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Biden wins White House, vowing new direction for divided U.S.

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Re: Biden wins White House, vowing new direction for divided U.S.

#201

Post by meroes »

softwaredoug wrote: post #81

On the data nerd side I continue to be shocked at how people misinterpret the certainty of polls/forecasts. Forecasts give us probability distributions based on historical polling error data. Not infallible predictions the expected value will 100% happen. It’s fairly revealing of society’s general innumeracy, just as it was 4 years ago when Trump won.

You could also fit the same data with "people polled thought they could vote until their vote was preferentially suppressed". So the polls will never match outcomes. And that it happened in the same direction two cycles in a row leads credence.

(I do not know why the forecasts are wrong, but I don't see why Parent is at all justified in his statement).

Re: Biden wins White House, vowing new direction for divided U.S.

#202

Post by pjc50 »

3np wrote: post #96

What I’m really curious about now is how the GOP are going to position itself wrt Trump and his rhetoric and claims when he’s no longer in office.

Who?

In six months time people will be denouncing photos where they appear with him as "fake news".

Re: Biden wins White House, vowing new direction for divided U.S.

#204

Post by [deleted] »

sergiotapia wrote: post #35

How does this election relate to the 2000 election when all media called Gore the winner, but then in December, Bush became the president elect? https://www.forbes.com/sites/jonathanponciano/2020/11/04/the... "On election night, it was unclear who had won, with the electoral votes of the state of Florida still undecided. The returns showed that Bush had won Florida by such a close margin that state law required a rec…

[deleted]

Re: Biden wins White House, vowing new direction for divided U.S.

#206

Post by listenallyall »

softwaredoug wrote: post #81

On the data nerd side I continue to be shocked at how people misinterpret the certainty of polls/forecasts. Forecasts give us probability distributions based on historical polling error data. Not infallible predictions the expected value will 100% happen. It’s fairly revealing of society’s general innumeracy, just as it was 4 years ago when Trump won.

if you're a data nerd, how can you NOT be shocked by so many results falling far outside the confidence interval (often multiple sigmas), and all in the same direction?

Re: Biden wins White House, vowing new direction for divided U.S.

#207

Post by saalweachter »

will4274 wrote: post #135
softwaredoug wrote: post #81

On the data nerd side I continue to be shocked at how people misinterpret the certainty of polls/forecasts. Forecasts give us probability distributions based on historical polling error data. Not infallible predictions the expected value will 100% happen. It’s fairly revealing of society’s general innumeracy, just as it was 4 years ago when Trump won.

I'm on the nerd side too, but I was quite surprised. Sampling isn't the only source of error in election polling - people also change their minds. In this election, people decided who they were going to vote for historically early - the lowest portion of people in the history of exit polls indicated they decided in the week before the election. In theory, this effect should reduce the width of the probability distrib…

There is also "what polls directly measure" and "what we infer from them".

Besides the usual adjustments for likely voter models, we also do things like infer how people will vote in House and Senate elections based on Presidential polling, because we do a lot more Presidential polling than down ballot, because money.

So one early thing that seems to have happened this year (and again, we are still early in the process to be making final verdicts in "what happened" retrospectives) is that people split their ballot more than anticipated, which means that the inferences we were making about down ballot races based on Presidential performance were off.

So not quite a polling error, but an example of uncertainty that may not have been correctly taken into account in forecasting.

Re: Biden wins White House, vowing new direction for divided U.S.

#208

Post by ironSkillet »

cratermoon wrote: post #130
softwaredoug wrote: post #81

On the data nerd side I continue to be shocked at how people misinterpret the certainty of polls/forecasts. Forecasts give us probability distributions based on historical polling error data. Not infallible predictions the expected value will 100% happen. It’s fairly revealing of society’s general innumeracy, just as it was 4 years ago when Trump won.

Couldn't the problem be that polling is just numeromancy dressed up in fancy math?

The problem that has appeared again is that without a representative sample of information gathered, it doesn't matter how fancy your models are, you will not have accurate results. And quantifying how unrepresentative your sample is basically impossible to figure out in this situation.

Re: Biden wins White House, vowing new direction for divided U.S.

#209

Post by elpakal »

phlakaton wrote: post #200
softwaredoug wrote: post #81

On the data nerd side I continue to be shocked at how people misinterpret the certainty of polls/forecasts. Forecasts give us probability distributions based on historical polling error data. Not infallible predictions the expected value will 100% happen. It’s fairly revealing of society’s general innumeracy, just as it was 4 years ago when Trump won.

I think it's more fundamental than numeracy. If the polls suggest there is a 2/3 probability you are going to win an election, but you lose, does that mean the polls were wrong? What if the probability was 9/10? I think the problem is trying to make sense of outliers and uncertainty, and that, in an election with 150M+ variables, you will end up with a result that isn't quite what anyone predicted. In other words: it…

Great comment, agreed. The wonderful books from Nassim Taleb ‘Black Swan’ & ‘Fooled by Randomness’ touch on this in a way that forever changed my thinking.

‘We just can’t predict’.

Re: Biden wins White House, vowing new direction for divided U.S.

#210

Post by Vaslo »

softwaredoug wrote: post #81

On the data nerd side I continue to be shocked at how people misinterpret the certainty of polls/forecasts. Forecasts give us probability distributions based on historical polling error data. Not infallible predictions the expected value will 100% happen. It’s fairly revealing of society’s general innumeracy, just as it was 4 years ago when Trump won.

Everytime I read a comment like this I think of that line from Dumb and Dumber:

“What are the chances of a guy like you and a girl like me... ending up together?”

“Not good”

“Not good like one in a hundred?”

“I'd say more like one in a million.”

“So you're you’re saying there's a chance!”

I know enough about probability distributions and modeling to know you can improve your models to lower that uncertainty.

And sorry, you are the Lloyd Christmas in this one.

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