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A few words about FiveThirtyEight

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Re: A few words about FiveThirtyEight

#51

Post by wasabi991011 »

qqtt wrote: post #24

As someone who was super interested in the 538-style of election coverage in 2008, I've kind of fallen "out of love" so to speak with election models and forecasting in general. I'm not really convinced about what it adds to the conversation around elections. We can all look at various polls and get an assessment of who is generally ahead. Weighted polling aggregators and forecasting models just collect all these pol…

Respectfully, I disagree on both points.

> We can all look at various polls and get an assessment of who is generally ahead.

I probably could, but there's a lot of polls to look through and I don't really want to spend the time. Much rather have someone else do it for me.

> if no matter what the result, we can always just say "the candidate who won could always have won given the forecast" - what are we really adding to the conversation here?

Isn't this hypothesis testing? If you have a weighted coin and a guess as to which side is heavier and by how much, you're going to need multiple flips to see if you are right. And it doesn't even really make sense to talk about how right/wrong you are about a single flip, only on the aggregate.

It's possible someone has already compiled FiveThirtyEight's results to get some aggregate accuracy, I haven't checked. If they have and he's wrong on average and that's what you are referencing, my apologies.

Re: A few words about FiveThirtyEight

#52

Post by pitpatagain »

koolba wrote: post #38
Gerardo1 wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you saying that Trump won the popular vote in 2016?

He won the popular vote in 2016 in States like Wisconsin that for months said he was 10-15% behind in the polls. It’s my interpretation that those polls were wrong but the majority of the media didn’t care. They just wanted to push a narrative that supporting Trump was a fringe minority in those States, rather than the true majority that it was.

This is not an accurate description of the magnitude of polling error in 2016 in WI, which was the state with the most significant polling error that year by a very large margin, see Table 2 "2016 final polling average versus actual results": https://centerforpolitics.org/crystalball/polling-error-in-2...

The final difference from polling in WI was 7%, other states had smaller polling errors. The fact is that 2016 was simply an extremely tight race in many states and difficult to forecast even with completely normal polling error bars.

Re: A few words about FiveThirtyEight

#53

Post by tqi »

qqtt wrote: post #24

As someone who was super interested in the 538-style of election coverage in 2008, I've kind of fallen "out of love" so to speak with election models and forecasting in general. I'm not really convinced about what it adds to the conversation around elections. We can all look at various polls and get an assessment of who is generally ahead. Weighted polling aggregators and forecasting models just collect all these pol…

I know the folks at 538 meant well, but I think the ultimate impact of their work was to accelerate the politics as entertainment, team sports-ification of elections, to our nations detriment.

Re: A few words about FiveThirtyEight

#54

Post by magicalist »

nozzlegear wrote: post #46
rconti wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I really enjoy Nate's podcast with Maria Konnikova - I read her book The Biggest Bluff a few years back and really enjoyed it, and them podcasting together is great. (Despite my feelings about never wanting to hear Malcolm Gladwell's voice ever again, as he's omnipresent in Pushkin podcast network ads, which seem to be the worst of the entire podcasting ecosystem). I never really followed the "Nate Silver" controvers…

> I never really followed the "Nate Silver" controversy after 2016, but it basically seems to boil down to a bunch of liberals being mad because they felt lied to for no apparent reason. FWIW I don't think he's controversial because of the 2016 polling miss, most people who follow 538 understand what 538 does and that it wasn't his "fault." He's controversial because he posts scalding hot takes on Twitter and then go…

Yes. And "the world would be better if more people were reasonable like me, now here's my hot take...", and using angry responses to demonstrate how reasonable he is in contrast. He ran out of content and resorted to ragebait, like most internet pundits.

Re: A few words about FiveThirtyEight

#55

Post by genewitch »

mgfist wrote: post #43
qqtt wrote: post #24

As someone who was super interested in the 538-style of election coverage in 2008, I've kind of fallen "out of love" so to speak with election models and forecasting in general. I'm not really convinced about what it adds to the conversation around elections. We can all look at various polls and get an assessment of who is generally ahead. Weighted polling aggregators and forecasting models just collect all these pol…

But that's because elections these days are incredibly close. It's like being upset that the best statistical answer to "who will win a coin toss" is "well it's 50/50".

