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Disney is shrinking FiveThirtyEight and Nate Silver (and his models) are leaving
- greesil 4y agoWell there goes any somewhat reliable election forecasting for the US
- justinsaccount 4y agoThe very idea of election forecasting is harmful to democracy and should be shunned wherever it appears.
- t-writescode 4y agoIf it's not being done in public, it's absolutely being done in private. Do you believe democratizing that data is a bad thing?
- creato 4y agoYes, it’s quite possible that “democratizing” election forecasts is bad. A public forecast may influence the likelihood of voting while a private forecast would not.
- Scubabear68 4y agoI don’t think this is the case at all. The whole purpose of private forecasting is to judge how your efforts are doing with the electorate, and adjust your strategy, poll/assess again, rinse and repeat. They don’t just forecast and shrug at the results.
- spartanatreyu 4y agoNot having public forecasting influences voting. Either way votes are going to be influenced. The benefit of democratizing those forecasts is to reduce surprises / rigged election accusations.
- dalyons 4y agothis is an interesting take. why do you say that?
- orev 4y agoIt’s pretty easy: if someone is projected to win, voters who were planning to vote for that person might stay home to avoid “wasting their time” since they’re going to win anyway. Then that person doesn’t win because the voters didn’t show up.
- LgWoodenBadger 4y agoOr conversely, people don’t go out and vote for their candidate because their candidate is projected to lose.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- SllX 4y agoPeople are going to make their own electoral decisions on their own terms, whether you, or I or anyone else agrees with them or how they came about their decisions. That’s about as democratic as it gets. Forecasts can inform those decisions, but they don’t decide them. EDIT: I have no love for iOS’s tendency to capitalize “democratic” or “republican” against my wishes.
- peteradio 4y agoWhich is remarkably stupid considering election day is voting for dozens or more positions.
- hattmall 4y agoIt's really not there's a lot of places where publishing polls is illegal. Public opinion is easily influenced by perception of public opinion. That's basically all of style, design and fashion, and polls can always be crafted to get the results you want or outright lie. Also what actual benefit does it serve to poll before elections if not to influence the outcome. I think maybe internal polling could be ok. But is it? Should politicians have their positions and push them, why should they change or hide their views in response to polling. We should be able to vote on unfiltered versions of politicians not people who are malleable to whatever will let them win.
- Multicomp 4y agoWhile I readily admit to feeling like my comment could be seen as sealioning, but could you post some links and/or search terms I could use to try to research why one might hold an opinion like this? I don't know whether to agree or disagree with this; I'm new enough to not have come across this particular opinion before (that I've noticed).
- justinsaccount 4y agoIt's simple: Election forecasting is often used as a form of voter manipulation, if not outright suppression. People should vote for the candidate that they want to win, not the candidate that the tv says has a better chance of winning.
- fshbbdssbbgdd 4y agoIsn’t the 538 approach of rigorous modeling a lot less likely to be manipulation than than the often vibes-based approach it replaced? Their predictions are based on actual polling, so they won’t take a candidate with real support and propaganda the support away with their forecasts.
- justinsaccount 4y agoWhat purpose does predicting the outcome of an election serve in a democracy?
- fshbbdssbbgdd 4y agoPeople want predictions for various reasons, but in general, predictions are good for making plans and preparing for the future. Elections are just one of many examples of an outcome you might want to predict, alongside crop yields, population growth, product sales, etc. I don’t have any deep thoughts about how these predictions serve democracy, but if people are interested in that line of inquiry, they should go ahead and pursue it.
- jen20 4y ago
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- whakim 4y agoIronically, FiveThirtyEight actually reviewed the literature on the effects of polling blackouts and concluded that the evidence was complicated and mixed. (See https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/does-knowing-whom-others-might-vote-for-change-whom-youll-vote-for/ https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/does-knowing-whom-other....)
- rhaway84773 4y agoI don’t think reliable forecasting is gone. Nate Silver does not bring any new data to the table. However, he does have good models to translate a whole bunch of raw, often contradictory, data into something more representative of reality. That being said, it’s not going anywhere. He will either self publish or join another firm. He might rejoin NYTimes for example.
- greesil 4y agoThat's heartening. Mainstream media election coverage is infuriating. Nate is the antidote for me.
- nwiswell 4y agohttps://election.princeton.edu/ https://election.princeton.edu/
- akio 4y agoPrinceton had Clinton at a >99% chance in their 2016 election forecast.
- kadoban 4y agoYeah, they used the obviously bad model that each state's results are independent rolls of the dice. Which, flawed models can still be useful, but I seem to recall them being pretty arrogant about their prediction in 2016 too, before the fact.
