4 ms·

What you're saying is that any result with a non-zero chance of happening should be unsurprising to us, because it was still in the realm of possibility? If tha

What you're saying is that any result with a non-zero chance of happening should be unsurprising to us, because it was still in the realm of possibility? If that's the case, what use are polls? What makes an election forecast based on polls more valuable than a coin flip?

softwaredoug 6y ago
Your coin flip analogy is spot on. But instead of a 1 in 2 probability, Trump had a 1 in 10 probability of winning. We knew this probability precisely because of polling data (and historical error). This wasn’t some rare weird outcome. This was probably a standard deviation or so closer to Trump in a forecast. Perfectly normal thing to happen.
- ghayes 6y ago
  Sure, the model had value precisely because it said that even if Trump did better than the polls suggested, he would likely still lose due to the paths of victory Biden had. That said, the polls have shown, in many cases, poor predictive behavior of actual votes, and as such, we should not just brush this off by quoting the distribution of outcomes.
jayd16 6y ago
Results fall on a spectrum from surprising to unsurprising based on the modeled prediction and confidence.
pessimizer 6y ago
Polls are astrological race science, and the reason you'll never be able to convince anyone of this is adequately covered by the book When Prophecy Fails. I've come to think that their bias is only slightly ideological, but instead springs more from a self-serving impulse to mirror the current beliefs of the audience most likely to believe in polls i.e. people overly impressed by credentials. They enjoy the sheer volume of numbers, rather than their actual usefulness. Alternate phrasings of identical questions asked in polls creates differences in outcome vastly larger than the effects they claim to detect. Somehow Nate Silver managed to get rich by selling synthetic CDOs of arbitrary polls (to people with his identical political outlook.) The only real poll is to ask the same questions, in the same way, as the ballot sheet does. Ideally these should be asked as people are entering or leaving the voting booth, and people should be paid for their responses, in order not to bias yourself towards bored loudmouths with nothing to do. This would be good for accuracy, not for usefulness in anything but generating a suspicion of election fraud. Instead, they're trying to figure out what percentage of black people go to the polls in Missouri, and pretending that the self-selected black voter has more in common politically with the general black phone answerer than the Missouri voter. Relying on that arbitrary assumption is the entire basis of their field. edit: I haven't read https://site.pennpress.org/aha-2021/9780812250046/race-and-the-making-of-american-political-science/ https://site.pennpress.org/aha-2021/9780812250046/race-and-t... yet, but I heard an interview with the author around the time that it came out, and it's another hidden history of a field that has completely unearned legitimacy. "Political Science" might largely be considered an outgrowth of scientific racism.
- overkalix 6y ago
  .

softwaredoug 6y ago

Your coin flip analogy is spot on. But instead of a 1 in 2 probability, Trump had a 1 in 10 probability of winning. We knew this probability precisely because of polling data (and historical error). This wasn’t some rare weird outcome. This was probably a standard deviation or so closer to Trump in a forecast. Perfectly normal thing to happen.

ghayes 6y ago
Sure, the model had value precisely because it said that even if Trump did better than the polls suggested, he would likely still lose due to the paths of victory Biden had. That said, the polls have shown, in many cases, poor predictive behavior of actual votes, and as such, we should not just brush this off by quoting the distribution of outcomes.

jayd16 6y ago

Results fall on a spectrum from surprising to unsurprising based on the modeled prediction and confidence.

pessimizer 6y ago

Polls are astrological race science, and the reason you'll never be able to convince anyone of this is adequately covered by the book When Prophecy Fails. I've come to think that their bias is only slightly ideological, but instead springs more from a self-serving impulse to mirror the current beliefs of the audience most likely to believe in polls i.e. people overly impressed by credentials. They enjoy the sheer volume of numbers, rather than their actual usefulness. Alternate phrasings of identical questions asked in polls creates differences in outcome vastly larger than the effects they claim to detect. Somehow Nate Silver managed to get rich by selling synthetic CDOs of arbitrary polls (to people with his identical political outlook.) The only real poll is to ask the same questions, in the same way, as the ballot sheet does. Ideally these should be asked as people are entering or leaving the voting booth, and people should be paid for their responses, in order not to bias yourself towards bored loudmouths with nothing to do. This would be good for accuracy, not for usefulness in anything but generating a suspicion of election fraud. Instead, they're trying to figure out what percentage of black people go to the polls in Missouri, and pretending that the self-selected black voter has more in common politically with the general black phone answerer than the Missouri voter. Relying on that arbitrary assumption is the entire basis of their field. edit: I haven't read https://site.pennpress.org/aha-2021/9780812250046/race-and-the-making-of-american-political-science/ https://site.pennpress.org/aha-2021/9780812250046/race-and-t... yet, but I heard an interview with the author around the time that it came out, and it's another hidden history of a field that has completely unearned legitimacy. "Political Science" might largely be considered an outgrowth of scientific racism.

overkalix 6y ago
.