How One 19-Year-Old Illinois Man Is Distorting National Polling Averages • Hacker News Board

Re: How One 19-Year-Old Illinois Man Is Distorting National Polling Averages

#71

Post by quickben » Thu, Oct 13, 2016, 1:56 AM UTC

mwfunk wrote: post #44

whamlastxmas wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're completely missing the point. Publications show bias all the time based on what factual information they report (or don't report). Look at CNN.com right. Literally nothing about the new wikileaks that came out today, even in a factual manner. Plenty of opinionated anti-Trump garbage. This is what your parent comment was referring to.

Either that, or you are the one with bias, and the news outlets you go to and/or the people you associate with feed into that bias. You can see just as much bias in the opposite direction on any number of news sites. They're all biased in different ways, some knowingly and some unknowingly. Individuals are usually even more imperfect than most news outlets when it comes to having limited sources of information and un…

"They're all biased in different ways, some knowingly and some unknowingly."

All are biased knowingly. We don't live in utopia, newspapers/media are paid enterprises.

Re: How One 19-Year-Old Illinois Man Is Distorting National Polling Averages

#72

Post by Tinyyy » Thu, Oct 13, 2016, 2:16 AM UTC

MrZongle2 wrote: post #56

Ensorceled wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Probably that they dislike politically motivated conspiracy theories when there is an obvious, non conspiracy based explanation, e.g. the one you just replied to.

Isn't this the point of having a discussion site, however: to discuss issues rather than simply downvote them to oblivion? Note my first post. I intentionally left it open-ended to spark discussion. In an election cycle where online propaganda and sockpuppetry have been confirmed , I don't think my question is in the same league as those posed by flat-earthers or 9/11 conspiracy theorists.

You wasted my time reading a comment that is meaningless and highly politically slanted. I want to save that time for future readers.

Re: How One 19-Year-Old Illinois Man Is Distorting National Polling Averages

#73

Post by chmullig » Thu, Oct 13, 2016, 2:32 AM UTC

sytelus wrote: post #25

TLDR; The 19-year black man is very small demographic and would have small sample size. Apparently, the sample for LA Times poll includes and outlier who favors Trump which then gets weighted disproportionately to arrive at conclusion that trump is favored by young black voters.

It's not that the cell is small. It's that it has a single respondent representing it, so his weight is increased enough to be the equivalent of 30 respondents.

Re: How One 19-Year-Old Illinois Man Is Distorting National Polling Averages

#74

Post by ubernostrum » Thu, Oct 13, 2016, 2:35 AM UTC

whamlastxmas wrote: post #17

untog wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does it matter? The point is that they published an article that is factually accurate. If they were publishing an opinion piece based on such motivations there might be an argument here. But they aren't.

You're completely missing the point. Publications show bias all the time based on what factual information they report (or don't report). Look at CNN.com right. Literally nothing about the new wikileaks that came out today, even in a factual manner. Plenty of opinionated anti-Trump garbage. This is what your parent comment was referring to.

The interesting thing here, of course, is how many big names in journalism are starting to question whether current (as opposed to, say, 50-60 years ago) standards of "neutral" reporting are really all that neutral, since they've begun to realize that the push to just dispassionately report every side of something led to mainstream media outlets becoming the largest provider of free advertising -- to none other than Trump -- in American political history.

To put it in context: there's a story I've heard once or twice about Walter Cronkite, during the JFK administration. JFK supported a bill to provide funding to the state of Alaska to construct mental health facilities, of which the state had (at the time) none, and a few of the more out-there Republicans who opposed him spun this into a conspiracy theory that JFK was secretly building Soviet-style gulags in Alaska, and would deport all his political enemies there once construction was finished (a sort of precursor to today's allegations the FEMA is a front for (insert Democratic president here)'s secret labor camps for his/her enemies). Cronkite supposedly refused to dignify the allegations with any kind of airtime, knowing that the mere act of mentioning the JFK-labor-camp stuff on a national news broadcast would implicitly legitimize it.

