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I really lost any semblance of respect for Silver after the 2016 election Analysis after analysis about how Hillary was a sure thing. It was an absolute echo c

I really lost any semblance of respect for Silver after the 2016 election Analysis after analysis about how Hillary was a sure thing. It was an absolute echo chamber and the election completely lifted the curtain for me

sdfghswe 3y ago
> Analysis after analysis about how Hillary was a sure thing. Really? I think I remember him giving Trump 30% on the night? EDIT: Got it - some people struggle with incorporating uncertainty into their reasoning.
- cvalka 3y ago
  Correct. He was right about the 2016 presidential election.
  - khazhoux 3y ago
    What does it mean to be "right"? A pollster claiming Trump:Hillary at 99:1, 50:50, or 33:66 could all claim to have been "right".
    - dllthomas 3y ago
      For the individual prediction it's impossible to say, so you reward the people who got it right based on how likely they said it was, and you penalize the people who got it wrong based on how unlikely they said it was. If we apply a proper scoring rule, over time the you score better by giving better calibrated guesses.
      - khazhoux 3y ago
        I agree with this. But the original statement is poorly phrased, that "He was right." He was perhaps more right than others who gave Trump lower odds. But there's not an absolute right/wrong (unless someone gave 100:0 odds).
        dllthomas 3y ago
        He seems to have been right that Trump's odds were higher because prediction error for different states wasn't independent as some other models were assuming. I agree that we don't have a way of assessing whether the percentage given was "correct", but over a bunch of predictions we can keep track and see how he does when he gives various percentages, or compare against others with a proper scoring rule. I don't make any claim that the odds he gave were right, but just that if they were we should still expect to see his "prediction" be wrong pretty often, so the fact that his prediction was wrong this time only counts so much against him (and to make up for that, only counts so much in is favor if he's right with low confidence).
    - beerpls 3y ago
      You’re being downvoted by people who don’t have a good argument against you To them Silver could have said Trump had a 1% chance of winning, and they would still be saying “yOu dOnT uNdErStaNd stAtIstIcS!!1” Basically, a lot of people really really really wanted to believe Hillary winning was a sure thing. They ignored any and all data saying “maybe she won’t” And now you can see the effect looking back - these people are still so salty about that bitter loss that they come in here and say that giving Trump a <30% chance of winning was absolutely the right call and if you don’t see that then you’re an idiot who can’t grasp statistics Literally - half the comments responding to me was this vitriolic idiocy. They can’t think, they’re emotions have overridden that That’s why they downvoted you for accurately pointing out that there’s no such thing as knowing that a statistical guess was “right” They’re downvoting you because you upset them by making them accept reality. That they were wrong and the Hillary couldn’t win.
re5i5tor 3y ago
100%. Never trusted him again.
- jjoonathan 3y ago
  You remember incorrectly. https://www.vox.com/2016/11/3/13147678/nate-silver-fivethirtyeight-trump-forecast https://www.vox.com/2016/11/3/13147678/nate-silver-fivethirt...
- tomrod 3y ago
  I question this view. Why? He forecast, and whats more provided the error bounds which gave Trump a chance to win. Outside of a crystal ball, what else could be expected?
  - khazhoux 3y ago
    > I question this view. Why? I think because what's the point of following the projections if at the end of the day they're indistinguishable from a coin toss? This applies to all polling. It's vaguely interesting but when (in Trump's case) a candidate can be consistently far behind for months and then still win because ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ that's how probability works, then what's the point of having followed the polls?
    - Nition 3y ago
      In this case the candidates were very close. Fivethirtyeight's estimate had Hillary at 48.5% of the vote and Trump at 44.9% (and the rest on other canditates), only 3.6% apart.[1] Usually, when things aren't quite so close, polls are a more useful gauge since they're more likely to be correct about who'll win as the gap widens. [1] https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/2016-election-forecast https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/2016-election-forecast
      - khazhoux 3y ago
        Why are you looking at the %vote, though? In that very link, 538 has Hillary as 71% chance of winning. That is not close at all. I'm not arguing that something can ever be treated as a certainty, just that there's "no point" in following the polls since even a lopsided 71-28% prediction will go either way, and is indistinguishable from a 50-50 prediction on election night.
walrus01 3y ago
I think both hardcore (D) and hardcore MAGA people have a lot to learn that wanting something to be true doesn't make it so.
fullshark 3y ago
He was criticized for giving trump too large a chance to win iirc Here he spikes the football over it: https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/why-fivethirtyeight-gave-trump-a-better-chance-than-almost-anyone-else/amp/ https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/why-fivethirtyeight-gav...
- shusaku 3y ago
  I think Nate Silver must be some kind of punching bag in right wing media circles, because some variation of this comment is posted basically every time 538 comes up on HackerNews.
  - astrange 3y ago
    This is more of an average person/mainstream media reading complaint. But they weren't paying attention in 2016 or else they would notice /he was the only person saying Hillary might not win/.
  - kelipso 3y ago
