FiveThirtyEight was interesting in its time, but in the past few years I felt it ironically became exactly what it was initially trying to oppose: a site full of opinion-based punditry. All their "538 chats" were basically the same as talking heads on TV. Okay, the 538 talking heads maybe paid more attention to data, but the good part of 538 was the intent to cut to the chase, dispense with all the puffery that ordinary news sources shove at you, and just let the data speak for itself. In recent years they moved away from that and became less distinguishable from the opinion section of a mainstream news source.
A few words about FiveThirtyEight
91–100 of 140 posts
Re: A few words about FiveThirtyEight
#92Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 200…
Out of curiosity, do you recall seeing a "county map" of the blue votes in the 2020 election?
Did you know that there are about 2,160 counties across these 40 states that collectively have a smaller population than Los Angeles county? Who cares about a "county map"?
Re: A few words about FiveThirtyEight
#93Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 200…
> 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? Because in a federal system it is often considered important to provide the less populous states with some protection against the more populous states always getting their way. The US Constitution does this by balancing representation based on popula…
"in a federal system it is often considered important"
by whom?
Definitely not James Madison who only grudgingly accepted this framework in Federalist No 62: https://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/fed62.asp
Re: A few words about FiveThirtyEight
#94Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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…
lol TIL "The View" is "some rando on youtube" And to answer your question, the video is a guest on the view who i don't know, saying the exact numbers i quoted. I was quoting the person on the view, which aired yesterday or something. what's interesting, is instead of discussing what i said prior to the link, you chose to instead try and make me feel bad for linking a video. Keep it classy, HN.
>what's interesting, is instead of discussing what i said prior to the link, you chose to instead try and make me feel bad for linking a video.
Others had already rebutted your assertion at least as well as I could, so I didn't feel the need to repeat what had already been offered.
However, given your initial rationale:
>>note: not clicking that because you disagree with me is really doing yourself a disservice.
was a poorly constructed straw man. Which I noted. It wasn't that I was rejecting you, I was clarifying that I (and likely many others) come to HN to discuss matters of interest to us.
If I wanted to watch videos, I'd go to youtube and the like. I came to HN instead.
I'd point out that you didn't make clear that you were "citing your sources" with the video link.
Now that I know the source ("Stephen Somebody or other" who managed to get himself booked on some low-information blab fest to make his important pronouncement), my initial response, "[s]o tell me what you think, don't link to some rando on youtube," was spot on.
All that said, linking to video sources is absolutely reasonable. In fact, I've referenced stuff from videos several times.
But each time, I made sure to explain the context of the video, the text of the quote and, most importantly, who was being quoted.
As I did here:
Re: A few words about FiveThirtyEight
#95Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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? Because in a federal system it is often considered important to provide the less populous states with some protection against the more populous states always getting their way. The US Constitution does this by balancing representation based on popula…
"in a federal system it is often considered important" by whom? Definitely not James Madison who only grudgingly accepted this framework in Federalist No 62: https://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/fed62.asp
> by whom?
Well, both by the majority of the drafters of the US Constitution, and the majority of the drafters of the Australian Constitution.
And the authors of the German Constitution – the German upper house, the Bundesrat, represents the German states (Länder), and although (unlike the Australian and US Senates) it does give more populous states a greater number of seats, the number of seats is still out of proportion to population: in Bremen there are 223,830 people per a seat, compared to 2,977,586 people per a seat in North Rhine-Westphalia.
And the authors of the Swiss Constitution – the Swiss upper house (Council of States) gives two seats each to twenty of the country's cantons, and one seat each to the other six (which six are traditionally referred to as "half-cantons")
And I'm sure I could dig up more examples – globally, the majority of federations have an upper house which provides, either equal representation to each state/province, or if not equal, then at least representation that deviates significantly from proportionality to population.
> Definitely not James Madison who only grudgingly accepted this framework in Federalist No 62
I'm not sure if Madison should be interpreted as "only grudgingly" accepting this framework – but even if that's true (Madison was very much an advocate of centralized power and supporter the interests of the big states over that of the smaller states), many of the other delegates at the 1787 Constitutional Convention viewed it more positively, even as a necessity – the majority of delegates agreed to the Constitution containing this provision, and it is unlikely such a majority would have if it had been ommitted.
Re: A few words about FiveThirtyEight
#96As 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 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.
Well swing states are the issues, aren’t they? I’m happy to live in a place where it isn’t a small fraction of individuals deciding the fate of the country.
Re: A few words about FiveThirtyEight
#97Earlier quoted context omitted.
"in a federal system it is often considered important" by whom? Definitely not James Madison who only grudgingly accepted this framework in Federalist No 62: https://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/fed62.asp
> by whom? Well, both by the majority of the drafters of the US Constitution, and the majority of the drafters of the Australian Constitution. And the authors of the German Constitution – the German upper house, the Bundesrat, represents the German states (Länder), and although (unlike the Australian and US Senates) it does give more populous states a greater number of seats, the number of seats is still out of propo…
> the German upper house, the Bundesrat, represents the German states (Länder), and although (unlike the Australian and US Senates) it does give more populous states a greater number of seats, the number of seats is still out of proportion to population: in Bremen there are 223,830 people per a seat, compared to 2,977,586 people per a seat in North Rhine-Westphalia.
To be fair, though, in the US, the House also has unfortunate proportional-representation anomalies, too, because the total number of Representatives has not changed in over a century. See Wyoming vs. California for an illustrative example.
Re: A few words about FiveThirtyEight
#98it must be a wild experience to have a megacorp buy out your brain child, burn it to ashes and throw it away, and chase after the next shiny thing to slap ads on...
The interesting thing about his experience, though, is that he had the clout (and foresight?) to craft the deal so that he was merely licensing his models to Disney, and ever since he left, Disney has not been able to use them (well, for some of the sports-related ones, Disney was permitted to keep a copy, but not benefit from further work on it).
So Silver still seems to have the rights to the important stuff that made FiveThirtyEight what it was. He can (and has been) more or less building a new version of it, using all his old IP as a base.
Re: A few words about FiveThirtyEight
#99This is an absolute loss. 538 is amazing because it forced people to confront the cold hard data about polls surrounding politics and if you didn't like it, figure out what they did wrong or deal with it. I'll never forget being called racist because I showed someone a 538 poll that said the presidential election was at best a toss-up to someone who was sure Kamala Harris would sweep the swing states.
538 hasn't really been 538 since Silver left, as Disney lost the rights to Silver's models (he maintained ownership of them) at that point. I'm honestly not too sad over the ABC News version of 538 folding; Silver's own continuing work will fill the niche that the old-school 538 flled.
Re: A few words about FiveThirtyEight
#100Nate, no. FiveThirtyEight is being shut down because its election model is wrong.
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