- joshl32532 4y agoMight as well divest FiveThirtyEight or shut it down if Nate Silver is leaving. Nate Silver is 538.
- throw0101b 4y agoEspecially given his Twitter handle: * https://twitter.com/natesilver538 https://twitter.com/natesilver538 :)
- hackernewds 4y agoRephrase title to Nate Silver (and his models) are leaving and Disney is shrinking FiveThirtyEight. Construct is so important in English (even without the And being a Hence)
- renewiltord 4y agoThis is horrible. Now how will I delude myself with forecasts about the Premier League? I'm going to need to wait for him to get a substack.
- henriquez 4y agoI'm surprised to learn that Disney owned FiveThirtyEight and also that they kept Nate Silver afloat for that long. Dude's credibility was shattered after 2016 - a master of proving that getting high on your own fumes makes you high.
- schnable 4y agoSeriously? What did he get wrong in 2016? Trump squeaked it out. 528 provides probabilities, and he expressed a very strong possibility of Trump winning with a 28% chance--much higher than almost everyone else including the Clinton campaign.
- rhaway84773 4y agoAlso, the numbers with which Trump won (he was the only Presidential candidate, or at least one of a couple, to win despite getting fewer overall votes), it’s pretty clear his odds were indeed low.
- throw0101b 4y agoThere have been five times where the Electoral College winner lost the popular vote: 1824, 1876, 1888, 2000, 2016. * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_presidential_elections_in_which_the_winner_lost_the_popular_vote https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_presiden...
- jcranmer 4y ago> (he was the only Presidential candidate, or at least one of a couple, to win despite getting fewer overall votes) Of the 52 elections from 1816 onwards (1816 being the first election where a majority of states determined their electors from the popular vote), 5 of them ended up with the victor not winning the plurality of the popular vote: * 1824: Andrew Jackson has a solid plurality, but fails to gain a majority of electoral votes, causing the election to be decided by the House vote. Ultimately, Clay (#4 in electoral and and #3 in popular vote) throws his support behind Adams (#2 in electoral and popular vote), and the Clay + Adams numbers would reach the majority threshold needed. (Okay, the House tiebreaks don't work like that, but this is long enough already). * 1876: Hayes gains the victory despite Tilden having an outright majority of the popular vote (the only one on this list to do so), although the counting of the votes produced severely acrimonious results resulting in a commission to determine which returns were valid (which ultimately ruled for Hayes). * 1888: Harrison wins the electoral vote despite Cleveland having the plurality * 2000: Bush wins the electoral vote despite Gore having the plurality * 2016: Trump wins the electoral vote despite Clinton having the plurality. Out of 52 elections, 5 times the victor failed to achieve a plurality vote. That's about 10% of the time, which isn't all that rare when you think about it.
- Scubabear68 4y agoIncredibly smart of him to hold the rights to his models personally, and only license them to 538 (and hence ABC/Disney).
- eshack94 4y agoAbsolutely. Good planning and foresight on his part to enable him to retain ownership of his hard work.
- hackernewds 4y agoUnlike W-2 work where EVERYTHING you do on work machine/time belongs to the organization. It's almost a hostage sitt
- jerrygenser 4y agoEven as a startup founder, the best practice is to sign over your IP rights to the company since investors want to see this. So I can say even with a large equity stake in a new venture that's not w-2 work, you still sign over IP rights to an org.
- endisneigh 4y agoI’ve been told all information should be free lol. I’m glad there are some sensible people.
- dragonwriter 4y agoIf the models were Free, they also wouldn’t be locked up at Disney when he left.
- cyanydeez 4y agoIt's a political model and as such, it most likely will be gamed as the cost to manipulate people at scale using the patterns of behavior it follows is not disentangled.
- shusaku 4y agoI wonder if TheRinger can afford him. My impression is that sites like 538, Grantland, Andscape, etc don’t make any money for Disney, so this isn’t too surprising.
- aardvarkr 4y agoHuh, I had no idea Nate Silver got his start on daily kos.
- fullshark 4y agoAd based media/journalism is hopeless. Stuff behind a paywall maybe can survive if you cater to a specific audience (politics junkies, businesses). The vast majority of journalism though will be explicitly public relations and a defacto wing of an economic entity.
- elzbardico 4y agoCommentary and analysis should be fine as professions for the highest levels. You can make a pretty good living out of subscriptions and even multiple millions out of a contract with a streaming service if you are an A-level analyst. But reporting requires some level of infra-structure that is harder to bootstrap.