    He is the face of election prediction in America. All the other guys at NYT, WaPo, etc aren't as famous. Of course he's going to be the face you punch for them not predicting the election remotely right. (And don't give me this shit about 75% or whatever odds he gave being the rightest or whatever weasel nonsense, it was still plenty wrong and he still want to lmao "spike the football" really? Get out of here.).
    - BirdieNZ 3y ago
      How is saying "there's a one in three chance that such-and-such an event occurs" classified as "plenty wrong" in your view, if the event occurs?
      - kelipso 3y ago
        The whole concept of a unique non repeatable single event being given a percentage chance of happening or not is absurd made up cope.
the_watcher 3y ago
FiveThirtyEight had about a 1/3 chance of Trump winning, far higher than anyone else was modeling. And he was one of the few pundits openly talking about how it wasn't some insane longshot. I have no idea where this meme came from, but it's annoyingly persistent.
- asah 3y ago
  You mean >50% isn't a lock? /s I remember this. Tough spot for NS. I remember thinking that 2:1 Hillary and three language around it, came across a useless hedge. In retrospect, I think he'd have gotten more respect if he shouted from the rafters that Hillary doesn't have a lock and Trump could really win. Then, he'd have been heralded as a genius. Strong forecasting, weak marketing.
  - the_watcher 3y ago
    Maybe, but that's basically asking him to develop the opposite of the personality type that makes him abnormally good at forecasting.
dboreham 3y ago
Wasn't that mainly due to the fact that people lie when they're asked if they'll vote for a highly distasteful candidate?
spookthesunset 3y ago
I mean he was getting crap for even suggesting trump had a chance. NYT had Hillary at like 99%
- jjtheblunt 3y ago
  but NYT has, at times, been straight propaganda (like other obvious news sites for other propaganda), which i guess is your point.
  - AtlasBarfed 3y ago
    for whom?
    - jjtheblunt 3y ago
      Well NYT themselves announced an editorial board overhaul a year or two ago because they said they had become too “left”, perhaps like Fox and WSJ were so far right? But now I’m not sure, since i subscribe and it seems balanced.
- robertoandred 3y ago
  1% isn’t a chance?
  - dllthomas 3y ago
    1% is a chance, but a proper scoring rule will penalize you more for being wrong about something you gave 1% than about something you gave 30%.
- bvinc 3y ago
  I don’t remember NYT. But I recall the other major poll site Real Clear Politics had an election map with a percentage chance for each state and they had Hillary at 99%. Their mistake was that they treated each state as an independent event. Treating each state as a separate biased coin toss leads you to put Hillary at 99%. Nate knew that these are not independent events and if republicans are being under polled in one state, it is more likely they’re being under polled in all of the states.
sidfthec 3y ago
Flip two coins. If they're both heads Trump wins. That's approximately what Silver's team was saying. No idea where this "sure thing" idea of your's comes from.
doctoboggan 3y ago
I remember leading up to Election Day his predictions were giving her 66% and Trump 33% (IIRC). Which means if you roll a die and it comes up as 1 or 2 then Trump wins (which isn't all that unlikely) Many people mistook these numbers to mean Clinton was going to get 66% of the vote and thus were expecting a landslide, but that is not what his numbers meant. Now I wasn't reading any of the analysis he or his team was putting out, but the modeling seemed reasonable to me.
titzer 3y ago
Turns out when statistics say there is a 5% chance of something happening, there's about a 5% chance of it happening. Also, for 2020, it turns out the actual vote split between the two US presidential candidates was pretty much exactly in line with polls.
- AlbertCory 3y ago
  Your two paragraphs have no relationship. How it could possibly "turn out" that there's a 5% chance of Trump winning? Was the election run 100 times? The accuracy of the polls is another matter entirely. You could estimate the chances that your polling was wrong, given that the selection of the sample is a random variable, people lie, and intentions change, but that's not at all what the general public thinks the number means.
  - astrange 3y ago
    > Your two paragraphs have no relationship. How it could possibly "turn out" that there's a 5% chance of Trump winning? Was the election run 100 times? You can calibrate it by looking at their other election predictions and seeing how generally on target it is. https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/checking-our-work/ https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/checking-our-work/
    - AlbertCory 3y ago
      no, you can only "calibrate" his prediction abilities in general: "given 100 predictions by Nate Silver, how many will be correct?" that's what you just said. In other words, if we forgot what actually happened, picked one past prediction out of a hat, asked "so was he right?" and then checked the results, he would be correct 95% of the time. That's what you're saying.
      - dragonwriter 3y ago
        No, its saying... Well, here: https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/checking-our-work/ https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/checking-our-work/
Nition 3y ago
Fivethirtyeight had Trump at a 28.6% chance to win on the night[1], the web page is still up. I recall that being higher than any other polls I saw at the time. A 1 in 3.5 chance isn't that unlikely, it implies they're very close. [1] https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/2016-election-forecast https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/2016-election-forecast
bart_spoon 3y ago
You clearly don’t understand how probability works
- deleted 3y ago
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deleted 3y ago
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DragonStrength 3y ago
What? At the time, people were lambasting him for saying Trump had a 30% chance, and I know people who think he was too smug after getting 2016 right. I mean, I know this is the internet and people can say whatever they want, but come on.
- add-sub-mul-div 3y ago
