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

nytimes.com

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

#81

Post by jocro »

firebones wrote: post #80
ianai wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> but you'd think that this would be an obvious one for them to break since it is ostensibly their specialty.

Silver's already touched on this poll and its unusual methodology:

http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/election-update-leave-th...

He didn't get scooped; explaining the technical details isn't his ostensible specialty, adjusting for them is.

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

#82

Post by firebones »

jocro wrote: post #81
firebones wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> but you'd think that this would be an obvious one for them to break since it is ostensibly their specialty. Silver's already touched on this poll and its unusual methodology: http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/election-update-leave-th... He didn't get scooped; explaining the technical details isn't his ostensible specialty, adjusting for them is.

Good point. Although I think Cohn's speciality is more valuable to me here. I came away from the Silver piece when I first read it with the problem merely being a fixed population of voters; the Cohn piece was much more illuminating since it showed the specifics of how that pre-condition has been affecting all kinds of aggregation methods. So Silver was the early warning, but Cohn had the nitty-gritty.

I'm just used to Silver providing that--they seem spread pretty thin. As you point out, you have to specialize in something, though...

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

#83

Post by brandmeyer »

firebones wrote: post #77
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 gr…

Nate Silver's writing quality this cycle has definitely been worse than last cycle. IMO, it has quite a bit to do with running his own website, instead of working as a blog under somebody else. There is much more pressure for fivethirtyeight.com to produce frequent updates than there was for fivethirtyeight.blogs.nytimes.com. I get that a major justification for branching out was to provide more sports coverage and some sparser statistical coverage of other topics. But there just isn't enough daily news on the presidential polls to justify the article publication rate he's running this cycle.

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

#84

Post by tiatia »

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…

Nate Silver has been criticized a lot by Mish (http://mishtalk.com/) and Mish was more often correct with his predictions than Nate. (What was Nate's prediction of Trump becoming the candidate? "Trump's chance of becoming the GOP nominee at 2 percent.")

Nate is strongly biased in favor of Hillary. That is fine but that is not scientific. Nassim Taleb said about Nate:

"55% "probability" for Trump then 20% 10 d later, not realizing their "probability" is too stochastic to be probability."

and

"So @FiveThirtyEight is showing us a textbook case on how to be totally clueless about probability yet make a business in it."

Proceed with caution.

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

#85

Post by cdelsolar »

sctb wrote: post #64
B1FF_PSUVM wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is not permitted to entertain such thoughts. Please seek the nearest Correct Thought Unit for urgent help.

Please don't comment like this on Hacker News.

What makes Hacker News a bastion of professionalism and gravity?

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

#86

Post by ajross »

firebones wrote: post #80
ianai wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Cohn is the Times's data journalist geek. He's, frankly, just as good at this stuff as Silver is. They seem to like each other, even.

It's a good article. And yeah, 538 got scooped on this one. But it's not because they weren't paying attention, they just had other stories to write.

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

#87

Post by Spivak »

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.

Isn't that just a perception problem? If a source isn't transparent about their methods and biases then the standard should be even higher for demonstrating truth because we have no choice but to assume the worst forms of bias.

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

#88

Post by matt4077 »

gozur88 wrote: post #65
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.

That wasn't the feat people make it out to be. In US elections there are only a handful of states that could go either way.

It adds up pretty quickly. For 2008 and 2012 combined, he only got one state wrong. Say there are 10 swing states close to 50/50 chances, and all others are fixed. The chance of getting them all right, twice, are 0.5^(2*10) = 0.000000953674316.

(that's actually not the best method to evaluate him, because he provides estimates of chances and could be better evaluated with something like the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brier_score that checks for calibration as well, but it's more intuitive).

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

#89

Post by matt4077 »

tiatia wrote: post #84
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…

Nate Silver has been criticized a lot by Mish ( http://mishtalk.com/ ) and Mish was more often correct with his predictions than Nate. (What was Nate's prediction of Trump becoming the candidate? "Trump's chance of becoming the GOP nominee at 2 percent.") Nate is strongly biased in favor of Hillary. That is fine but that is not scientific. Nassim Taleb said about Nate: "55% "probability" for Trump then 20% 10 d later…

538 didn't give any predictions on the primaries. Yes, they wrote articles saying that he had no chance, but those are separate from their statistical predictions.

And, regarding the volatility: the probabilities reported by 538 are closely linked to betting/prediction markets. Anyone with a better model could parlay into money quite easily.

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

#90

Post by matt4077 »

eatbitseveryday wrote: post #47

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

Can you come up with a better one? Because it's as fair a summary as I could write within that space, and the article was pretty much what I expected before I clicked.

I see no harm in headlines that create interest as long as they are not misleading.

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