Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Disney erased FiveThirtyEight

natesilver.net

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 270 posts

Re: Disney erased FiveThirtyEight

#71

Post by lacewing »

rurp wrote: post #38
ninth_ant wrote: post #31

> I did too much bragging in the media and didn’t anticipate the extent to which public opinion toward FiveThirtyEight would shift once we became a corporate-backed incumbent rather than an eccentric upstart Can’t speak for everyone else, but it wasn’t this for me. It was about 2016 presidential that lost me. He tries to justify this later about how theirs was better than other outlets but I don’t care. Call it emoti…

I had complaints about 538, especially the early days, but don't understand this critique at all. A 30% chance hitting is completely unremarkable, and it was a perfectly reasonable reading of the evidence at the time. Nate isn't wrong that conventional wisdom was way off, with even supposedly statistical models giving Hillary a 99% chance of winning. Elections, like many things, have some inherent uncertainty. A seve…

I don't understand why this is surprising. People didn't go to FiveThirtyEight to marvel the science behind it. The science was just supposed to give you what you came there for: the actual election results.

In the end, it turned out that predicting elections is still very hard, and that for all the fanfare, FiveThirtyEight performed only slightly better than what you could find in any other reputable newspaper, so it kinda lost its appeal.

Re: Disney erased FiveThirtyEight

#72

Post by ngriffiths »

rurp wrote: post #38
ninth_ant wrote: post #31

> I did too much bragging in the media and didn’t anticipate the extent to which public opinion toward FiveThirtyEight would shift once we became a corporate-backed incumbent rather than an eccentric upstart Can’t speak for everyone else, but it wasn’t this for me. It was about 2016 presidential that lost me. He tries to justify this later about how theirs was better than other outlets but I don’t care. Call it emoti…

I had complaints about 538, especially the early days, but don't understand this critique at all. A 30% chance hitting is completely unremarkable, and it was a perfectly reasonable reading of the evidence at the time. Nate isn't wrong that conventional wisdom was way off, with even supposedly statistical models giving Hillary a 99% chance of winning. Elections, like many things, have some inherent uncertainty. A seve…

Discussion of stats models is always complicated by the fact that a lot of people will read "30%" as a "no" prediction and claim your model is wrong if the thing happens. On the one hand, one strategy is to "hide" the numbers a bit behind a blaring headline that says "we are not sure!!" It's a bit of an art to decide when to be "sure" or not. On the other hand, in research for example you can just say screw it, I care if the correct people are correct, not if a bunch of wrong people are wrong.

I feel like the correct strategy for 538 when it was actually niche was to be precise, but then it went viral and maybe should've hit the IDK button much harder and more often after that.

Re: Disney erased FiveThirtyEight

#73

Post by armchairhacker »

jcranmer wrote: post #39
armchairhacker wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

According to AllSides, many outlets moved left, although some did move right: https://www.allsides.com/blog/AllSides-Media-Bias-Rating-Ove... It and https://mediabiasfactcheck.com say NYTimes “leans left” and is “left-center” respectively. What’s an example that you believe highlights NYTimes moving rightward?

> What’s an example that you believe highlights NYTimes moving rightward? Look at their coverage of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's response to a question about Taiwan versus Trump's response to a question about Taiwan. In the first case, their quote included all of the um's and other similar pauses in answering the question. In the second case, their quote of Trump cleaned up all of those artifacts. The end result is tha…

I assume you mean this article for AOC quotes: https://archive.ph/gmvBy

And this for Trump quotes: https://archive.ph/staNQ

You’re right about the quotes.

But also consider this article that was published after Trump’s, not even labeled “editorial” or “opinion”: “Trump’s Taiwan Gambit is Already a Gift to China” (https://archive.ph/lwBWD)

Re: Disney erased FiveThirtyEight

#74

Post by afavour »

ninth_ant wrote: post #31

> I did too much bragging in the media and didn’t anticipate the extent to which public opinion toward FiveThirtyEight would shift once we became a corporate-backed incumbent rather than an eccentric upstart Can’t speak for everyone else, but it wasn’t this for me. It was about 2016 presidential that lost me. He tries to justify this later about how theirs was better than other outlets but I don’t care. Call it emoti…

I think this gets to the core of why a lot of this election prediction stuff doesn't work. People just don't parse the numbers the way the authors intend.

FiveThirtyEight had Trump at a 30% chance of winning, and he won. The model wasn't wrong. The less likely of two outcomes occurred. Even if they'd had him at 1% they still wouldn't technically have been wrong though I think complaints might be more warranted.

If they had Trump at 49% would you have still been angry? What about at 51%? Would it have been okay then?

Re: Disney erased FiveThirtyEight

#75

Post by bachmeier »

shawabawa3 wrote: post #34
ninth_ant wrote: post #31

> I did too much bragging in the media and didn’t anticipate the extent to which public opinion toward FiveThirtyEight would shift once we became a corporate-backed incumbent rather than an eccentric upstart Can’t speak for everyone else, but it wasn’t this for me. It was about 2016 presidential that lost me. He tries to justify this later about how theirs was better than other outlets but I don’t care. Call it emoti…

Because they said trump only had a 30% chance to win? What if they had said 49%? Would that have made their prediction worthless?

When pressed before the election, Silver did not explain where Trump's much higher probability of winning came from. He predicted a Trump loss, Trump won, and he claimed victory because he gave Trump a better chance of winning. There's no way that strategy could have failed.