- WheatMillington 4y agoNate Silver is a guy who got lucky one year, and managed to convince everyone he's a genius.
- saghm 4y agoNot making a judgment about his methods or not, but he was pretty accurate more than once; in 2008 he predicted 49/50 states correctly in the US presidential election, and in 2012 he predicted all 50 correctly. You might be right that he isn't as smart as people think, but "got lucky one year" is an exaggeration.
- keithwinstein 4y agoI'm a big fan of Nate Silver, but I think this idea that he "predicted N/50 states correctly" in 2008 and 2012 is mostly a myth. (1) The website doesn't "predict" a state when it reports that the probability of (e.g.) an Obama victory in Florida is 50.3%, which I believe is what 538 assessed in 2012. If you think that a state's probability distribution is 50/50 between Candidate X and Y, and the outcome is Candidate X, obviously you don't get any points for a good prediction. You didn't make a prediction. And if you say it's 50.3% probability, it's essentially the same situation. You didn't make (much of) a prediction. Which is okay! (2) In terms of Brier Scores or entropy scores, which compare the probability with the outcome and give more "points" the stronger the prediction was made (vs. what actually happened), FiveThirtyEight's predictions are generally just middle-of-the-pack compared with other websites and mechanisms of aggregating these polls. (See, e.g., https://web.math.princeton.edu/~sswang/Wang_Origins_of_Presidential_poll_aggregation_withfigures.pdf https://web.math.princeton.edu/~sswang/Wang_Origins_of_Presi...) There's no strong evidence that 538's predictions are much better or worse than other reasonable ways to weight and aggregate the recent polls that anybody else might come up with. (3) And... almost everything that tries to quantify the accuracy of the predictions is talking about the state of the 538 website ON THE MORNING OF THE ELECTION. But that's probably the least useful day to be looking at FiveThirtyEight. By then, you can just wait a few hours and get the actual results. :-) The predictions that are really valuable are the ones that are made some time in advance, e.g. one or two months. But (a) it's hard to directly measure the "accuracy" of a prediction like that, because... things change and we can't rerun the universe, and (b) it's not like the model is somehow time-invariant to be able to measure the accuracy indirectly by proxy; there are various "time until election" factors included in these model itself, the dynamics of the election itself probably have a "time until election" dependency, AND the website operators, including 538, are generally manually tweaking the model parameters or behavior in ways they don't always disclose as the election evolves. So basically... it's hard to say. I think 538 has done great work, and in general it's incredibly useful to have a consistent world model that you can rationally update to discuss the effect of recent news. The FiveThirtyEight political models are as good as any for that! But I don't think there's much strong evidence they're better.
- crazygringo 4y agoVery curious where he goes, if it'll be back somewhere mainstream like NYT, or if it'll be independent on Substack, or somewhere else more alternative/indie like Vox. Also a shame he can't take the FiveThirtyEight trademark with him. He can take his models, but not the brand. Still, his own name "Nate Silver" seems to have just as much recognition as "FiveThirtyEight" so he'll do just fine.
- timbit42 4y agoWhen will the size of the electoral college change again?
- votepaunchy 4y agoWhen Puerto Rico or DC become states. Each would add two Senators and draw from the pool of Representatives (replacing DC’s third elector).
- dragonwriter 4y ago> When will the size of the electoral college change again? When: (1) One or more new states are added, or (2) The law fixing the size of the House is amended/replaced. I wouldn’t be surprised if those happen together, so that adding the new state adds on rather than redistributes seats in the House initially. Note that D.C. being added (with no change to the fixed size of the House) as a state would actually shrink the electoral college by one, since it would add two Senators and zero reps, but D.C. already has three electors; any other state being added (with no change to the fixed size of the House) would add two electors for the two additional Senators added.
- dllthomas 4y agoOr in theory 3) when the Constitution is amended in a way that changes the makeup of the electoral college, but in practice that's much less likely to happen than the other two (which are themselves unlikely to happen soon).
- crazygringo 4y ago
- mempko 4y agoSomewhat related: The problem with Nate Silver and most others in this game is they don't treat the statistics they show as random variables. I want to see confidence intervals for all statistics. They just show 'Chance of winning is X" instead what they need to so is 'Change of winning is between X and Y'. It's such a simple change I'm shocked nobody does it including Nate Silver. It's all what I call 'pop statistics' at this point and IMO hurts the public and democracy.
- kadoban 4y agoYou do not have to dig far _at all_ on 538 to find that info. They prominently display the distribution of their results.