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I've got to say that I've been a cynical admirer of Silver since the last election. Why cynical? Because I began to notice throughout the Republican nomination

by dkrich 14y ago

I've got to say that I've been a cynical admirer of Silver since the last election. Why cynical? Because I began to notice throughout the Republican nomination process that his observations varied wildly on which Republican candidate presented great values on intrade. I think over time he gave a nod to every candidate, save Michelle Bachmann, Tim Pawlenty, and John Huntsmann. From the outset, Romney was the favorite to win, and not surprisingly, he won. But throughout the nomination process where much less was known, many of his projections proved to be wrong. So despite all of the contrarian opinion on which candidates may pull it out against popular opinion (or perception) these faded away until Romney was the clear favorite, Silver predicted him to win, and eventually he carried the nomination. Once in the Presidential election, Obama was the favorite. Incumbent Presidents rarely lose, and Mitt Romney was not exactly a compelling candidate. All that said, he's clearly a brilliant dude, and I give him a lot of respect for the accuracy of his predictions. I just haven't found them to be hugely useful for any practical purposes. I guess people tend to be enamored by the things they don't understand (statistical analysis), and I don't think there's anything wrong with that.

cdf 14y ago
Nate Silver claims to be a statistician, not a clairvoyant. While there is a sense of inevitability of Romney's nomination, I think it is obvious that the Republican voters agree with you that he is not a compelling candidate and were desperately looking for alternatives, and as each candidate wilted in the spotlight, they kept moving on to the next, and polling numbers reflected that, and Nate Silver was merely reporting that shift.
- dkrich 14y ago
  So is that at all at odds with what I said? I'm saying that I haven't found his predictions to be useful because they have not correctly predicted anything that I myself didn't predict with the same information without any statistical analysis. Sure, he predicted it with 3% greater accuracy. So what? Sadly what makes most elections predictable is how shitty the candidates are on one side. To be fair I don't think that a statistical analysis will ever be useful in an election unless the election is absolutely a dead heat. Most elections for the past several years (with the obvious exception of 2000) have been fairly predictable from the outset.
the_cat_kittles 14y ago
There were a couple notable projections that he was considerably off on, particularly some Santorum primary numbers late in the game. But, even someone with a projected 98% chance of winning should lose 2% of the time. In the aggregate, Silver's projections are excellent. I would like to see something like a Brier score for his projections, and compare it to various polling organizations, and other analytical pundits (do any notable ones exist?) to see who has done the best. On a related note, it would be nice to have a place where people could publicly lock in projections, and develop a record. Maybe that would help put the Joe Scarboroughs of the world out of work.
- gwern 14y ago
  If it helps, http://marginoferror.org/2012/11/08/aggregating-the-aggregates/ http://marginoferror.org/2012/11/08/aggregating-the-aggregat... reports a RMSE for just his state-level margin of victory. But as part of a project I was aggregating predictions as well, and for his state wins I got 0.02833, for his Senate-level predictions I got a Brier of 0.04484545, and for his Presidency win & Senate wins & state wins, I got a Brier of 0.03710118. Hope this helps!
  - gwern 14y ago
    The project, specifically, was http://appliedrationality.org/2012/11/09/was-nate-silver-the-most-accurate-2012-election-pundit/ http://appliedrationality.org/2012/11/09/was-nate-silver-the... / http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4760649 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4760649
zecho 14y ago
>I just haven't found them to be hugely useful for any practical purposes. His models are dry, boring even. But they're based in some semblance of data. When compared to the vast majority of the pundit class, and political journalism in general, his model is a breath of fresh air if you want to understand the state of the campaigns beyond what some pundit heard from "a source" or some journalist asked of a random campaign worker.
- zabuni 14y ago
  He makes mention of that in his book. He uses the example of online poker players, which he used to be. He doesn't consider himself great at that either, just better than the hordes of rank idiots that played during the online poker bubble before the feds shut him down. One they were chased away by the various lawsuits, he lost a great deal more of games. He also says that effort/optimization falls under the Pareto principle, where the last 20% of your optimizations is about 80% of your work, so it's a lot harder to get from being pretty good to world class. But any model that takes into account prior data will get you a hell of a lot of the way there.
digikata 14y ago
In the primaries there are more candidates and fewer polls so you get sparser measurements of the state of a given candidate's appeal. So maybe it's natural for the predictions to have more variation at that stage.
josephlord 14y ago
I'm not from or in the US but can I ask a slightly off-topic question? Is Romney really the best the Republican's can offer? It seemed from here (UK) that he was not a compelling candidate from the start but most the others in the nomination process were massively flawed in some way or other and/or their political views were just too far from the mainstream to really fly. Romney might still have won if Obama had made a mess of something in the last days before the election as a couple of percent swing would have changed everything but it just seems like the Republicans should be able to do better. Two questions: 1) Do the Republicans have people who would make compelling candidates in the Presidential election? (Who?) 2) If not is there a structural problem in the Republican party that means extreme views (or massive personal cash) is required to reach the position to become a candidate and it somehow weeds out the compelling candidates?
- andrewcooke 14y ago
  [not american] my impression is that it is the latter - that it is hard to appeal consistently to both the party (to become the chosen candidate) and to the nation. hence the accusations of flip-flopping and the arguments from "reasonable republicans" that romney would actually have been quite good even though he had to say various odd things. i wonder if they will attempt to change how candidates are selected. [above i have tried to be impartial; a more personal take is that the republican party has become accustomed to lying to its supporters and is now trapped with the results. to have to rely on people trusting that their candidate is "bluffing" does not seem healthy.] --- more on topic: the results reporting really disappointed me. the take-away from silver's work is not that this is very complex. it's that the electoral college system plus most people voting the same way over time means that only a few results are uncertain. so focussing on those places allows you to predict the election. similarly, reporting all the other (known) data is irrelevant. it's not news, and it's not exciting. yet on election night we saw every result being treated equally. there was no acknowledgement of the reality. it looked exactly like an entertainment show. was there any presentation of the results, anywhere, that ignored most of the data and focussed only on the swing states? that spent the rest of the time analyzing what had happened in the light of the clearly expected, accurately predicted result?

