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Disney erased FiveThirtyEight

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Re: Disney erased FiveThirtyEight

#101

Post by Traster »

jp57 wrote: post #61
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 really think a majority of NYTimes and ABCnews consumers don't know the difference between a 2/3 chance (super close) of winning and 2/3 of the vote (a landslide).

Apparently neither do a big chunk of HN readers.

Re: Disney erased FiveThirtyEight

#102

Post by Terr_ »

rc_kas wrote: post #19
CGMthrowaway wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>cbs, the ny times, and the washington post have all shifted rather noticeably rightward As the Overton window or activist left moves further left on issues like identity politics, crime and free speech (1619 Project era at NYT, staff revolts etc), steady coverage can appear "righter" by comparison without actually changing

Remember when Net Nuetrality was the priority of hackernews and slashdot and basically all people in tech. Now it's a "leftist policy". We live in crazy times. Overton window has definitely shifted to the right. Beign a normal person who values science is now considered "leftist". Its nuts.

There's also a bloc that's been working to try to retroactively redefine what "Net Neutrality" means.

Instead of the usual stuff like "consumers have rights" or "ISP monopolies are bad" or "utilities should just provide the product and not spy and manipulate", they want it to mean something closer to "no online community can moderate itself."

And that's the charitable version. The worse version involves rank hypocrisy and selective enforcement, where large social "networks" must be "neutral" to literal nazis, while somehow it's also OK to permaban for insulting Dear Leader.

Re: Disney erased FiveThirtyEight

#103

Post by bonzini »

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.

Silver claimed that his model was better because it predicted a high correlation between PA/MI/WI.

A model that predicts a 30% chance of winning the election will be wrong 1 out of 3 times, which is not quite a coin flip but close enough.

Re: Disney erased FiveThirtyEight

#104

Post by lacewing »

hungryhobbit wrote: post #86
lacewing wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 d…

Again, I don't think any of this matters. People were not coming there to have "information communicated to them". They were coming there for the satisfaction of knowing the results before everyone else. And FiveThirtyEight couldn't realistically deliver on that.

Re: Disney erased FiveThirtyEight

#105

Post by Sparkle-san »

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 can't find the source anymore since 538 is no more, and I recall Nate even describing what could (and did) happen, which was that one swing state moving to the right had a high likelihood of them all moving to the right.

Re: Disney erased FiveThirtyEight

#106

Post by daedrdev »

chao- wrote: post #13

>The Times was also in the midst of a leadership transition, and new management tends to want to move on from the old regime’s pet projects, even if they were successful. Learning about B2B sales over the years, the size of this leadership-change factor has been among the most eye-opening (and among the most disappointing). It cuts both ways: You can have a successful pilot that doesn't proceed because this-or-that V…

Once you look, you see this all the time when new CEOs join large companies, they feel the need to mark their territory by taking a dump on it.

Re: Disney erased FiveThirtyEight

#107

Post by FergusArgyll »

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…

It was 30% in the end, before the nomination it famously gave him a 2% chance of getting nominated. All the talk about 30% is disingenuous

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FiveThirtyEight#2016_U.S._elec...

Re: Disney erased FiveThirtyEight

#108

Post by famouswaffles »

slg wrote: post #23
divbzero wrote: post #12

Some of Disney’s most valuable properties—ESPN, Pixar, Marvel, Star Wars—were acquired. FiveThirtyEight may be smaller, but it should be in Disney’s self-interest to set things right and earn a reputation for being a good home for acquisitions.

> ESPN, Pixar, Marvel, Star Wars And all of those have declined in reputation since their acquisition or soon after.

That's not remotely true.

Disney bought ESPN in 1996, Marvel in 2009 (literally had 2 movies released here and one of them flopped) and Pixar in 2006.

For Pixar, they and Disney were joined at the hip even before acquisition. Besides distribution rights, Disney had full sequel rights to almost all of Pixar's catalogue at the time. Disney could have made a sequel to Finding Nemo, The Incredibles etc even without Pixar's blessing or involvement. There is quite literally no Pixar without Disney.

Marvel? Their most successful years were under Disney. ESPN did not become the media empire you know it as until well after Disney's acquisition either.

Re: Disney erased FiveThirtyEight

#109

Post by oceanplexian »

amanaplanacanal wrote: post #88
coliveira wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

What position was Kamala Harris in the DNC Primaries before she was appointed as the General Election Candidate? First place? Second Place?

Surely she must have been in the top 3?

Re: Disney erased FiveThirtyEight

#110

Post by Traster »

The more I read about how big businesses operate the more I think it resembles the weather. There's no intelligence in there, it's just random fluctuations. FiveThirtyEight never made any sense at Disney and seems to have been passed around there more like a trinket than a decades work of dozens of people.
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