard to tell with these things.
- jedberg 6y agoProbably the best way to figure it out is to analyze reddit/hn for comments like "538 says Biden will win!" vs "538 says Biden might win go vote"
- Wowfunhappy 6y agoThere is, as the statisticians would say, a confounding variable: we all lived through the 2016 election.
- takeda 6y agoThe crazy thing though is that statistics also contributed to the loss. There was a campaign to discredit Clinton so many Democrats weren't happy about her. Seeing statistics in her favor many Democrats decided to either stay home or vote 3rd party. This also give extra opportunity to tilt scales in 3 important states to win the entire election. Moral of the story is, one should never assume that their candidate winning in polls is an excuse to not vote.
- heleninboodler 6y agoThe cartoon fox is really infantilizing. I know probability is tricky and sometimes counterintuitive, and I appreciate being taught things, but don't treat me like I'm in kindergarten.
- wilg 6y agoI think this says a lot more about you than it does about the cartoon fox!
- currymj 6y agoi have to imagine it would piss Nate Silver off to experience 4 years of continual mockery for "getting the election completely wrong" when he in fact got it right. anyway, I agree the cartoon fox seemed very condescending and I wonder whether there wasn't some real frustration with the public behind it.
- dragonwriter 6y ago> The cartoon fox is really infantilizing. I know probability is tricky and sometimes counterintuitive, and I appreciate being taught things, but don't treat me like I'm in kindergarten. Have you considered that you are quite possibly both more educated and more intelligent than the people whose experience the cartoon fox is designed to improve. Sure, I don't need it, but I haven't even noticed it since the first time I went to the forecast page this cycle.
- Wowfunhappy 6y agoThe first non-news graphic on Five Thirty Eight is literally a bunch of balls, colored red and blue. Short of actually including this type of auto-playing animation (which is perhaps the solution, but has its own issues), I'm not sure what else they could do. People are bad at dealing with uncertainty. And also don't read.
- rsynnott 6y agoI feel like the plinko type animation might be better, as it makes it really, really clear that, yes, the improbable thing can happen.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- dragonwriter 6y ago> The first non-news graphic on Five Thirty Eight is literally a bunch of balls, colored red and blue. No, it is literally a set of maps of different outcomes of simulations representing (in a reduced way, because there's only room for 22 maps, at least on desktop; I think they have fewer on mobile) the range and frequency of simulation results. The balls come after that.
- adrianmonk 6y ago> many people, apparently, believe that things which have a 20% chance of happening will never happen and those with an 80% chance will always happen It could be the counter-intuitive nature of probability, but I wonder if it might sometimes just be that, psychologically, people have trouble accepting the idea that nobody really knows. You look at a site like FiveThirtyEight, you know the site is run by an expert, and you know that multiple sources of data have been fed into number-crunching computers. You've seen other situations where this type of process nails it. You have a strong desire to know the answer, and that biases you toward believing that you do. The idea that something so important is unknown is unpleasant, so you reject it. About the difficult of grasping the basic concept, if you've ever seen the TV show Card Sharks (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Card_Sharks https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Card_Sharks), a key part of the game is that contestants see a card which is face up, and they have to make bets based on whether the next card drawn is higher or lower. In that context, they have no trouble understanding that if the face-up card is a 5, the next card is probably higher (6, 7, 8, 9, 10, J, Q, K, A) but it could also be lower (2, 3, 4). Essentially, I think people can understand that unlikely things happen, but where they have difficulty is seeing/admitting that this is one of those situations.
- impendia 6y ago> if you've ever seen the TV show Card Sharks... I developed and taught an entire undergraduate math class on the mathematics of game shows. https://people.math.sc.edu/thornef/schc212/gameshows-428.pdf https://people.math.sc.edu/thornef/schc212/gameshows-428.pdf Much of the class I worked out probabilities like these, and compared what contestants "should" do to what they actually do. Watching reruns of Card Sharks, The Price Is Right, and others, I've found that most people have a surprisingly good intuitive sense of probability. Not always, but more often than not.
- js2 6y agoExcept for that damn Monty Hall problem!
- rsynnott 6y agoI'm not sure it's that simple, because even _after the fact_ people were talking about how 538 "said Clinton would win". They're doing so in this comments section, in fact. I also seem to remember seeing a study that people made better probability-based decisions if given probabilities phrased as fractions than percentages; I wonder if something similar is going on with the cards example.