by dkrich 14y ago

cdf 14y ago

Nate Silver claims to be a statistician, not a clairvoyant. While there is a sense of inevitability of Romney's nomination, I think it is obvious that the Republican voters agree with you that he is not a compelling candidate and were desperately looking for alternatives, and as each candidate wilted in the spotlight, they kept moving on to the next, and polling numbers reflected that, and Nate Silver was merely reporting that shift.

dkrich 14y ago
So is that at all at odds with what I said? I'm saying that I haven't found his predictions to be useful because they have not correctly predicted anything that I myself didn't predict with the same information without any statistical analysis. Sure, he predicted it with 3% greater accuracy. So what? Sadly what makes most elections predictable is how shitty the candidates are on one side. To be fair I don't think that a statistical analysis will ever be useful in an election unless the election is absolutely a dead heat. Most elections for the past several years (with the obvious exception of 2000) have been fairly predictable from the outset.

the_cat_kittles 14y ago

There were a couple notable projections that he was considerably off on, particularly some Santorum primary numbers late in the game. But, even someone with a projected 98% chance of winning should lose 2% of the time. In the aggregate, Silver's projections are excellent. I would like to see something like a Brier score for his projections, and compare it to various polling organizations, and other analytical pundits (do any notable ones exist?) to see who has done the best. On a related note, it would be nice to have a place where people could publicly lock in projections, and develop a record. Maybe that would help put the Joe Scarboroughs of the world out of work.

gwern 14y ago
If it helps, http://marginoferror.org/2012/11/08/aggregating-the-aggregates/ http://marginoferror.org/2012/11/08/aggregating-the-aggregat... reports a RMSE for just his state-level margin of victory. But as part of a project I was aggregating predictions as well, and for his state wins I got 0.02833, for his Senate-level predictions I got a Brier of 0.04484545, and for his Presidency win & Senate wins & state wins, I got a Brier of 0.03710118. Hope this helps!
- gwern 14y ago
  The project, specifically, was http://appliedrationality.org/2012/11/09/was-nate-silver-the-most-accurate-2012-election-pundit/ http://appliedrationality.org/2012/11/09/was-nate-silver-the... / http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4760649 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4760649

zecho 14y ago

>I just haven't found them to be hugely useful for any practical purposes. His models are dry, boring even. But they're based in some semblance of data. When compared to the vast majority of the pundit class, and political journalism in general, his model is a breath of fresh air if you want to understand the state of the campaigns beyond what some pundit heard from "a source" or some journalist asked of a random campaign worker.

zabuni 14y ago
He makes mention of that in his book. He uses the example of online poker players, which he used to be. He doesn't consider himself great at that either, just better than the hordes of rank idiots that played during the online poker bubble before the feds shut him down. One they were chased away by the various lawsuits, he lost a great deal more of games. He also says that effort/optimization falls under the Pareto principle, where the last 20% of your optimizations is about 80% of your work, so it's a lot harder to get from being pretty good to world class. But any model that takes into account prior data will get you a hell of a lot of the way there.

digikata 14y ago

In the primaries there are more candidates and fewer polls so you get sparser measurements of the state of a given candidate's appeal. So maybe it's natural for the predictions to have more variation at that stage.

josephlord 14y ago

I'm not from or in the US but can I ask a slightly off-topic question? Is Romney really the best the Republican's can offer? It seemed from here (UK) that he was not a compelling candidate from the start but most the others in the nomination process were massively flawed in some way or other and/or their political views were just too far from the mainstream to really fly. Romney might still have won if Obama had made a mess of something in the last days before the election as a couple of percent swing would have changed everything but it just seems like the Republicans should be able to do better. Two questions: 1) Do the Republicans have people who would make compelling candidates in the Presidential election? (Who?) 2) If not is there a structural problem in the Republican party that means extreme views (or massive personal cash) is required to reach the position to become a candidate and it somehow weeds out the compelling candidates?

andrewcooke 14y ago
[not american] my impression is that it is the latter - that it is hard to appeal consistently to both the party (to become the chosen candidate) and to the nation. hence the accusations of flip-flopping and the arguments from "reasonable republicans" that romney would actually have been quite good even though he had to say various odd things. i wonder if they will attempt to change how candidates are selected. [above i have tried to be impartial; a more personal take is that the republican party has become accustomed to lying to its supporters and is now trapped with the results. to have to rely on people trusting that their candidate is "bluffing" does not seem healthy.] --- more on topic: the results reporting really disappointed me. the take-away from silver's work is not that this is very complex. it's that the electoral college system plus most people voting the same way over time means that only a few results are uncertain. so focussing on those places allows you to predict the election. similarly, reporting all the other (known) data is irrelevant. it's not news, and it's not exciting. yet on election night we saw every result being treated equally. there was no acknowledgement of the reality. it looked exactly like an entertainment show. was there any presentation of the results, anywhere, that ignored most of the data and focussed only on the swing states? that spent the rest of the time analyzing what had happened in the light of the clearly expected, accurately predicted result?