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Now that’s a funny one With a straight face you’re going to say that in 2016 you saw a bunch of polls coming out showing trump winning? Absolutely not. Nobody

Now that’s a funny one With a straight face you’re going to say that in 2016 you saw a bunch of polls coming out showing trump winning? Absolutely not. Nobody, and I mean nobody, gave him a snowflakes chance. Everyone including Silver mentioned “the greatest election landslide in history”, or some variant. If there were polls showing trump winning they were hidden from ans downplayed in the msm. And to say anything else is a very poor lie.

titzer 3y ago
There weren't polls showing Trump winning the popular vote. And he didn't. https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/2016-election-forecast/national-polls/ https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/2016-election-forecast/... The last poll there from Nov 8 showed Clinton winning the popular vote by...wait for it...3.9 percent. She won the popular vote by...2.9 percent. National polls weren't far off at all. The electoral college was decided by less than 50,000 votes overall. No one predicted the margins in those key states would be so small. It was a razor-thin win. Statistics always have a margin of error and give probabilities. Polls didn't have to predict Trump winning. Instead, they give a probability of winning. FiveThirtyEight predicted a 28% chance of winning[2]. That's based on Monte Carlo simulations (that's where they run, e.g. 100 random elections and count how many times each outcome occurred). It actually doesn't matter if that estimate was low; it was high enough (1 in 4 chance) that the outcome wasn't insane. Even three days after the election, they already had an analysis of what they went wrong with polling[1]. I mean, you could read that or continue to trot out tired polarized arguments. [1] https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/why-fivethirtyeight-gave-trump-a-better-chance-than-almost-anyone-else/ https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/why-fivethirtyeight-gav... [2] https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/2016-election-forecast/ https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/2016-election-forecast/
- beerpls 3y ago
  I love how the popular vote is only ever mentioned when it’s to defend the idea that all these analyses “were actually right” You’re not getting it. The analysis, the “28%” - those were wring. those were poor analyses Yea they came back after and made up some bs about “oh we know what we did wrong now!” When I was in school all the people who were cheating their way through math did the same thing. They couldn’t solve the problem, and the second you gave them the answer they magically “got it” Fortune telling is a business of luck. Unless you can convince your followers that you’re right even when you’re clearly wrong
  - titzer 3y ago
    Forecasting a 28% chance of something happening is likely to end with it happening about 1 out of 4 times. At this point you are just being deliberately obtuse.
    - beerpls 3y ago
      [flagged]
  - hnfong 3y ago
    > Fortune telling is a business of luck. It's more of a business of being connected to some forms of future reality. I can understand if people think nobody can do better than pure chance, but even so, I'm pretty sure the folks who believe statistics could give them an edge are quite misguided.

titzer 3y ago

There weren't polls showing Trump winning the popular vote. And he didn't. https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/2016-election-forecast/national-polls/ https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/2016-election-forecast/... The last poll there from Nov 8 showed Clinton winning the popular vote by...wait for it...3.9 percent. She won the popular vote by...2.9 percent. National polls weren't far off at all. The electoral college was decided by less than 50,000 votes overall. No one predicted the margins in those key states would be so small. It was a razor-thin win. Statistics always have a margin of error and give probabilities. Polls didn't have to predict Trump winning. Instead, they give a probability of winning. FiveThirtyEight predicted a 28% chance of winning[2]. That's based on Monte Carlo simulations (that's where they run, e.g. 100 random elections and count how many times each outcome occurred). It actually doesn't matter if that estimate was low; it was high enough (1 in 4 chance) that the outcome wasn't insane. Even three days after the election, they already had an analysis of what they went wrong with polling[1]. I mean, you could read that or continue to trot out tired polarized arguments. [1] https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/why-fivethirtyeight-gave-trump-a-better-chance-than-almost-anyone-else/ https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/why-fivethirtyeight-gav... [2] https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/2016-election-forecast/ https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/2016-election-forecast/

beerpls 3y ago
I love how the popular vote is only ever mentioned when it’s to defend the idea that all these analyses “were actually right” You’re not getting it. The analysis, the “28%” - those were wring. those were poor analyses Yea they came back after and made up some bs about “oh we know what we did wrong now!” When I was in school all the people who were cheating their way through math did the same thing. They couldn’t solve the problem, and the second you gave them the answer they magically “got it” Fortune telling is a business of luck. Unless you can convince your followers that you’re right even when you’re clearly wrong
- titzer 3y ago
  Forecasting a 28% chance of something happening is likely to end with it happening about 1 out of 4 times. At this point you are just being deliberately obtuse.
  - beerpls 3y ago
    [flagged]
- hnfong 3y ago
  > Fortune telling is a business of luck. It's more of a business of being connected to some forms of future reality. I can understand if people think nobody can do better than pure chance, but even so, I'm pretty sure the folks who believe statistics could give them an edge are quite misguided.