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A few words about FiveThirtyEight

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Re: A few words about FiveThirtyEight

#61

Post by dragonwriter »

magicalist wrote: post #54
nozzlegear wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

> He ran out of content and resorted to ragebait

I think, actually, he needed to sell content and resorted to ragebait for attention; the transition happened when he and Disney parted ways, and he stopped being a creator sponsored by a media corporation and started being an independent content seller.

Re: A few words about FiveThirtyEight

#62

Post by roenxi »

genewitch wrote: post #55
mgfist wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Sure. And what was the probability of something like that happening? About a coin flip.

It is an election using First-Past-the-Post counting. A 50:50 probability doesn't mean the final count will be close, it (usually, anyway) means there is evens odds which side is about to win decisively. The county results are expected to correlate, as are the swing states in all likelihood.

Re: A few words about FiveThirtyEight

#63

Post by aaronbrethorst »

genewitch wrote: post #55
mgfist wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Counties don't vote and Trump's popular vote "mandate" is smaller than Clinton's popular vote win in 2016.

Here's a fun stat: literally 40 states have a population that is less than the population of Los Angeles county alone. Why doesn't Los Angeles itself have 80 senators?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_United_States_presidentia...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024_United_States_presidentia...

Setting aside 2000 and 2016 (EC winners lost the popular vote), you'd have to go back to 1968 and Nixon's squeaker of an election over Humphrey to find a closer popular vote: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_presiden...

Re: A few words about FiveThirtyEight

#64

Post by nobody9999 »

genewitch wrote: post #55
mgfist wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

>https://youtu.be/zG3n2IeaTPA

>note: not clicking that because you disagree with me is really doing yourself a disservice.

I won't click the link because I'm here for discussion with the users of this site, not some random video you thought was interesting/useful.

Why do you find it interesting/useful? What arguments are made? How do those arguments comport with your beliefs?

Let's have a discussion. So tell me what you think, don't link to some rando on youtube.

Re: A few words about FiveThirtyEight

#65

Post by mikepurvis »

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…

As a resident of Kitchener ON, I'm privileged to live in one of just two Canadian ridings represented by the Green Party— I worked on Mike Morrice's first campaign in 2019, and I remember being frustrated trying to talk to voters on doorsteps and having to explain over and over that the purported "polls" on 338 (Canadian knockoff 538) showing us at 3-4% support in the riding were based on projecting forward previous results and adjusting slightly for national polling trends.

Sure enough, we ended up coming in at a whopping 26% in 2019, and in 2021 won the seat with 33%. Certainly the win was in part because the incumbent was embroiled in a last minute scandal, but I truly believe the polling aggregators have a huge suppressing effect on breakout candidates— without that effect it's possible we could have taken the earlier election too.

Now that seat is "safely" Green, it's been twice affirmed with huge wins for a separate Green candidate at the provincial level:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kitchener_Centre_(federal_elec...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kitchener_Centre_(provincial_e...

I expect this year's federal election will deliver another 40-50% result for Morrice, as he's very popular locally, but there's 338 again showing a big upswing for the Liberals in Kitchener Centre, when almost certainly there is no such thing, it's all just hallucinated from national polling:

https://338canada.com/35048e.htm

Re: A few words about FiveThirtyEight

#66

Post by bee_rider »

wslack wrote: post #49
sdwr wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I kinda get your point - statistics suck the air out of the room. If regular people are talking about swing state poll margins of error instead of the actual issues, something's gone wrong. 538 democrasized the numbers that were the domain of political whizzes. I don't know if that's a good thing.

I think aggregators are useful to tell us what actually moved voters in a campaign - the swings are visible even if baseline error is not.

Eh, this seems to just promote armchair quarterbacking. What moved voters is an issue for the campaigns to track. We should listen to what the campaigns say about what we care about.

Re: A few words about FiveThirtyEight

#68

Post by bnralt »

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…

Like the Rationalist's "Bayesian priors," the election models were a remnant of the "big data" hype from a decade and a half ago. This article is a decent overview for anyone who forgot about it[1]. Like with many hype cycles, there was something actually important underneath the surface (useful statistical modeling), but then people with a poor understanding of the limitations ran wild thinking it could do things far beyond its capabilities (in this case, the degree to which one could use statistics to predict the future).

Industry gave up on the more extreme claims fairly quickly because it wasn't able to produce. But it lingered on in other places where there was less direct feedback or it was telling people what they wanted it to hear.

To add to this, it became obvious that many of the leaders in this "field" were people who believed they had an expertise that was far beyond their actual capabilities. Nate Silver ended up accusing much of the polling industry of fraud recently, because he wasn't able to do basic statistical math[2].

[1] https://slate.com/technology/2017/10/what-happened-to-big-da... [2] https://x.com/JustinWolfers/status/1853302476406993315

Re: A few words about FiveThirtyEight

#69

Post by bee_rider »

nobody9999 wrote: post #64
genewitch wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> https://youtu.be/zG3n2IeaTPA >note: not clicking that because you disagree with me is really doing yourself a disservice. I won't click the link because I'm here for discussion with the users of this site, not some random video you thought was interesting/useful. Why do you find it interesting/useful? What arguments are made? How do those arguments comport with your beliefs? Let's have a discussion. So tell me what…

Also it is a video. Asking literate people to go watch a video is disrespectful of their time.

Re: A few words about FiveThirtyEight

#70

Post by Gimpei »

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 disagree. Before 538 people were still offering lots of election predictions and it was much much worse, because it was based entirely on hunches and vibes. Silvers rates the pollsters and provides confidence intervals far better than a simple average of polls does. I’d much rather read his forecasts than any number of bloviating opeds.
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