  These are the people who got their feelings hurt over a culture war and lash out at Silver because he's become vaguely mainstream synonymous with political projections. Nobody with a serious position and serious attention on this would criticize Silver. It was the Buzzfeed types that gave Clinton a much higher chance.
  - stonogo 3y ago
    No, literally everyone gave Clinton a much higher chance. I think FiveThirtyEight is mostly a clickbait circus, but they were the only serious prediction organization who rated Trump's chances as high as they did.
- beerpls 3y ago
  [flagged]
cthalupa 3y ago
I see this repeated all the time and I don't understand how people come to this conclusion. 538 consistently gave Trump a better chance than much of the mainstream media, with him showing a roughly 30% chance for much of the year, including right up at the election. At times it dropped as low as 15% or so, but... that's still not some insanely rare occurrence. As for what they were actually saying? Silver and 538 never claimed it was a sure thing. Let's look at some actual articles: https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/election-update-dont-ignore-the-polls-clinton-leads-but-its-a-close-race/ https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/election-update-dont-ig... "At the same time, it shouldn’t be hard to see how Clinton could lose. She’s up by about 3 percentage points nationally, and 3-point polling errors happen fairly often, including in the last two federal elections. Obama beat his polls by about 3 points in 2012, whereas Republicans beat their polls by 3 to 4 points in the 2014 midterms. If such an error were to favor Clinton, she could win in a borderline landslide. If the error favored Trump, however, she’d be in a dicey position, because the error is highly correlated across states. There’s also reason to think a polling error is more likely than usual this year, because of the high number of undecided voters. In national polls, Clinton averages about 45 percent of the vote and Trump 42 percent; by comparison, Obama led Mitt Romney roughly 49-48 in national polls at the end of the 2012 campaign. That contributes significantly to uncertainty, since neither candidate has enough votes yet to have the election in the bag. To be honest, I’m kind of confused as to why people think it’s heretical for our model to give Trump a 1-in-3 chance — which does make him a fairly significant underdog, after all. There are a lot of ways to build models, and there are lots of factors that a model based on public polling, like ours, doesn’t consider.3 But the public polls — specifically including the highest-quality public polls — show a tight race in which turnout and late-deciding voters will determine the difference between a clear Clinton win, a narrow Clinton win and Trump finding his way to 270 electoral votes." https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/clinton-probably-finished-off-trump-last-night/ https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/clinton-probably-finish... is about as bullish on Clinton as I can find from the archives, and even there Silver does not talk about how Hillary is a sure thing, and instead spend several paragraphs discussing reasons why Trump could still win and what those would look like. And as those things occurred, the model shifted back from being as bullish on Hillary, for the reasons Silver outlines. I don't know why you would read a 70% chance of victory as being the same thing as a sure victory. I wouldn't want to bet my life on a 70% success rate!
AlbertCory 3y ago
Percentage probabilities are meaningless for an event like this. Can you run the 2016 election 1,000 times and count the times Hillary wins? Of course you can't. Unlike estimating "what's the chance it rains tomorrow?" you can't even find 1,000 elections in the past with roughly similar conditions. Unlike a baseball season, you don't have enough samples for the true probabilities to come out. So, yes, despite all your downvotes, you're right: he pandered to the people who want a percentage number, despite the fact that it's meaningless and they will misunderstand it.
- jackmott42 3y ago
  People do misunderstand it, that is true. Including you, who thinks it is meaningless. Being imperfect is very different from useless or meaningless.
  - AlbertCory 3y ago
    [flagged]
    - OkayPhysicist 3y ago
      If you apply the same statistically model to many discrete events, you can evaluate its accuracy. Intuitively, High confidence + Correct answer > Low confidence correct answer > low confidence wrong answer > high confidence wrong answer. Burning my roulette wheel after winning doesn't invalidate the fact that there was a 1/38 chance of doing so.
      - AlbertCory 3y ago
        > If you apply the same statistical model You can stop there. Does 538 have a single model that never changes and never receives human tweaking? Does it in turn rely on third-party polls that also never change their methodology? No, of course it doesn't. The last sentence illustrates why people's concept of probability is so off. Cards, dice, and roulette wheels are not a model for human events.
- 3y ago
jackmott42 3y ago
This is a very strange take since it was Nate Silver who gave trump an order of magnitude higher chance of winning than everyone else. Around 30% chance, same for a batter getting a hit in baseball, which happens all the time.
- Agathos 3y ago
  I think a lot of people looked at his last prediction that Tuesday morning, observed that 70 > 30, and assumed that meant it was a lock. And then spent the last six years blaming Silver for their own innumeracy.
  - beerpls 3y ago
    I find it fascinating that so many people here jump to the assumption that the average person doesn’t get that giving a 28% chance of victory doesn’t mean they can’t win Clearly. Its not a difficult concept. But those same people are wholly unable to see that all the other verbiage and propaganda that was behind/infused with Silver was, in no short terms, a demoralization campaign against the trump voters And since they can’t see that all they can do is project their ego to say they aren’t wrong, its that the people who don’t agree with them don’t comprehend very basic statistics
labster 3y ago
Excellent troll, good sir, 10/10