Re: How One 19-Year-Old Illinois Man Is Distorting National Polling Averages

#75

Post by bmelton » Thu, Oct 13, 2016, 2:45 AM UTC

Lerc wrote: post #62

aetherson wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I think this can lead to the Wikipedia fallacy. If you reduce the credibility of information when you can perceive a means whereby the information could be compromised, you end up placing undue weight upon non-transparent information sources. 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.

And the fix for either is peer review. Obviously, a forefront-expert in a given field may not have the luxury of peers, making peer review more difficult, but as sub-peers attempt to dissect the work, they learn, and the more that attempt to dissect, the more sub-peers are elevated to an extent that they can either debunk or give approval.

Re: How One 19-Year-Old Illinois Man Is Distorting National Polling Averages

#76

Post by fulldecent » Thu, Oct 13, 2016, 2:52 AM UTC

hilop wrote: post #51

alva wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

LTCM failed too because they did not consider confidence intervals on its models.

Re: How One 19-Year-Old Illinois Man Is Distorting National Polling Averages

#77

Post by firebones » Thu, Oct 13, 2016, 3:03 AM UTC

aetherson wrote: post #15

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…

I like Nate Silver. He broke new ground. But I've grown less enamored this most recent cycle because his predictions seem to be a lot more of the Nostradamus type--pre-analyze outcomes on three possible resolutions, then get credit for being right. Most of his wins come because polls have a tendency to tighten up to the actual numbers the closer they are to the election, as any latent bias gets washed out. He gets graded on more accurate information, not when uncertainty is high. (This isn't inherently a problem, but it does expose why he 100% missed the Trump primary phenomenon...he's trying to address it with "fundamentals" and other alternate models, but this is just more hedging so that at least one story makes sense.)

He's not deceptive about this--I will give him that. It's all in the open. But it seems to amplify a kind of narrative fallacy if these mistakes aren't revisited anew (rather than just saying "as predicted, since outcome C actually happened, it was due to voter bloc X doing it as we said."

But I can't complain about a pundit class not giving actionable data--that's not their job. Silver's job is to add data to the discussion, and to stimulate the discussion. And I give him a "B" for that.

That said, this cycle, I've rediscovered Sam Wang at http://election.princeton.edu/ and think he maybe gives a purer approach to analysis, one not so much driven by clicks. He doesn't seem to hedge as much as Silver.

Re: How One 19-Year-Old Illinois Man Is Distorting National Polling Averages

#78

Post by flomo » Thu, Oct 13, 2016, 3:11 AM UTC

succstressful wrote: post #59

eatbitseveryday wrote: post #47

Will the era of click-bait titles come to an end?

As soon as it stops working, it will stop being employed.

Sadly, when I first clicked on this, it had a much better headline. Something like "LA Times poll, how sample sizes make it an outlier".

Maybe clickbait++, or maybe the NY Times felt better about fingering a young black guy than a competing paper.

Re: How One 19-Year-Old Illinois Man Is Distorting National Polling Averages

#79

Post by SubiculumCode » Thu, Oct 13, 2016, 3:15 AM UTC

marricks wrote: post #30

erickhill wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Have you seen the comparisons to Princeton's Election Conesertium which did something similar but without the "special sauce"? He did a little worse, which is a bit of evidence saying Sam's more straight numbers are better than Nate's judgment.

or random error.

Re: How One 19-Year-Old Illinois Man Is Distorting National Polling Averages

#80

Post by firebones » Thu, Oct 13, 2016, 3:19 AM UTC

ianai wrote: post #43

aetherson wrote: post #15

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…

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.

Let's keep it simple; it wasn't Silver and 538 who did the piece on USC/Dornsife and why it was an outlier, it was Nate Cohn and the NYT. I think Silver and his org know more than 95% of the others about polling, but you'd think that this would be an obvious one for them to break since it is ostensibly their specialty.

Not that there's anything wrong with getting scooped. But it is an indication that his nose is too far in the meta-model and not in the real world. That's a class of mistake that can lead you to drive off a cliff.