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What percentage chance must a forecast assign to an outcome before you would be able to accept it happening not being due to dishonesty? 538 gave Trump a ~30% c

What percentage chance must a forecast assign to an outcome before you would be able to accept it happening not being due to dishonesty? 538 gave Trump a ~30% chance of winning on Election Day 2016. If you roll a die twice and it comes up less than 4 both times, would you start looking for criminal intent? It’s also worth noting that 538 doesn’t conduct any of the polls that feed into their forecast, and so aren’t pollsters in a relevant sense here. Their entire reason for existing is that they agree that there is systematic bias in polls so they attempt to model it.

tehjoker 6y ago
I feel the fact that statistics are uncertain gives them incredible cover for their deceptions. They aren't just slightly wrong, they are extremely wrong in not just the overall picture, but in state after state and race after race, in multiple election cycles to the degree that if it happened in any other country, the UN would intervene. The magnitude of their errors are shocking, stunning, and increasing over time. I can't understand how anyone can ever look at these again without a canister of salt. If Trump won in a landslide after they predicted Biden up by a landslide but assigned it some kind of probability you're going to give them a pass? Of course not. The fact that there are so many polls and they are all wrong means that there is something foul at play at the heart of this entire enterprise. The most charitable thing I could say is that they are completely useless, a toy metric for amusements.
- johncolanduoni 6y ago
  Could you quantify the extremely wrong part? You can see their forecast map here[1]. Even if we just look at whether the probability of Trump winning a particular state was > 50% (and ignore the magnitude), the only state we have some semblance of results for that they got wrong is Florida, plus one of the Maine congressional districts. For over 50 discrete predictions that definitely doesn’t look extremely wrong to me. Given how negative you are about them “over time”, I wouldn’t have expected you to take a detailed look at their model this time around. Out of curiosity, what drove you to take a look this time around so you could claim their errors are “shocking, stunning, and increasing”? [1]: https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/trump-biden-election-map/ https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/trump-biden-election-ma...

tehjoker 6y ago

I feel the fact that statistics are uncertain gives them incredible cover for their deceptions. They aren't just slightly wrong, they are extremely wrong in not just the overall picture, but in state after state and race after race, in multiple election cycles to the degree that if it happened in any other country, the UN would intervene. The magnitude of their errors are shocking, stunning, and increasing over time. I can't understand how anyone can ever look at these again without a canister of salt. If Trump won in a landslide after they predicted Biden up by a landslide but assigned it some kind of probability you're going to give them a pass? Of course not. The fact that there are so many polls and they are all wrong means that there is something foul at play at the heart of this entire enterprise. The most charitable thing I could say is that they are completely useless, a toy metric for amusements.

johncolanduoni 6y ago
Could you quantify the extremely wrong part? You can see their forecast map here[1]. Even if we just look at whether the probability of Trump winning a particular state was > 50% (and ignore the magnitude), the only state we have some semblance of results for that they got wrong is Florida, plus one of the Maine congressional districts. For over 50 discrete predictions that definitely doesn’t look extremely wrong to me. Given how negative you are about them “over time”, I wouldn’t have expected you to take a detailed look at their model this time around. Out of curiosity, what drove you to take a look this time around so you could claim their errors are “shocking, stunning, and increasing”? [1]: https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/trump-biden-election-map/ https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/trump-biden-election-ma...