sdfghswe 3y ago

> Analysis after analysis about how Hillary was a sure thing. Really? I think I remember him giving Trump 30% on the night? EDIT: Got it - some people struggle with incorporating uncertainty into their reasoning.

cvalka 3y ago
Correct. He was right about the 2016 presidential election.
- khazhoux 3y ago
  What does it mean to be "right"? A pollster claiming Trump:Hillary at 99:1, 50:50, or 33:66 could all claim to have been "right".
  - dllthomas 3y ago
    For the individual prediction it's impossible to say, so you reward the people who got it right based on how likely they said it was, and you penalize the people who got it wrong based on how unlikely they said it was. If we apply a proper scoring rule, over time the you score better by giving better calibrated guesses.
    - khazhoux 3y ago
      I agree with this. But the original statement is poorly phrased, that "He was right." He was perhaps more right than others who gave Trump lower odds. But there's not an absolute right/wrong (unless someone gave 100:0 odds).
      - dllthomas 3y ago
        He seems to have been right that Trump's odds were higher because prediction error for different states wasn't independent as some other models were assuming. I agree that we don't have a way of assessing whether the percentage given was "correct", but over a bunch of predictions we can keep track and see how he does when he gives various percentages, or compare against others with a proper scoring rule. I don't make any claim that the odds he gave were right, but just that if they were we should still expect to see his "prediction" be wrong pretty often, so the fact that his prediction was wrong this time only counts so much against him (and to make up for that, only counts so much in is favor if he's right with low confidence).
  - beerpls 3y ago
    You’re being downvoted by people who don’t have a good argument against you To them Silver could have said Trump had a 1% chance of winning, and they would still be saying “yOu dOnT uNdErStaNd stAtIstIcS!!1” Basically, a lot of people really really really wanted to believe Hillary winning was a sure thing. They ignored any and all data saying “maybe she won’t” And now you can see the effect looking back - these people are still so salty about that bitter loss that they come in here and say that giving Trump a <30% chance of winning was absolutely the right call and if you don’t see that then you’re an idiot who can’t grasp statistics Literally - half the comments responding to me was this vitriolic idiocy. They can’t think, they’re emotions have overridden that That’s why they downvoted you for accurately pointing out that there’s no such thing as knowing that a statistical guess was “right” They’re downvoting you because you upset them by making them accept reality. That they were wrong and the Hillary couldn’t win.

