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Disney erased FiveThirtyEight

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Re: Disney erased FiveThirtyEight

#191

Post by RajT88 »

nostrademons wrote: post #64
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…

> 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…

I saw this up close once.

My job involves service contracts for the cloud. We get to know workloads and optimize them and learn how to troubleshoot them to reduce mitigation time.

I had a big customer go from "must have, non-negotiable" for my team to a non-renewal in weeks when a new CTO came in. Within a month, they had an outage we could have mitigated quickly and had our yearly contract pay for itself.

Re: Disney erased FiveThirtyEight

#192

Post by Dylan16807 »

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...

> 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...

For anyone making many predictions, you can analyze the outcomes to see how accurate those percentages are.

For anyone making few predictions, you should never trust their track record even if it's technically perfect.

Re: Disney erased FiveThirtyEight

#193

Post by lmm »

bsimpson wrote: post #127
ngriffiths wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

That's a core mechanic in games like Dispatch. People don't like seeing a 95% chance of winning and then losing. The game tweaks the odds, so certain thresholds become gimmes (something like "if the displayed odds are better than 75%, treat them as 100%").

Conversely weather forecasters report a 40% chance of rain when the actual chance is 10% or similar.

So I have a bit of sympathy for people who don't have a good intuition for probabilities, given that the world is constantly gaslighting them.

Re: Disney erased FiveThirtyEight

#194

Post by burritoAlPast0r »

shermantanktop wrote: post #176
applfanboysbgon wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm simply tired of this hindsight virtue signaling. Virtue signalling is a funny term. What, exactly, does it mean here? In what way is reminiscing about a venture that lasted 15 years of your life "virtue signalling"? It seems to be that word is trotted out as a meaningless cliche, something in the sense of "I don't like this thing, but I'll sound more sophisticated if I accuse it of this nebulous bad thing rathe…

“Virtue signaling” has become a thought-terminating cliche. All it really amounts to is an accusation of insincerity motivated by vanity, which is a two-for-one ad hominem attack that allows the accuser to avoid responding to the actual point.

It is a statement on a culture that values insincere "feelgoodery" over truth. We can decry the downfall of common sense even if it comes at the expense of pointing out the obvious. Imo this is a good trend.

Re: Disney erased FiveThirtyEight

#195

Post by applfanboysbgon »

burritoAlPast0r wrote: post #194
shermantanktop wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“Virtue signaling” has become a thought-terminating cliche. All it really amounts to is an accusation of insincerity motivated by vanity, which is a two-for-one ad hominem attack that allows the accuser to avoid responding to the actual point.

It is a statement on a culture that values insincere "feelgoodery" over truth. We can decry the downfall of common sense even if it comes at the expense of pointing out the obvious. Imo this is a good trend.

> insincere "feelgoodery" over truth

This has literally nothing to do with the article, and really nothing to do with almost any usage of the term I've seen. I pretty much always see it as a kind of incoherent insult that, like this usage here, isn't based in any kind of reality but instead just makes the person writing it feel good about themselves for some reason.

Re: Disney erased FiveThirtyEight

#196

Post by ngriffiths »

this_user wrote: post #185
gh02t wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The real caveat is that 538 was a Monte Carlo model, and is only as good as its inputs. "Here's what the current spread in polling numbers is *given our model and the current polling and their reported uncertainties.*" Polling uncertainties are themselves computed under certain models, and those models are subject to errors. I don't think 538 hid this, but it's a difficult caveat for people to reason about because th…

Building a model for predicting the ultimate winner of a US presidential election is particularly difficult, because you are dealing with noisy input data and nonlinear effects, i.e. just a few thousand votes in a few key states can completely flip the outcome. If you then have poorly calibrated polls with a large margin of error, there is really nothing much you can do. On the other hand, it does raise the question…

Exactly, and correlated errors, where a polling error in one state predicts similar errors across the board.

I disagree that it's all pointless though. Most basically it's smart for campaigns to have a good model and let that inform strategy where appropriate. Since the president is a big deal other people's decisions are also impacted, and in the long run it pays to have good predictions of those chances. Also, the outcome sometimes is fairly certain and that isn't always easy to see.

Re: Disney erased FiveThirtyEight

#197

Post by lmm »

rurp wrote: post #114
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.

That makes as much sense as visiting ESPN and expecting them to tell you who will definitely win the Super Bowl next year. Anyone expecting that is going to be disappointed often no matter what. I thought it went without saying but a good analyst can't predict the future in politics, sports, or anything else. What they can do is make good probabilistic estimates of what is likely to happen. 538 wasn't pretending to d…

> a good analyst can't predict the future in politics, sports, or anything else. What they can do is make good probabilistic estimates of what is likely to happen. 538 wasn't pretending to do anything more than that.

Well, sure, but how big is the market for that, really? Particularly for a binary outcome like an election, knowing who's going to win is fun, reading a pundit telling you who's going to win can be fun, but ultimately the man in the street is going to take whatever the pundit said and reduce it to candidate X or candidate Y, and you can only do so much better than replacement level at that.

Re: Disney erased FiveThirtyEight

#198

Post by DANmode »

3eb7988a1663 wrote: post #169
robotresearcher wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Unlikely they’ll be walking back the UX and UI changes specifically for their push into spatial and convergent computing.

Re: Disney erased FiveThirtyEight

#199

Post by lmm »

FergusArgyll wrote: post #107
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…

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...

They had him at 30% at a time when most reputable media had him in single digits at best. You might not remember now, but the result of that election was a real shock.

Re: Disney erased FiveThirtyEight

#200

Post by omot »

what i miss most about 538: whether it’s elections or the play offs, nothing comes close to how clean and fun the data interaction felt. i would constantly refresh any time a game finished or when a started called a candidate. i wonder who the front end engineer was, and what they’re doing now. would love for them to be building more fun ways to be interacting with data.
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