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Disney erased FiveThirtyEight

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Re: Disney erased FiveThirtyEight

#161

Post by bombcar »

nomel wrote: post #111
lacewing wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'm very curious to see how polymarket fairs, compared to the news agencies. I suspect prediction markets will be the norm, going forward. Polls can't fully capture the element of anonymity that's required for an accurate poll of something controversial.

My experience was that prediction markets were lagging indicators and basically followed something akin to an aggregate opinion of polls.

This is especially viewable if you watch them during the 2020 election.

Re: Disney erased FiveThirtyEight

#162

Post by halJordan »

fasterik wrote: post #128
zombittack wrote: post #122

At this point in my life I have zero patience or sympathy for the story of a man selling his company to a massive conglomerate and then feeling betrayed or somehow sad/regretful when said conglomerate destroys it or weaponizes it. I'm simply tired of this hindsight virtue signaling. They don't care about us. That means even you, Nate Silver. Btw was a big fan back then! Signal and the Noise was a great book.

There's value in making more people aware of something, even if it appears obvious to you. It's possible that someone who doesn't share your views on Disney, or corporations more broadly, might have been familiar with FiveThirtyEight and will have their views changed by Nate Silver's account of the situation. There's also nothing wrong with someone reflecting on something they worked on for over a decade and identify…

I'll disagree. As an open forum, all responses are allowed, even telling someone to sleep in the bed they made.

But it does bring up a good point. That too many people are trying to have their cake and eat it too. Any reasonable person does, or ought to know, the cycle 538 went through. And we need to stop giving the benefit of the doubt to reasonable people who say "well I'm the one who didn't"

Re: Disney erased FiveThirtyEight

#163

Post by bombcar »

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?

Denying that the democrats had two high-profile situations where the “wrong” candidate ended up running is denying the obvious. It’s manifest that Obama wasn’t to win the primary, and that the superdelegates exist for reasons.

Re: Disney erased FiveThirtyEight

#164

Post by FireBeyond »

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…

> 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.

I've even heard things like "70% chance of Hillary winning means she gets 70% of the votes!" (and tangentially, my far-too-long argument with someone on Reddit who insisted "there is no way in hell 50% of the people in this town make above the median income"...)

Re: Disney erased FiveThirtyEight

#165

Post by waterTanuki »

Even if you believe Nate Silver's analysis was deeply flawed/inaccurate the layout and presentation of the data itself made it easy for others to understand why it was flawed or innacurate. Modern science is built on thousands and thousands of failed experiments and research that went the wrong path. That makes preservation of this site important, more important than whatever personal grudge you may hold against him.

Re: Disney erased FiveThirtyEight

#166

Post by bombcar »

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...

538 claimed that they post-checked thousands of elections and their percentages were pretty close. (E.g., 30% chances happened about 30% of the time, million to one chances happened every single time)

Re: Disney erased FiveThirtyEight

#167

Post by bachmeier »

hungryhobbit wrote: post #90
bachmeier wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 perfectl…

> 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.

He (or anybody) can make adjustments to the data. He was challenged to explain why his predictions were so different, but he wouldn't do it.

> 538 did that better than any other poll analyst

He made a binary prediction, and it was wrong. There's no such thing as "better" when you only have one outcome. Your prediction is either right or wrong. If by "better" you mean he was wrong but assigned a higher probability to a Trump victory, the best forecaster would have been someone that mechanically changed the probability of a Trump victory to slightly less than 50% no matter what the data said.

Re: Disney erased FiveThirtyEight

#168

Post by akio »

bombcar wrote: post #160
akio wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Speak for yourself. That's not why I read FiveThirtyEight. The purpose of FiveThirtyEight was never to be an oracle for the average person. It was always a deliberately wonky site for a wonky audience. They were very clear about that in the articles they published and topics they covered.

If we’re brutally honest the vast majority of 538 readers read it to be assured that the right outcome was outcoming.

They went to the wrong place then.

----

Nov. 1, 2016 — Election Update: Yes, Donald Trump Has A Path To Victory — https://archive.is/kwdab

> Tuesday was another pretty good day of polling for Donald Trump.

> Trump remains an underdog, but no longer really a longshot: His Electoral College chances are 29 percent in our polls-only model — his highest probability since Oct. 2 — and 30 percent in polls-plus.

> This isn’t a secure map for Clinton at all. In a race where the popular vote is roughly tied nationally, Colorado and New Hampshire are toss-ups, and Clinton’s chances are only 60 to 65 percent in Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania.

> If you want to debate a campaign’s geographic planning, Hillary Clinton spending time in Arizona is a much worse decision than Trump hanging out in Michigan or Wisconsin.

----

Sept. 16, 2016 — How Trump Could Win The White House While Losing The Popular Vote — https://archive.is/rxP5l

> Using a prototype of a demographic election calculator that FiveThirtyEight will be unveiling in the next few weeks, I decided to simulate a few election scenarios.

> The result? Clinton would carry the popular vote by 1.5 percentage points. However, Trump would win the Electoral College with 280 votes by holding all 24 Romney states and flipping Florida, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Iowa and Maine’s 2nd Congressional District from blue to red.

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Jun 29, 2016 — Donald Trump Has A 20 Percent Chance Of Becoming President — https://archive.ph/ryIkP

> A 20 percent or 25 percent chance of Trump winning is an awfully long way from 2 percent, or 0.02 percent. It’s a real chance: about the same chance that the visiting team has when it trails by a run in the top of the eighth inning in a Major League Baseball game. If you’ve been following politics or sports over the past couple of years, I hope it’s been imprinted onto your brain that those purported long shots — sometimes much longer shots than Trump — sometimes come through.

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FiveThirtyEight was probably the worst reputable source to read if you were looking for maximum assurances that Clinton would win.

Re: Disney erased FiveThirtyEight

#169

Post by 3eb7988a1663 »

robotresearcher wrote: post #130
nostrademons wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I would love to have later learned that leaders who evaluate opportunities separate from personal attachment are seen as more efficient, better, and selected favorably; that more successful companies are less subject to this sort of political/careerist whimsy. My experience is that it's the opposite: the more successful the company is, the more prone it is to flights of executive whimsy. At more successful companie…

> the more successful the company is, the more prone it is to flights of executive whimsy Apple's Liquid Glass comes to mind. The design exec responsible suddenly left Apple for Meta, a company rather less esteemed for design, and Apple still hasn't acknowledged this failure or backtracked.

Admit wrong, from Apple? Was there acknowledgement of say butterfly keyboards? Seems on brand to quietly walk back an unpopular decision.

Re: Disney erased FiveThirtyEight

#170

Post by slg »

teddyh wrote: post #150
hobofan wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

What Viet Cong parallels? Whatever you mean, it can’t have been very visible to the audience, since clear Viet Cong sympathies would not have gone over well (at least not universally) in 1977-1983.

This 3 minute clip of a conversation between George Lucas and James Cameron might help.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=fv9Jq_mCJEo

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