Re: Disney erased FiveThirtyEight

#76

Post by [deleted] »

rurp wrote: post #38
ninth_ant wrote: post #31

> I did too much bragging in the media and didn’t anticipate the extent to which public opinion toward FiveThirtyEight would shift once we became a corporate-backed incumbent rather than an eccentric upstart Can’t speak for everyone else, but it wasn’t this for me. It was about 2016 presidential that lost me. He tries to justify this later about how theirs was better than other outlets but I don’t care. Call it emoti…

I had complaints about 538, especially the early days, but don't understand this critique at all. A 30% chance hitting is completely unremarkable, and it was a perfectly reasonable reading of the evidence at the time. Nate isn't wrong that conventional wisdom was way off, with even supposedly statistical models giving Hillary a 99% chance of winning. Elections, like many things, have some inherent uncertainty. A seve…

[deleted]

Re: Disney erased FiveThirtyEight

#77

Post by bryanlarsen »

armchairhacker wrote: post #27
Octoth0rpe wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Maybe this has to do with the leftward trend of the mainstream press. What mainstream press outlet has moved leftwards? I can't think of any, and I certainly am interested in knowing which those might be. Inversely, cbs, the ny times, and the washington post have all shifted rather noticeably rightward in the last 10 years.

According to AllSides, many outlets moved left, although some did move right: https://www.allsides.com/blog/AllSides-Media-Bias-Rating-Ove... It and https://mediabiasfactcheck.com say NYTimes “leans left” and is “left-center” respectively. What’s an example that you believe highlights NYTimes moving rightward?

That same result would also be achieved by the Overton window moving right.

Re: Disney erased FiveThirtyEight

#78

Post by kjkjadksj »

palata wrote: post #53
bellowsgulch wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean everyone said he had a snowball’s chance in hell and then we ended up with him for two terms because the Democrats can’t stop fighting over the worse possible candidates to back that no one is asking for.

I find it interesting to blame it on the democrats. We ended up with him because enough people voted for him .

The blame is put on democrats because when they lose its because they don’t turn out and when they win its because they do. It is quite simple really. Republicans are far more reliable voters. You can look at vote totals and see this pattern. Massive delta for democrats election over election and usually half that delta for republicans.

Re: Disney erased FiveThirtyEight

#79

Post by volkl48 »

kypro wrote: post #59
fabian2k wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FiveThirtyEight gave Trump a 30% chance. Their reporting did make clear that with margin was within the range of a normal polling error. And sometimes you get more than a normal polling error. It doesn't help that the US has a terrible election system that often leads to small margins in some states being decisive.

> FiveThirtyEight gave Trump a 30% chance. I know I'm being super conspiratorial here but why wouldn't all forecasters predict just between 30% - 70%? That way if they're "right" they can take the credit for it and if they're wrong they can say "well, we weren't that wrong". That's probably what I'd do anyway...

It implies a close race or a strong reason to believe there's some sort of systemic polling miss, and if it's a blowout you still look pretty bad. Especially if you don't have some kind of good explanation for the miss/you keep making those kinds of misses frequently.

Also there's more going in those forecasts besides just the "% chance to win". There's expected results in terms of %'s of the vote for the candidates, and that's what people tend to focus on for actually analyzing your performance and credibility after the fact.

You getting the outcome correct but being off by 20 points on the margin is a much worse performance than you getting the outcome wrong but being within 0.5 points of the margin. (ex: Results are 49.75/50.25, you predicted 30/70, another outlet predicted 50.25/49.75).

Re: Disney erased FiveThirtyEight

#80

Post by underlipton »

legitster wrote: post #28

> The thinking at Disney is presumably that they invested a lot of money in FiveThirtyEight and were left with nothing to show for it. But to my mind, however much they spent on FiveThirtyEight, they never invested a dollar in it. There was never really any effort, or even any pretense of trying, to make it a profitable unit of the company. At one point, other senior staffers and I basically begged Disney to turn on…

It's not the full story, but it's certainly a large part of it.

I'll chime in tangentially with another large part: the disproportionate share of both asset and liquid wealth held by people who are some combination of a) Baby Boomers, b) in the top percentiles of wealth/income, c) politically- or socially-connected. As you say, it's not all of them, but enough of them. At the confluence of the two groups is a desire not to invest in potentially risky ventures, or to spend on consumption, but instead to put as much money as possible into a narrow band of low-risk, often passive investments, and to pull every lever possible to protect those investments, even when they become outmoded in some regard and the income stream or economic activity that supports their high (growing) valuation dries up.

Supporting this paradigm (ostensibly so that seniors don't die in poverty, so that strategically-important businesses and ventures are backstopped, etc., but, crucially, to the detriment of all other concerns) means an erosion of a sort of "constructive inefficiency": "wasted" spending on ventures that might not work out, on employees who are not the best and most productive, on niche services and products, which altogether represent a massive share of potential economic activity that is much better at involving and supporting a diverse population with diverse needs and diverse skill sets that perhaps have not yet found the correct outlet to produce maximal value.

Your C-suite goons and my rich, highly networked seniors don't care about the potential of a paradigm shift to support and enable short-term losers, though. They just want to pile into the sure-thing of your "actually good businesses" (which, in many cases, aren't actually that good).

Post reply on HN