re5i5tor 3y ago

100%. Never trusted him again.

jjoonathan 3y ago
You remember incorrectly. https://www.vox.com/2016/11/3/13147678/nate-silver-fivethirtyeight-trump-forecast https://www.vox.com/2016/11/3/13147678/nate-silver-fivethirt...
tomrod 3y ago
I question this view. Why? He forecast, and whats more provided the error bounds which gave Trump a chance to win. Outside of a crystal ball, what else could be expected?
- khazhoux 3y ago
  > I question this view. Why? I think because what's the point of following the projections if at the end of the day they're indistinguishable from a coin toss? This applies to all polling. It's vaguely interesting but when (in Trump's case) a candidate can be consistently far behind for months and then still win because ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ that's how probability works, then what's the point of having followed the polls?
  - Nition 3y ago
    In this case the candidates were very close. Fivethirtyeight's estimate had Hillary at 48.5% of the vote and Trump at 44.9% (and the rest on other canditates), only 3.6% apart.[1] Usually, when things aren't quite so close, polls are a more useful gauge since they're more likely to be correct about who'll win as the gap widens. [1] https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/2016-election-forecast https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/2016-election-forecast
    - khazhoux 3y ago
      Why are you looking at the %vote, though? In that very link, 538 has Hillary as 71% chance of winning. That is not close at all. I'm not arguing that something can ever be treated as a certainty, just that there's "no point" in following the polls since even a lopsided 71-28% prediction will go either way, and is indistinguishable from a 50-50 prediction on election night.

walrus01 3y ago

I think both hardcore (D) and hardcore MAGA people have a lot to learn that wanting something to be true doesn't make it so.

fullshark 3y ago

He was criticized for giving trump too large a chance to win iirc Here he spikes the football over it: https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/why-fivethirtyeight-gave-trump-a-better-chance-than-almost-anyone-else/amp/ https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/why-fivethirtyeight-gav...

shusaku 3y ago
I think Nate Silver must be some kind of punching bag in right wing media circles, because some variation of this comment is posted basically every time 538 comes up on HackerNews.
- astrange 3y ago
  This is more of an average person/mainstream media reading complaint. But they weren't paying attention in 2016 or else they would notice /he was the only person saying Hillary might not win/.
- kelipso 3y ago
  He is the face of election prediction in America. All the other guys at NYT, WaPo, etc aren't as famous. Of course he's going to be the face you punch for them not predicting the election remotely right. (And don't give me this shit about 75% or whatever odds he gave being the rightest or whatever weasel nonsense, it was still plenty wrong and he still want to lmao "spike the football" really? Get out of here.).
  - BirdieNZ 3y ago
    How is saying "there's a one in three chance that such-and-such an event occurs" classified as "plenty wrong" in your view, if the event occurs?
    - kelipso 3y ago
      The whole concept of a unique non repeatable single event being given a percentage chance of happening or not is absurd made up cope.

the_watcher 3y ago

FiveThirtyEight had about a 1/3 chance of Trump winning, far higher than anyone else was modeling. And he was one of the few pundits openly talking about how it wasn't some insane longshot. I have no idea where this meme came from, but it's annoyingly persistent.

asah 3y ago
You mean >50% isn't a lock? /s I remember this. Tough spot for NS. I remember thinking that 2:1 Hillary and three language around it, came across a useless hedge. In retrospect, I think he'd have gotten more respect if he shouted from the rafters that Hillary doesn't have a lock and Trump could really win. Then, he'd have been heralded as a genius. Strong forecasting, weak marketing.
- the_watcher 3y ago
  Maybe, but that's basically asking him to develop the opposite of the personality type that makes him abnormally good at forecasting.

dboreham 3y ago

Wasn't that mainly due to the fact that people lie when they're asked if they'll vote for a highly distasteful candidate?