Are you sure about that?

89% of counties turned red. Looking at 1.5% total difference is missing the forest for the trees. Trump got all swing states.

To quote: "this is absolutely a mandate."

https://youtu.be/zG3n2IeaTPA

edit: facts cannot be insolent. The youtube link is a guest on the view named Stephen something, from this week, saying the words that i typed into the comment box. Not clicking it is doing yourself a disservice; as it is "source cited."

Don't get mad at me for relaying this information.

Re: A few words about FiveThirtyEight

#56

Post by magicalist »

NeutralCrane wrote: post #18
snickerbockers wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nobody who thinks they can pin a probability on an event that only gets sampled once should ever be taken seriously.

Each race is only sampled once. But he runs the same methodology on hundreds of races. If the candidates he gives an X% chance to win go on to win approximately X% of the time, the methodology is reliable.

Not if the methodology is different per race, which it is. No other office is elected like the president is.

Re: A few words about FiveThirtyEight

#57

Post by nomilk »

> Last night, as President Trump delivered his State of the Union address, the Wall Street Journal reported that ABC News would lay off the remaining staff at 538 as part of broader cuts within corporate parent Disney.

Did Trump's policies cause the layoffs, or does Nate just happen to mention Trump's address? (forgive my ignorance - feels odd to mention the address if it had nothing to do with the layoffs, but I'm not aware of any obvious connection)

Re: A few words about FiveThirtyEight

#58

Post by MostlyStable »

Uehreka wrote: post #40
qqtt wrote: post #24

As someone who was super interested in the 538-style of election coverage in 2008, I've kind of fallen "out of love" so to speak with election models and forecasting in general. I'm not really convinced about what it adds to the conversation around elections. We can all look at various polls and get an assessment of who is generally ahead. Weighted polling aggregators and forecasting models just collect all these pol…

I find the modeling super useful, many conventional media outlets still don’t properly communicate probabilities to their audience. For instance, I vividly remember the following exchange between Nate and some news anchor in during one of the 2016 conventions: Anchor: So Nate, you say Trump has a 25% chance of winning, can you tell us exactly what that means? Nate: Sure. So imagine I flipped two quarters, and they bo…

I agree with basically this whole comment, but the sad/ironic/whatever part of it is though even though Nate Silver was doing the thing you are describing ("actually, Trump has a real shot of winning"), afterwards he got constantly dinged (either by people incorrectly conflating him with the 99% models, or by people who just didn't actual listen to him) for "getting it wrong" because he "only" gave trump a 30ish % chance of winning.

I still come across it every once in a while and it probably has the highest ratio of level of infuriating-ness to low-value of the stakes of the opinion of just about any political opinion I can think of.

Re: A few words about FiveThirtyEight

#59

Post by CalRobert »

qqtt wrote: post #24

As someone who was super interested in the 538-style of election coverage in 2008, I've kind of fallen "out of love" so to speak with election models and forecasting in general. I'm not really convinced about what it adds to the conversation around elections. We can all look at various polls and get an assessment of who is generally ahead. Weighted polling aggregators and forecasting models just collect all these pol…

I find it useful in the general way that having corroborating sources for election data is useful. If the election is reasonably close to models, exit polls, etc. then it is more likely to have been run fairly.

Re: A few words about FiveThirtyEight

#60

Post by stackskipton »

nomilk wrote: post #57

> Last night, as President Trump delivered his State of the Union address, the Wall Street Journal reported that ABC News would lay off the remaining staff at 538 as part of broader cuts within corporate parent Disney. Did Trump's policies cause the layoffs, or does Nate just happen to mention Trump's address? (forgive my ignorance - feels odd to mention the address if it had nothing to do with the layoffs, but I'm n…

No, I think Nate was pointing out while everyone was distracted by Trump State of the Union, 538 was cut so few people would notice.
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