Why we should care about the Nate Silver vs. Nassim Taleb Twitter war

Post by grzm » Tue, Dec 18, 2018, 6:49 PM UTC

leereeves wrote: post #189

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fine, but Silver goes to extreme ends in my opinion to explain what a probability means. During the 2016 presidential election he was emphasizing "Hey, it's less likely than the alternative, but there is a real possibility Trump will win. There is a very plausible path for him to wrap up the electoral votes." And afterwards, I think the results showed how accurate Silver was - he gave a much higher probability to Tru…

Nate Silver didn't always hedge his bets; early in the election he was making emphatic (and wrong) predictions like these: > The lesson, rather, is that Trump’s campaign will fail by one means or another. > Donald Trump Is Winning The Polls — And Losing The Nomination > Our emphatic prediction is simply that Trump will not win the nomination. It’s not even clear that he’s trying to do so.

Post by VintageCool » Tue, Dec 18, 2018, 6:58 PM UTC

dragonwriter wrote: post #81

013a wrote: post #45

The whole 2016 situation feels like many people are borderlining on delusion, Nate included. The Comey thing certainly helped Trump, but even the day of the election 538 was still forecasting a massive win for Hilary. How can the probabilities be that wrong? Because the polls were wrong. Or, at least, incomplete. It doesn't matter how good your algorithms are if the data isn't there. And 2016 proved that 538, and rea…

> but even the day of the election 538 was still forecasting a massive win for Hilary It was predicting a large electoral win as the median scenario, but only a 70% chance of Clinton winning at all, because discrepancy between actual outcomes and polling were likely to be correlated across states, and many states were very close. This is where Silver differed from the other forecasts that were saying Clinton 90%+ bas…

Post by leereeves » Tue, Dec 18, 2018, 7:20 PM UTC

grzm wrote: post #191

leereeves wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nate Silver didn't always hedge his bets; early in the election he was making emphatic (and wrong) predictions like these: > The lesson, rather, is that Trump’s campaign will fail by one means or another. > Donald Trump Is Winning The Polls — And Losing The Nomination > Our emphatic prediction is simply that Trump will not win the nomination. It’s not even clear that he’s trying to do so.

Do you have dates for those quotes? I suspect many (if not all of them) refer to pre-nomination model. Silver explicitly addressed how he messed up the primary model by not trusting the numbers in his 18 May 2016 blog post "How I Acted Like A Pundit And Screwed Up On Donald Trump: Trump’s nomination shows the need for a more rigorous approach." https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/how-i-acted-like-a-pund...

Post by dragonwriter » Tue, Dec 18, 2018, 8:14 PM UTC

mercutio2 wrote: post #170

huffmsa wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes but that's not how the proles understand the blog. They take it as "x has a y % chance of happening". Which is Taleb's beef with it. The commoner thinks its Silver putting his money on something, but when it doesn't happen he says "well I didn't say _that_". And it in the day and age of more robust machine learning models, that the 538 models are so volatile is a pretty weak excuse.

Humans are volatile. Politics even more so. Our options aren’t “high confidence converging predictions, or 538”. The options in the current era for understanding of the electorate’s mood are “overly confident individual polls, poorly analyzed with completely inadequate models”, vs “538-style epistemically humble models accompanied by discussions of their confidence, which can be scored in aggregate after each electio…

Post by thousandautumns » Tue, Dec 18, 2018, 8:44 PM UTC

zimablue wrote: post #181

thousandautumns wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's only useless and deceptive if you willfully do absolutely nothing to understand what it is, or how it differs from the other models 538 has, which apparently is the case for Taleb.

Or in other words, you're 99% of people who will ever hear the number