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Aside from never, ever, ever using the NYT for elections after "the needle" debacle in 2016, I have been utterly unimpressed with the NYT more broadly. Their av

by flkiwi 2y ago

Aside from never, ever, ever using the NYT for elections after "the needle" debacle in 2016, I have been utterly unimpressed with the NYT more broadly. Their average, day-to-day journalism--and especially their political journalism--has been little better than gossip at best and actively hostile to healthy democracy at worst. To the extent they were ever anything special and not simply the beneficiary of huge market bias, they lost that years ago.

mmaunder 2y ago
What was the needle debacle?
- ceejayoz 2y ago
  A false sense of precision, like saying “93.274% chance” when your error margin is +/- 10%.
  - glimshe 2y ago
    If they went from 99% to 0% in 1 hour, their error margin was around 100%...
    - ceejayoz 2y ago
      The margin of error on any poll or estimate is itself an estimate. With ~60 elections under the country's belt, the 1% chance occurring isn't that shocking.
- flkiwi 2y ago
  8pm - Hillary shows as having a 99% chance of winning the presidential election. 9pm - Hillary has a 0% chance of winning. Turning rapidly changing and imprecisely known information into a widget was just one of their astonishing number of problems, but, more than anything, it symbolized to me their absolute arrogance that they were the source of societal trends rather than merely teasing out hints from incomplete data like any other peon.