How One 19-Year-Old Illinois Man Is Distorting National Polling Averages • Hacker News Board

Re: How One 19-Year-Old Illinois Man Is Distorting National Polling Averages

#111

Post by whamlastxmas » Thu, Oct 13, 2016, 1:27 PM UTC

matt4077 wrote: post #93

whamlastxmas wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're completely missing the point. Publications show bias all the time based on what factual information they report (or don't report). Look at CNN.com right. Literally nothing about the new wikileaks that came out today, even in a factual manner. Plenty of opinionated anti-Trump garbage. This is what your parent comment was referring to.

Considering the universe of facts is endless, it seems that it's impossible to report without "bias" then – you necessarily have to make decisions and there is no objective standard to judge stories by. (and, btw, the leaks have three stories in the "top news" block on the top left, and an above-the-fold story in the politics section right now)

Less than 8 hours later and I don't see it. And 8 hours between my comment and yours. They show it less than a day, but Kim getting robbed has been front page for a week

Re: How One 19-Year-Old Illinois Man Is Distorting National Polling Averages

#112

Post by ianai » Thu, Oct 13, 2016, 4:58 PM UTC

jocro wrote: post #81

firebones wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let's keep it simple; it wasn't Silver and 538 who did the piece on USC/Dornsife and why it was an outlier, it was Nate Cohn and the NYT. I think Silver and his org know more than 95% of the others about polling, but you'd think that this would be an obvious one for them to break since it is ostensibly their specialty. Not that there's anything wrong with getting scooped. But it is an indication that his nose is too…

> but you'd think that this would be an obvious one for them to break since it is ostensibly their specialty. Silver's already touched on this poll and its unusual methodology: http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/election-update-leave-th... He didn't get scooped; explaining the technical details isn't his ostensible specialty, adjusting for them is.

And so what if he were to be scooped? No ones all knowing.

Re: How One 19-Year-Old Illinois Man Is Distorting National Polling Averages

#113

Post by marricks » Thu, Oct 13, 2016, 8:05 PM UTC

SubiculumCode wrote: post #79

marricks wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you seen the comparisons to Princeton's Election Conesertium which did something similar but without the "special sauce"? He did a little worse, which is a bit of evidence saying Sam's more straight numbers are better than Nate's judgment.

or random error.

Definitely possible, that's why I said "a bit"

Re: How One 19-Year-Old Illinois Man Is Distorting National Polling Averages

#114

Post by tankenmate » Fri, Oct 14, 2016, 10:26 AM UTC

contravariant wrote: post #108

tankenmate wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't really need to estimate the distribution of ages; the electoral roll and the census will give you a distribution with an error that is several orders of magnitude small than the sampling error from the poll. For all intents and purposes the electoral roll and census data is so close to reality that you might as well declare it as such for calculations.

Well if the idea is to correct for the biased sampling of your poll you actually do need to estimate the distribution of ages in the people you've polled. Dividing them in small groups and calculating the proportion of people in each isn't the best approach though.

You don't need to estimate the distribution of the ages of the people you have polled unless of course you don't know the ages of the people you have polled.

You have two distributions of ages here; both are known (within reasonable comparatively minute errors), no need to estimate. The distribution of ages of the electorate, strictly not known, but so so close to known compared to all the other estimates you have to deal with. And the distribution of the ages of your pollees, you simply ask them their age (estimating whether they are lying to you about their age is an infinitely deep philosophical hole you'll never get out of).