61–70 of 114 posts
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His dog won pretty handily in the last election, though. It's not an exact science, but his methodology seemed to eliminate a fair amount of doubt from the equation.
I think it will be really interesting to see what happens in election forecasting if Trump wins this election -- doubly so if there's no major scandal for Clinton between now and election day.
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You just criticized somebody for specialising in what they're talking about. Next you're going to tell me Hawking's biased about physics theories because he knows them and that's somehow a bad thing.
No, but if Hawking tells me that there are two theories, "a" and "b," that compete to explain a given phenomenon, and "a" is right and "b" is wrong, and "a" is a theory that Hawking himself came up with, then I'll note that. Even if, as in this case, I think that despite the bias, Silver is right.
People don't trust Wikipedia because anyone could have written it yet place more trust in books that may just have a veneer of authenticity.
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Nate Tin did eventually publish a post [0] outlining that his way off predictions (sub 2% at one point) [1] of the R. primaries were terribly affected by his bias. That was honourable of him to admit. Presumably he is trying to eliminate that bias going forward for the main event. [0] http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/how-i-acted-like-a-pundi... [1] https://i.sli.mg/hF2vOz.jpg
His name is Nate Silver. Don't be obnoxious. 538 didn't fail to read data properly re Trump's nomination. Trump was a new phenomenon with no history to build a model from. 538's mistake was guessing instead of admitting they had insufficient data -- which is bad behavior, but not because their preferred methodology is bad.
Regarding the Times ' decision to run this article, I wonder how much of it was based upon "hey, polling is kind of goofy" and how much of was "look! Here's another way we can show that Trump isn't really resonating with voters!".
It is not permitted to entertain such thoughts. Please seek the nearest Correct Thought Unit for urgent help.
Nate Silver at 538 talks about the whole dissecting polls deal, or "unskewing" them. All polls must make methodological choices, and all of those choices have advantages and disadvantages. Spending a lot of time trying to dissect those choices and passing judgment on them is not as productive as: 1. Looking at aggregates of lots of polls. 2. Looking at the variance that a poll captures from one iteration of it to ano…
His dog won pretty handily in the last election, though. It's not an exact science, but his methodology seemed to eliminate a fair amount of doubt from the equation.
Side rant: what the heck did they implement on NYtimes.com ?! When I quickly click the text (which I compulsively do to select a paragraph etc.), it changes the font size (sigh)
Ugh, what were they thinking? I can't even imagine what this feature would be for!
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I don't know if you've followed polling closely, but this particular poll (LAT/USC) is outside the envelope and it has attracted considerable attention because of this. See the lead sentence in: http://www.latimes.com/politics/la-na-pol-poll-faq-20161006-... . Anyway, the story turns out to be a great example about survey design tradeoffs.
Oh, I'm certainly not disputing the NYT article itself. But as with all political coverage this year, I'm highly suspect of timing and motivation. This post had an additional benefit: I've been able to observed the votes for my comments go up and down like a roller coaster for the past hour, as the readers of HN apply their own biases. Rather interesting, especially as the number of actual responses is relatively sma…
As for the motivation, as a purveyor of facts I have to imagine that the NYT is frustrated at Trump's complete disregard for them, and his disregard of polling is a big part of that.
Regarding the Times ' decision to run this article, I wonder how much of it was based upon "hey, polling is kind of goofy" and how much of was "look! Here's another way we can show that Trump isn't really resonating with voters!".
There's nothing at all wrong with this article in a vacuum, but there does appear to be a bias in article selection. (Although I suppose that some of that must also be simply because 'Trump' sells newspapers (or clicks or what have you.))
Nate Silver at 538 talks about the whole dissecting polls deal, or "unskewing" them. All polls must make methodological choices, and all of those choices have advantages and disadvantages. Spending a lot of time trying to dissect those choices and passing judgment on them is not as productive as: 1. Looking at aggregates of lots of polls. 2. Looking at the variance that a poll captures from one iteration of it to ano…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
His name is Nate Silver. Don't be obnoxious. 538 didn't fail to read data properly re Trump's nomination. Trump was a new phenomenon with no history to build a model from. 538's mistake was guessing instead of admitting they had insufficient data -- which is bad behavior, but not because their preferred methodology is bad.
Bull. Their polling based model performed okay (although, at least through Super Tuesday when I looked at it, his polls-plus model didn't outperform his polls-only model, and neither significantly outperformed the RCP weighted average of polls). What failed during the primaries was Nate's "Party Decides" punditry.