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FiveThirtyEight articles on the Internet Archive

fivethirtyeightindex.com

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Re: FiveThirtyEight articles on the Internet Archive

#51

Post by nomilk »

culi wrote: post #21

Unfortunately most of the most important visualizations are broken in the archived version. Including the gun deaths visualization and I think the P-hacking interactive https://web.archive.org/web/20230205124354/https://fivethirt... It's kinda sad to know no one else will get to experience those interactive visualizations. Though its nice to see the approval comparison page still works https://web.archive.org/web/202…

Curious why they're broken, as the wayback machine seems to be able to run javascript. Do the visualisations rely on a server (or some other assets not included in wayback machine's crawl)?

Re: FiveThirtyEight articles on the Internet Archive

#52

Post by saberience »

stinkbeetle wrote: post #35
materielle wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He didn’t hedge at the end. Nate always writes the models before election season then doesn’t touch them apart from actual bug fixes. The model actually organically predicted 30%. I still think that’s about accurate. Maybe it should’ve been 40%. Everyone forgets that it was a pretty close election. Clinton could’ve won without the Comey announcement.

I think he did hedge (or "strategically bug fix"). The prediction for Trump went from IIRC around 15 to 30 in the last week or so. It was a big swing, IIRC with a lot of waffle around why it happened but not a lot of verifiable fact. > I still think that’s about accurate. Maybe it should’ve been 40%. It wasn't accurate. This is something people misunderstand about these predictions. If the 2016 election was held 100…

That's where you're wrong, the election was very, very close. In fact, if roughly 40k voters (across three states) had switched from Trump to Hillary, she would have won, that's how close it was.

40k voters, that's really not very many. So it's hard to say whether Trump had a 30% chance of winning or 40% or whatever, but the election at most was a toss-up.

Many random events could have resulted in a different outcome.

Re: FiveThirtyEight articles on the Internet Archive

#53

Post by tekla »

stinkbeetle wrote: post #46
SilverBirch wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To give you a trivial example: The simplest way I can put this is that turn out varies based on the weather[1], and turn out is skewed by party. So if it rains on election day you are going to get a different result, and that result can flip the outcome of the election if the election is close. So it’s kind of a nonsense to say. “Trump would have won 100 times out of 100”. Are you saying Nate Silvers model should hav…

It's not nonsense. What's nonsense is to say Nate's prediction for the election was accurate or correct. It trivially was not. What it would be reasonable to say is if his model had correctly predicted the outcome of a significant sample of elections, then you could say his model has some accuracy or predictive power. But it still would never have been accurate or right in the specific instances it got wrong, that's…

It's so interesting to see how someone could so confidentially wrong and clearly show no knowledge of statistics.

Re: FiveThirtyEight articles on the Internet Archive

#54

Post by stinkbeetle »

saberience wrote: post #52
stinkbeetle wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think he did hedge (or "strategically bug fix"). The prediction for Trump went from IIRC around 15 to 30 in the last week or so. It was a big swing, IIRC with a lot of waffle around why it happened but not a lot of verifiable fact. > I still think that’s about accurate. Maybe it should’ve been 40%. It wasn't accurate. This is something people misunderstand about these predictions. If the 2016 election was held 100…

That's where you're wrong, the election was very, very close. In fact, if roughly 40k voters (across three states) had switched from Trump to Hillary, she would have won, that's how close it was. 40k voters, that's really not very many. So it's hard to say whether Trump had a 30% chance of winning or 40% or whatever, but the election at most was a toss-up. Many random events could have resulted in a different outcome…

You misunderstand my point. I am talking about the actual election that happened where these many random events that could have resulted in a different outcome did not happen. I was being a bit facetious maybe in my point. But the point is that the thing that is to be predicted is the actual real event that occurs in this universe. Silver made a prediction, and it was wrong.

"Oh but it was only a 70% prediction"

You can't 70% win an election. Silver's prediction was that Clinton would win, but he was not super confident about it. The prediction was wrong. He was right to not be super confident about it, but the prediction of who would win was still wrong.

Re: FiveThirtyEight articles on the Internet Archive

#56

Post by dreijs »

materielle wrote: post #31
patcon wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's the fivethirtyeight of of historical significance, and Disney is one of the largest and wealthiest companies on the planet. So it's just kinda like "whoa, this is stratospheric negligence" or "whoa, what is the reason for this... assuming they are not idiots?"

Also, they don’t any plans for the IP, and Nate would’ve paid above-market rate just to take over and preserve the content for posterity. He estimates that they deleted 200,000 hours of human labor. This is just some Disney suits being extraordinarily petty.

Yes, just to add to this: in the article by Nate [0] he says that he tried to buy the IP but Disney refused because they were unhappy with some of his prior comments.

"I did approach Disney a year or two ago, through my agent, about acquiring the remaining IP. ...

We were told to basically get lost: ABC was annoyed with my critical public comments about their management of FiveThirtyEight. It apparently wasn’t a long conversation, so I don’t have a lot more color to report than that."

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48197703

Re: FiveThirtyEight articles on the Internet Archive

#57

Post by alberto-m »

I am certainly missing a lot of nuance here, but it seems to me Nate Silver managed to have his cake and eat it too. He surely got good money for selling FiveThirtyEight, and now that the buyer has erased the product, Nate can get back a huge chunk of its readers since he offers very similar analyses on his personal site. Sure, natesilver.net has less brand recognition than fivethirtyeight.com, but it's still decently well-known and can only go up from here.

Re: FiveThirtyEight articles on the Internet Archive

#58

Post by mold_aid »

internet2000 wrote: post #13

I'm seeing a lot about this. What makes this situation different than any other website going offline?

In a sense, nothing - and any other website should be archived, too.

In another sense, it's a journalistic source with information and commentary on past elections. Even aside from the political context that muddies the waters around or outright denies results, matters of public discourse on the web should not be ephemeral or subject to the decisions of the publication - they should be archived.

Re: FiveThirtyEight articles on the Internet Archive

#59

Post by isityettime »

stinkbeetle wrote: post #35
materielle wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He didn’t hedge at the end. Nate always writes the models before election season then doesn’t touch them apart from actual bug fixes. The model actually organically predicted 30%. I still think that’s about accurate. Maybe it should’ve been 40%. Everyone forgets that it was a pretty close election. Clinton could’ve won without the Comey announcement.

I think he did hedge (or "strategically bug fix"). The prediction for Trump went from IIRC around 15 to 30 in the last week or so. It was a big swing, IIRC with a lot of waffle around why it happened but not a lot of verifiable fact. > I still think that’s about accurate. Maybe it should’ve been 40%. It wasn't accurate. This is something people misunderstand about these predictions. If the 2016 election was held 100…

That's the beauty of this brand of pseudoscience. Statistical predictions of singular events like a particular election are totally unfalsifiable. You can just say "I guess we live in 30% world" or whatever, every time.

Re: FiveThirtyEight articles on the Internet Archive

#60

Post by its-summertime »

alberto-m wrote: post #57

I am certainly missing a lot of nuance here, but it seems to me Nate Silver managed to have his cake and eat it too. He surely got good money for selling FiveThirtyEight, and now that the buyer has erased the product, Nate can get back a huge chunk of its readers since he offers very similar analyses on his personal site. Sure, natesilver.net has less brand recognition than fivethirtyeight.com, but it's still decentl…

I think the nuance is that it is notable historical articles about predictions and discussions of political elections, during a time when politics is quite at the fore-front of many people's minds
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