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

81–90 of 270 posts

Re: Disney erased FiveThirtyEight

#81

Post by softwaredoug »

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…

We should have a drinking game in Nate Silver thread anyone complains about 2016 prediction. Then everyone piles on to point out how probabilities work.

Re: Disney erased FiveThirtyEight

#82

Post by coliveira »

afavour wrote: post #74
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 th…

Technically this is right. But if that is the case (and it seems to be), then a coin flip is better than their models. Because we only care about the current election, not a sequence of 1000 elections (which will not happen, by the way).

Re: Disney erased FiveThirtyEight

#83

Post by coliveira »

bellowsgulch wrote: post #37
shawabawa3 wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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.

Democrats will not let people choose candidates because that may be too dangerous for their interests. We'll never get good candidates as long as the current leadership is in control.

Re: Disney erased FiveThirtyEight

#84

Post by teddyh »

wredcoll wrote: post #43
SilverElfin wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Disney removed a lot of the earlier IP from the official Star Wars storyline shortly after acquiring it. That IP was much better than the complete mess and politicization of Star Wars that happened in the sequels. Sure they are trying to squeeze money out of it - and maybe some of the TV shows are tolerable - but they killed the brand and its best content in the process.

Good point, Star Wars was famously not about politics. Very apolitical.

The politics of the original trilogy Star Wars was essentially “dictators and fascists with big armies are bad”. It was naïve and simplistic; a simple storytelling device, nothing more. There was no conscious choice behind it. If it had been made 40 years earlier, the enemies would have been savage indigenous people, as was the style at the time. The politics of modern Star Wars are… specific. Pointed. Winking at the camera. I suspect they may not age well.

Re: Disney erased FiveThirtyEight

#85

Post by afavour »

coliveira wrote: post #82
afavour wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 th…

Technically this is right. But if that is the case (and it seems to be), then a coin flip is better than their models. Because we only care about the current election, not a sequence of 1000 elections (which will not happen, by the way).

I don’t disagree, I think the tea leaf reading is ultimately pretty futile.

But at the same time I do think it’s valid to say it’s more than a coin flip. The polling data over the election cycle showed that Trump had a smaller but still legitimate chance of winning. The data was different in 2020, when he lost.

Re: Disney erased FiveThirtyEight

#86

Post by hungryhobbit »

lacewing wrote: post #71
rurp wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 i…

538 was never about magically making polls more reliable, and only people that don't understand what polls are could think that (caveat: lots of people don't understand how polls work).

538 was about analyzing and communicating the information from those polls in an easily accessible form. If you came to the site for that, you weren't mad that they "predicted poorly something that was impossible to predict from the data sources they used" ... you were just mad at Trump for winning (despite polls suggesting otherwise).

Re: Disney erased FiveThirtyEight

#87

Post by coliveira »

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...

You're completely right, although I believe this number was not decided personally. They just happened to pick algorithms that have this "nice" property because it will lead to the same result.

Re: Disney erased FiveThirtyEight

#88

Post by amanaplanacanal »

coliveira wrote: post #83
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.

Democrats will not let people choose candidates because that may be too dangerous for their interests. We'll never get good candidates as long as the current leadership is in control.

Do you not have primaries where you are?

Re: Disney erased FiveThirtyEight

#89

Post by dogleash »

coliveira wrote: post #82
afavour wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 th…

Technically this is right. But if that is the case (and it seems to be), then a coin flip is better than their models. Because we only care about the current election, not a sequence of 1000 elections (which will not happen, by the way).

> But if that is the case (and it seems to be), then a coin flip is better than their models.

If a coin flip is the necessary mental model to remind you both things can happen, then sure.

People just love horse race coverage. Silver gave us the most accurate horse race coverage. Maybe the lesson is stop following horse race coverage.

But most people went back to the tea leave readers. That way when the election was over, it can justifiably be the charlatan's fault that viewers got over-invested in their predictive capabilities.

Re: Disney erased FiveThirtyEight

#90

Post by hungryhobbit »

bachmeier wrote: post #75
shawabawa3 wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Nate Silver is not a magician! He can't magically make polls reliable!

All he (or anyone) can do is interpret or analyse poll results, and then surface their findings in a way a larger audience can understand. 538 did that better than any other poll analyst ... but they all got it wrong because the polls themselves were faulty.

TLDR; You can't get water from a stone, and no one (not even Nate Silver) can get perfectly accurate predictions from (inherently flawed) polls!

Post reply on HN