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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

#101

Post by vintermann »

throwaway729 wrote: post #35
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.

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.

Nate Silver arguably lost a good deal of "prediction calibration points" by placing a very low chance on Trump getting the nomination in the first place.

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

#103

Post by 1812calif »

vintermann wrote: post #101
throwaway729 wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Nate Silver arguably lost a good deal of "prediction calibration points" by placing a very low chance on Trump getting the nomination in the first place.

Not at all. A low probabilty does not make the prediction invalid because of the result.

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

#104

Post by Houshalter »

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…

Actually Nate Silver did criticize polls like this on his podcast. At least the choice of weighting based on who they voted for in the past election. Which is known to be very biased. 538 does grade the quality of polls and excludes/weights polls that have lots of problems.

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

#105

Post by corin_ »

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…

Something happening after being given a statistically low chance of happening doesn't automatically mean the statistical model was wrong.

If we are standing at a roulette table and I tell you there is a 2.7% chance the ball will land on 4 and it lands on 4, it doesn't mean my low % was incorrect.

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

#106

Post by Sacho »

1812calif wrote: post #103
vintermann wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nate Silver arguably lost a good deal of "prediction calibration points" by placing a very low chance on Trump getting the nomination in the first place.

Not at all. A low probabilty does not make the prediction invalid because of the result.

And wouldn't the same be true if Trump wins the election? After all, Nate Silver isn't predicting a 0% chance for Trump to win, I think last time I checked it was 10-15%.

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

#107

Post by pwg »

jakub_g wrote: post #48

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)

Running NoScript (https://noscript.net/) in default deny all javascript I can click to select paragraphs without the text doing anything beyond becoming 'selected' text. (Note, I do not normally do this, I had to test to verify.)

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

#108

Post by contravariant »

tankenmate wrote: post #33
contravariant wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't get why the bracketed the age group at all. Surely you can just estimate the distribution?

You don't really need to estimate the distribution of ages; the electoral roll and the census will give you a distribution with an error that is several orders of magnitude small than the sampling error from the poll. For all intents and purposes the electoral roll and census data is so close to reality that you might as well declare it as such for calculations.

Well if the idea is to correct for the biased sampling of your poll you actually do need to estimate the distribution of ages in the people you've polled.

Dividing them in small groups and calculating the proportion of people in each isn't the best approach though.

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

#109

Post by ddalex »

inimino wrote: post #100
throwaway729 wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If the polls stay as they are and the election goes the other way, it means that polling as practiced is somehow fundamentally broken, which would be very surprising. If there's a gradual shift in the polls, I'm not sure what that would mean. Which scenario did you have in mind?

BRexit will likely want to have a word with you.

I have a feeling that polling is used now a political weapon not a measure of reality.

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

#110

Post by vintermann »

1812calif wrote: post #103
vintermann wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nate Silver arguably lost a good deal of "prediction calibration points" by placing a very low chance on Trump getting the nomination in the first place.

Not at all. A low probabilty does not make the prediction invalid because of the result.

Well, that's not what I said either.
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