- pjc50 6y agoApart from xcom players, to whom 90% of something working means almost certain disaster.
- rsynnott 6y agoSome games actually do use fake random number generators that behave more like people intuitively expect randomness to behave; if there’s supposedly a 5% chance of something happening it will NEVER happen twice in a row, and so on.
- colinmhayes 6y agoI'm not convinced people actually have trouble misunderstanding probability. I think it's more likely that some bad faith conservatives said "look at how stupid the liberal media is, they said Hillary couldn't lose" and people actually believed that without checking what 538 actually said.
- gowld 6y agoI thi to it would work better if it actually showed one ball drop at a time, instead of just quickly generating the same bar/scatter graphs that the original sites show. The single ball drop, with slower motion, gives you a chance to feel the uncertainty.
- darkerside 6y agoThere's an option to do that a little lower down
- Wowfunhappy 6y agoThis, but I wish it defaulted to that instead of starting with all the balls at once.
- gojomo 6y agoIndeed! The multiple balls may be thought of like ballots/points, leading to the wrong intuition that “more balls one side, that side wins”. But that’s exactly the misinterpretation of probabilities/multiple-trials such demos are trying to fight. Perhaps, whenever many balls shown at once, all but one should be faint/outlined or even X’d out?
- madcaptenor 6y ago270 To Win has a simulation that fills in the electoral map one state at a time: https://www.270towin.com/2020-simulation/ https://www.270towin.com/2020-simulation/ They even have a mode that fills in the states in roughly the order of poll closing times, which helps to get your head around how election night is likely to go. (Except it'll probably be election week and poll closing times will matter less than how fast various states count mail-in votes.)
- kkotak 6y agoLooks like we've not learned anything from 2016.
- rhacker 6y agoThat's what I came in to say. If it happens again I think we can conclude that at this point, the people voting and the people getting ahead looking polls (say on the internet, random calls, etc..) are not the same people.
- edmundsauto 6y agoLet's say the odds stay where they are, and Trump wins again. That would be hitting on a 30% chance in 2016 and hitting on a 20% chance in 2020. That's a 6% chance overall. 6% likely outcomes happen all the time. It would be a textbook example of "resulting" to draw a conclusion based on this.
- T-hawk 6y ago[deleted]
- rsynnott 6y ago> If the polls didn't match the votes in 2016, they probably won't again in 2020, for at least some of the same underlying reasons. That's true only if you assume perfectly spherical pollsters :) After a real or perceived polling miss (in reality, most polls weren't off by all that much in 2016), pollsters tend to change assumptions, sometimes overcompensating. Notably, after a moderate polling miss in the 2015 elections, which predicted a hung parliament where in fact the Tories managed a small majority, UK pollsters went on to overcompensate in the 2017 election, showing a Tory blow-out win whereas in fact they ended up with a hung parliament. (That one, incidentally, shows one danger of polls! The first poll allowed Cameron to safely promise a vote on the EU, because he assumed they'd be either out of government or in coalition with the libdems, who wouldn't allow it. In fact, they won and were forced to go through with it. The second one allowed Theresa May to call a snap election to gain seats so as to have enough spare MPs to be able to ignore the ERG and negotiate a semi-sensible Brexit. Instead, they lost seats, had to deal with the ERG and Unionists, and ultimately ended up with the current catastrophe. The current Brexit mess is at least in part due to polling misses.) In the US, pollsters have started to pay a lot more attention to education, which was a major predictor in the 2016 election.
- jvanderbot 6y agoThis is awful because the balls are not being dropped in the center. Instead, the color of the end slots should change based on probabilities. The skewing of the entry point implies a bias in prior distribution, which is not the right message.
- shoes_for_thee 6y agoI wouldn't straight up call this 'awful,' but I do agree that probability should be expressed by the color of the end slots.
- nl 6y agoWhy would this make any sense? The probability is expressed by the number of times a ball ends up in each of the end slots. That's the whole point!
- tantalor 6y ago> the balls are not being dropped in the center They are being dropped from the center of the probability distribution, not the center of the electoral vote threshold (which would be nonsense). > skewing of the entry point Skewing from what? > bias in prior distribution That's the point! > color of the end slots should change based on probabilities The height of the bar changes based on the probabilities.