spookthesunset 3y ago

I mean he was getting crap for even suggesting trump had a chance. NYT had Hillary at like 99%

jjtheblunt 3y ago
but NYT has, at times, been straight propaganda (like other obvious news sites for other propaganda), which i guess is your point.
- AtlasBarfed 3y ago
  for whom?
  - jjtheblunt 3y ago
    Well NYT themselves announced an editorial board overhaul a year or two ago because they said they had become too “left”, perhaps like Fox and WSJ were so far right? But now I’m not sure, since i subscribe and it seems balanced.
robertoandred 3y ago
1% isn’t a chance?
- dllthomas 3y ago
  1% is a chance, but a proper scoring rule will penalize you more for being wrong about something you gave 1% than about something you gave 30%.
bvinc 3y ago
I don’t remember NYT. But I recall the other major poll site Real Clear Politics had an election map with a percentage chance for each state and they had Hillary at 99%. Their mistake was that they treated each state as an independent event. Treating each state as a separate biased coin toss leads you to put Hillary at 99%. Nate knew that these are not independent events and if republicans are being under polled in one state, it is more likely they’re being under polled in all of the states.

sidfthec 3y ago

Flip two coins. If they're both heads Trump wins. That's approximately what Silver's team was saying. No idea where this "sure thing" idea of your's comes from.

doctoboggan 3y ago

I remember leading up to Election Day his predictions were giving her 66% and Trump 33% (IIRC). Which means if you roll a die and it comes up as 1 or 2 then Trump wins (which isn't all that unlikely) Many people mistook these numbers to mean Clinton was going to get 66% of the vote and thus were expecting a landslide, but that is not what his numbers meant. Now I wasn't reading any of the analysis he or his team was putting out, but the modeling seemed reasonable to me.

titzer 3y ago

Turns out when statistics say there is a 5% chance of something happening, there's about a 5% chance of it happening. Also, for 2020, it turns out the actual vote split between the two US presidential candidates was pretty much exactly in line with polls.

AlbertCory 3y ago
Your two paragraphs have no relationship. How it could possibly "turn out" that there's a 5% chance of Trump winning? Was the election run 100 times? The accuracy of the polls is another matter entirely. You could estimate the chances that your polling was wrong, given that the selection of the sample is a random variable, people lie, and intentions change, but that's not at all what the general public thinks the number means.
- astrange 3y ago
  > Your two paragraphs have no relationship. How it could possibly "turn out" that there's a 5% chance of Trump winning? Was the election run 100 times? You can calibrate it by looking at their other election predictions and seeing how generally on target it is. https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/checking-our-work/ https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/checking-our-work/
  - AlbertCory 3y ago
    no, you can only "calibrate" his prediction abilities in general: "given 100 predictions by Nate Silver, how many will be correct?" that's what you just said. In other words, if we forgot what actually happened, picked one past prediction out of a hat, asked "so was he right?" and then checked the results, he would be correct 95% of the time. That's what you're saying.
    - dragonwriter 3y ago
      No, its saying... Well, here: https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/checking-our-work/ https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/checking-our-work/

Nition 3y ago

Fivethirtyeight had Trump at a 28.6% chance to win on the night[1], the web page is still up. I recall that being higher than any other polls I saw at the time. A 1 in 3.5 chance isn't that unlikely, it implies they're very close. [1] https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/2016-election-forecast https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/2016-election-forecast

bart_spoon 3y ago

You clearly don’t understand how probability works

deleted 3y ago
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DragonStrength 3y ago

What? At the time, people were lambasting him for saying Trump had a 30% chance, and I know people who think he was too smug after getting 2016 right. I mean, I know this is the internet and people can say whatever they want, but come on.

add-sub-mul-div 3y ago
These are the people who got their feelings hurt over a culture war and lash out at Silver because he's become vaguely mainstream synonymous with political projections. Nobody with a serious position and serious attention on this would criticize Silver. It was the Buzzfeed types that gave Clinton a much higher chance.
- stonogo 3y ago
  No, literally everyone gave Clinton a much higher chance. I think FiveThirtyEight is mostly a clickbait circus, but they were the only serious prediction organization who rated Trump's chances as high as they did.
beerpls 3y ago
[flagged]

