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Either destroy it or improve it in a materially important way. Nate Silver has a good observation on the latter, "Mastodon seems like a honeytrap for hall-moni

• toss1 4y ago
  Hmmm. Nate Silver got completely suckered by the R operation to flood the zone with RW-biased polls, predicting the "red wave" that never happened. He stated before the election that 'the averages would look more blue if they were based on the long-standing polling orgs', but made no appropriate weighting adjustment. Afterwards, he blamed his failure on the Dems not running a similar bogus operation to bias the averages & narrative. He got pretty roasted on Twitter for both. So no surprise that he would want to avoid the "hall monitor types".
  • lupire 4y ago
    The funny thing about Nate Silver is that the one thing he is famous for is using good, solid statistical analysis to get better results than most pollsters/predictors's gut opinions. But then he got old/lazy/arrogant/whatever and started thinking that his gut opinions were worth something.
    • toss1 4y ago
      Spot on. Insufficient skepticism. We can hope he'll learn the lesson and apply more of it next time around.
    • memish 4y ago
      Nate is the same as he always was. It's just that other people have become more tribal and don't like when any of his output doesn't support their bias.
    • throwawaylinux 4y ago
      > The funny thing about Nate Silver is that the one thing he is famous for is using good, solid statistical analysis to get better results than most pollsters/predictors's gut opinions. Yes, in that it's the public image that he crafted for himself, and a lot of gullible people believe(d). It wasn't ever really true though. I love this https://i.imgur.com/6Z9QQj3.jpeg https://i.imgur.com/6Z9QQj3.jpeg despite it being a bit trollish, really dispels the idea that Nate had his finger on the pulse or that his 20% chance of Trump winning actually means he was right all along "and if you think otherwise then you're a math-denier". What it shows is the pattern of a pretty typical political hack who, far from an impartial reporting of fact, is actually trying to make news and influence opinion to curry favor with segments of the ruling class. It wouldn't take Einstein to work out he was spouting total nonsense pretty quickly, but a lot of people read something they like, and hear the words "data", "logic", "science", and take that cue to switch their brains off. What Nate Silver did -- what they all do -- is use fact and data and statistics to build their careers as influencers, if and where that intersects with telling the truth is only as a means to that end.
  • deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  • memish 4y ago
    Most people don't like obnoxious hall monitors. You don't need to craft an entire custom narrative to explain that.
  • epakai 4y ago
    I don't get the impression from 538's podcasts. He certainly found their 'deluxe' model more compelling, but he was also open to the possibility of Democrats performing better than it. Twitter just seems like a bad platform to get nuance from. (deluxe had R's at 55% for the Senate for example, slightly favored) Particularly if you watch/listen to the model talk episodes (just Galen and Nate talking) they addressed these points many times.
  • rsynnott 4y ago
    I'm not sure Silver is right about the Mastodon thing (so far I'm enjoying Mastodon hugely; it's a bit like Titter was 15 years ago when I joined; that is, far better than modern Twitter), but he, _many, many times_, raised the possibility of a polling error in favour of the Republicans on the 538 podcast, and did also specifically address the weird behaviour of the partisan polls.