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Disney erased FiveThirtyEight

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Re: Disney erased FiveThirtyEight

#91

Post by thaumasiotes »

wredcoll wrote: post #48
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?

NYTimes constantly deletes parts of Trump's comments or outright rephrases them in an attempt to make him seem smarter, or at least, less insane. They rarely to never do that for other people.

> They rarely to never do that for other people.

They do that to everyone. That's how all quotation in journalism is done.

Re: Disney erased FiveThirtyEight

#92

Post by ghostbrainalpha »

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…

Polls became much less interesting as an Entertainment category once we all had experience with how unreliable they are.

Re: Disney erased FiveThirtyEight

#96

Post by dwoldrich »

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 .

And he won the popular vote if you believe that all U.S. elections are secure and sacrosanct. He is diabolical at getting people to talk about him and think about him constantly.

Joe Biden on the other hand was a senile wrecker for Build Back Better and the party finally made "the switch" to unelected Harris far too late in the process. Even if she was a great candidate, with her odd laughter and fascination with buses, there was not enough time to shape her candidacy. Her VP candidate choice was hobbled by rising anti-semitism in the party against Shapiro and perhaps concerns of being outshined by him. No, the Democrats did not do themselves any favors in the '24 election.

Carter, Clinton and Obama were media creations, vaulting to national prominence out of nowhere. It helped that Clinton and Obama were great, charismatic choices.

Now the traditional media is fragmented and weak. You're not seeing furtive vaulting attempts for potential phenoms like Newsome gain any traction. Who is the media going to be stuck with next time? Will it be take-two for Harris?

WHEN, not if, Harris loses bigly to Vance, then the Democrats will absolutely be to blame. Where are their all new shiny, beautiful, erudite candidates that would need all four years to gestate and promote? Shouldn't we be getting acquainted with them now? I wager they're not going to appear, and we'll get more flunkies. My theory as to why is that those currently in power in the party do not share; they're aging out and hollowing out the party in the process. We're to the point now of collapse. I'm surprised a third party on the left hasn't yet formed.

Re: Disney erased FiveThirtyEight

#97

Post by chasil »

fuzzfactor wrote: post #66
chasil wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Berkshire Hathaway has this attitude, with the proviso that the corporate management at the acquired firm must be competent, and the firm be profitable and protected by a "moat." It's amazing that they trot out Sees Candy every year for the shareholders' meeting when they own GEICO. It seems that Disney isn't doing this quite right.

For one thing See's Candy is fundamentally a value-added operation and GEICO is a positive cash flow financial structure which remains competitive by trying not to remove as much value from the customer as the next guy.

Sees Candy made the wiki.

Services & retailing: Ben Bridge Jeweler, Business Wire, Dairy Queen, McLane Company, NetJets, Oriental Trading Company, Pampered Chef, See's Candies, Star Furniture, WPLG

Manufacturing: Benjamin Moore & Co., Clayton Homes, CTB International, Duracell, Fruit of the Loom, Johns Manville, Lubrizol, Precision Castparts Corp, Scott Fetzer Company, Garan Inc

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berkshire_Hathaway

Re: Disney erased FiveThirtyEight

#98

Post by gh02t »

ngriffiths wrote: post #72
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…

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 car…

The real caveat is that 538 was a Monte Carlo model, and is only as good as its inputs. "Here's what the current spread in polling numbers is *given our model and the current polling and their reported uncertainties.*" Polling uncertainties are themselves computed under certain models, and those models are subject to errors. I don't think 538 hid this, but it's a difficult caveat for people to reason about because the sorts of modeling errors that have the most influence usually represent "unknown unknowns".

Re: Disney erased FiveThirtyEight

#99

Post by hobofan »

teddyh wrote: post #84
wredcoll wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The Viet Cong parallels in the original Star Wars about as much "winking at the camera" as current Star Wars is to current politics.

Re: Disney erased FiveThirtyEight

#100

Post by akio »

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…

> FiveThirtyEight performed only slightly better than what you could find in any other reputable newspaper

FiveThirtyEight gave Trump double the odds of the next highest reputable prediction, which was The New York Times Upshot (15%). Princeton Election Consortium gave Trump less than 1%.

That is not "only slightly better" to anyone who's statistically literate.

A FiveThirtyEight reader in 2016 was significantly better calibrated regarding Clinton’s chances than a reader of other reputable newspapers.

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