- jvanderbot 6y agoRight. I think a more layperson interpret-able visualization would be to have what appears to be a "fair" (centered) sampling, and show the results based on the likelihood of landing in Trump/Biden. A biased sampling with uniform slots at the bottom shows the same thing, yes.
- Wowfunhappy 6y agoI believe the idea is: 1. We’re dropping the ball at the position the polls (and our models) indicate. 2. The balls may end up in a different place due to any number of unforeseen factors (the pegs).
- wellpast 6y ago> Presidential Plinko takes that uncertainty and translates it into Plinko boards with similar uncertainty, so that you can experience just how uncertain predictors’ forecasts are. Nope. To fully demonstrate how uncertain predictors’ forecasts are, you need to animate a few meteorites crashing into the Plinko board, one said meteorite with Hillary's emails on them. And then go read The Black Swan, especially the chapter where one of the reference figures is a Plinko board.
- netsharc 6y agoHuh, I forgot about the Comey e-mail investigation October surprise (thanks a lot, Comey, you....). I wonder if Trump or Putin has any Biden surprises for this month...
- bra-ket 6y agonice visuals, but these polls and simulations were wrong in 2016, and are likely wrong now.
- edmundsauto 6y agoAre you aware of the adjustments that were made by pollsters and meta-pollsters like 538 since 2018? Also, it's not like they were wrong in 2016 -- 538 had a 30% chance of a Trump victory. I expected better statistical understanding from this audience, but maybe that only underscores how difficult it is to get people thinking correctly about probabilities.
- kilbuz 6y agoWhat does wrong even mean in these contexts? You can't reliably evaluate a probability model with n = 1 test cases.
- UncleOxidant 6y agoThe polls were right in 2016 in that Clinton did win ~3Million more votes than Trump. The problem was with polls in some states that ended up being crucial for an electoral college win. Hopefully 538 (and other similar organizations) have learned something from that and have made some adjustments.
- verylittlemeat 6y agoThat seems outrageously obtuse. The electoral college is fundamental to predicting the US presidential election. The idea that 538 got it right but just didn't factor in the electoral college is a real stretch. If they screwed up polls in states that were crucial for an electoral college win then they screwed up full stop.
- rsynnott 6y ago538 et al don't, as a general rule, run their own polls. In 2016, some swing states were poorly polled, so they were flying kind of blind on those. And, of course, a few tens of thousands of votes different on the day, below the margin of error of any poll, and no-one would be bothered about them. In a way, 538 can't win here; they said "there's a 30% chance of this thing happening", it happened, based on differences below the resolution that they could even see at, and everyone's annoyed with them.
- sneak 6y agoRunning javascript provided by a site that's not from an authenticated source is... a pretty significant risk to certain people. To the author: please turn on TLS for your site. It's free.
- wilg 6y agoWhat's the risk? And what certain people? And how does knowing that said JavaScript is legitimately from "presidential-plinko.com" reduce that risk?
- parliament32 6y agoTo know that your ISP / government / local MITM on your wifi didn't inject malicious JS? This has been a thing approximately forever https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2014/09/why-comcasts-javascript-ad-injections-threaten-security-net-neutrality/ https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2014/09/why-comcasts-jav...
- dane-pgp 6y agoAnd, to the question of "What certain people?", the answer, in the general case, includes Chinese dissidents: https://www.zdnet.com/article/china-resurrects-great-cannon-for-ddos-attacks-on-hong-kong-forum/ https://www.zdnet.com/article/china-resurrects-great-cannon-...
- Waterluvian 6y agoThanks for making this. It’s silly and fun and a bit educational. Plinko was the best part of being sick as a kid.
- romwell 6y agoThis is fantastically awesome! What people often miss is that a statement like "X wins with 75% probability" means that X's supporters have a very solid chance of losing. The odds (and risks) in the long run aren't the same when there is no long run, just one experiment. My recommendation would be to change the script so that "dropping all balls" stops after one run, and the button "drop one ball" gets highlighted after that, encouraging the user to click it. Because it is then that you get to feel how real the chances of ball ending up on the right side are, even if most balls end up on the blue side. We all only get one drop. ---------- Personal plug: my 3D-printed Galton/Plinko board[1]. If anyone's interested, I can share the STL file or OpenSCAD code. [1]https://i.imgur.com/O4ZqOVR.jpeg https://i.imgur.com/O4ZqOVR.jpeg