cthalupa 3y ago

I see this repeated all the time and I don't understand how people come to this conclusion. 538 consistently gave Trump a better chance than much of the mainstream media, with him showing a roughly 30% chance for much of the year, including right up at the election. At times it dropped as low as 15% or so, but... that's still not some insanely rare occurrence. As for what they were actually saying? Silver and 538 never claimed it was a sure thing. Let's look at some actual articles: https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/election-update-dont-ignore-the-polls-clinton-leads-but-its-a-close-race/ https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/election-update-dont-ig... "At the same time, it shouldn’t be hard to see how Clinton could lose. She’s up by about 3 percentage points nationally, and 3-point polling errors happen fairly often, including in the last two federal elections. Obama beat his polls by about 3 points in 2012, whereas Republicans beat their polls by 3 to 4 points in the 2014 midterms. If such an error were to favor Clinton, she could win in a borderline landslide. If the error favored Trump, however, she’d be in a dicey position, because the error is highly correlated across states. There’s also reason to think a polling error is more likely than usual this year, because of the high number of undecided voters. In national polls, Clinton averages about 45 percent of the vote and Trump 42 percent; by comparison, Obama led Mitt Romney roughly 49-48 in national polls at the end of the 2012 campaign. That contributes significantly to uncertainty, since neither candidate has enough votes yet to have the election in the bag. To be honest, I’m kind of confused as to why people think it’s heretical for our model to give Trump a 1-in-3 chance — which does make him a fairly significant underdog, after all. There are a lot of ways to build models, and there are lots of factors that a model based on public polling, like ours, doesn’t consider.3 But the public polls — specifically including the highest-quality public polls — show a tight race in which turnout and late-deciding voters will determine the difference between a clear Clinton win, a narrow Clinton win and Trump finding his way to 270 electoral votes." https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/clinton-probably-finished-off-trump-last-night/ https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/clinton-probably-finish... is about as bullish on Clinton as I can find from the archives, and even there Silver does not talk about how Hillary is a sure thing, and instead spend several paragraphs discussing reasons why Trump could still win and what those would look like. And as those things occurred, the model shifted back from being as bullish on Hillary, for the reasons Silver outlines. I don't know why you would read a 70% chance of victory as being the same thing as a sure victory. I wouldn't want to bet my life on a 70% success rate!

AlbertCory 3y ago

Percentage probabilities are meaningless for an event like this. Can you run the 2016 election 1,000 times and count the times Hillary wins? Of course you can't. Unlike estimating "what's the chance it rains tomorrow?" you can't even find 1,000 elections in the past with roughly similar conditions. Unlike a baseball season, you don't have enough samples for the true probabilities to come out. So, yes, despite all your downvotes, you're right: he pandered to the people who want a percentage number, despite the fact that it's meaningless and they will misunderstand it.

jackmott42 3y ago
People do misunderstand it, that is true. Including you, who thinks it is meaningless. Being imperfect is very different from useless or meaningless.
- AlbertCory 3y ago
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  - OkayPhysicist 3y ago
    If you apply the same statistically model to many discrete events, you can evaluate its accuracy. Intuitively, High confidence + Correct answer > Low confidence correct answer > low confidence wrong answer > high confidence wrong answer. Burning my roulette wheel after winning doesn't invalidate the fact that there was a 1/38 chance of doing so.
    - AlbertCory 3y ago
      > If you apply the same statistical model You can stop there. Does 538 have a single model that never changes and never receives human tweaking? Does it in turn rely on third-party polls that also never change their methodology? No, of course it doesn't. The last sentence illustrates why people's concept of probability is so off. Cards, dice, and roulette wheels are not a model for human events.
3y ago

jackmott42 3y ago

This is a very strange take since it was Nate Silver who gave trump an order of magnitude higher chance of winning than everyone else. Around 30% chance, same for a batter getting a hit in baseball, which happens all the time.

Agathos 3y ago
I think a lot of people looked at his last prediction that Tuesday morning, observed that 70 > 30, and assumed that meant it was a lock. And then spent the last six years blaming Silver for their own innumeracy.
- beerpls 3y ago
  I find it fascinating that so many people here jump to the assumption that the average person doesn’t get that giving a 28% chance of victory doesn’t mean they can’t win Clearly. Its not a difficult concept. But those same people are wholly unable to see that all the other verbiage and propaganda that was behind/infused with Silver was, in no short terms, a demoralization campaign against the trump voters And since they can’t see that all they can do is project their ego to say they aren’t wrong, its that the people who don’t agree with them don’t comprehend very basic statistics

labster 3y ago

Excellent troll, good sir, 10/10