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FiveThirtyEight articles on the Internet Archive

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Re: FiveThirtyEight articles on the Internet Archive

#71

Post by bombcar »

Jiro wrote: post #28
ycombinete wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Archive.org mostly ignores robots.txt https://blog.archive.org/2017/04/17/robots-txt-meant-for-sea...

People always use that link as reference to say that Internet Archive ignores robots.txt but it only actually says they are ignoring it for government sites. It suggests that they might do it for other sites in the future (of 2017), but does not actually say that that they have done it. https://blog.archive.org/2018/04/24/addressing-recent-claims... which is a year later mentions that they have an automated process w…

That first link is confusing; it seems to say they ended up removing the pages not because of a legal threat but because of robots.txt “automated”.

If archive.org can be manipulated to remove content either via legal threats or simple robots.txt it loses a significant portion of its societal value.

Re: FiveThirtyEight articles on the Internet Archive

#72

Post by noirscape »

amalcon wrote: post #69
ninjalanternshk wrote: post #63

[flagged]

538: "We have no idea who will win. It seems like basically a coin toss." Reality: someone wins. Internet: "How did 538 mess this up so badly?"

It's a bit more loaded than that. 538 post-Nate Silver had a model setup that was apparently kind of a mess. 538 was apparently sending strange messages to Republican leaning polling agencies, demanding they gave far more detailed audit information than usual (with the implication obviously being that they were fraudulent pollsters), and the guy running the site had fairly openly tuned his model on the assumption people cared about certain talking points. 538 was predicting Biden victories even when the polls were so overwhelmingly against him that not even the most Democratic leaning polling agencies had trust in him; even if you aren't running difficult math, that means something has gone wrong with the model.

(Something which got worse after Harris was picked, although every polling aggregator went barmy - there's suspicions that a lot of polling agencies aggressively normalized their data to avoid being seen as biased, leading to an almost 50/50 split.)

Re: FiveThirtyEight articles on the Internet Archive

#73

Post by SilverBirch »

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…

What are you even classifying as accurate or correct? Do you take every 51% prediction from FiveThirtyEight and if the result is a win you consider that forecast accurate? And every 49% prediction must result in a loss? This just not how statistical forecasts work.

>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.

I don't know why you're couching that in a hypothetical, FiveThirtyEight has repeatedly done that exercise.

>But it still would never have been accurate or right in the specific instances it got wrong

It is core to the concept of a probability that the result is going to go the opposite way from the prediction sometimes! It's meaningless to call it "wrong".

Re: FiveThirtyEight articles on the Internet Archive

#74

Post by amalcon »

noirscape wrote: post #72
amalcon wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

538: "We have no idea who will win. It seems like basically a coin toss." Reality: someone wins. Internet: "How did 538 mess this up so badly?"

It's a bit more loaded than that. 538 post-Nate Silver had a model setup that was apparently kind of a mess. 538 was apparently sending strange messages to Republican leaning polling agencies, demanding they gave far more detailed audit information than usual (with the implication obviously being that they were fraudulent pollsters), and the guy running the site had fairly openly tuned his model on the assumption peo…

So, I would actually agree with you that 538 was a mess in that period. I would actually trace the first problems back to Enten's departure, but it did get worse when Silver left.

It's just that this particular criticism (that they got it "wrong") doesn't seem very well founded.

Re: FiveThirtyEight articles on the Internet Archive

#76

Post by beepbopboopp »

iamnothere wrote: post #70
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…

He may also finally shake off the comment trolls who piled onto him after 2016, seemingly blaming him for the election results (absurd but people are absurd). After that election, a certain group would tirelessly work to discredit him any time his election predictions were not entirely one-sided.

It was so funny, he mostly predicted the election correctly, but people confused probabilistic forecasting for sports lines.

Re: FiveThirtyEight articles on the Internet Archive

#77

Post by PaulHoule »

jnovek wrote: post #68
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Nate can get back a huge chunk of its readers The downside is this furthers the divide between folks who pay for subscriptions and masses who get shoveled ad-powered slop.

He put up a substantial number of articles for free during the 2024 election, it felt less paywalled than much of the MSM these days.

He puts up a substantial number of articles today for free.

Re: FiveThirtyEight articles on the Internet Archive

#78

Post by newaccount670 »

amalcon wrote: post #69
ninjalanternshk wrote: post #63

[flagged]

538: "We have no idea who will win. It seems like basically a coin toss." Reality: someone wins. Internet: "How did 538 mess this up so badly?"

Biden got literally 0% of the vote despite 538 predicting him to win.

They chose to pretend Biden's mental decline wasn't happening because that was the Democrat party line at the time. How can you trust predictions from someone who is willing to manipulate his results to prop up his political party?

Re: FiveThirtyEight articles on the Internet Archive

#80

Post by jscomino »

stinkbeetle wrote: post #54
saberience wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Just want to say, I appreciate your pragmatic perspective on this. Nate Silver had one job: Predict who would win. And he failed at that. With lots of hand waving he can excuse himself but at the end of the day his visitors wanted an answer and he gave them the wrong answer.
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