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Disney erased FiveThirtyEight

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Re: Disney erased FiveThirtyEight

#231

Post by Brendinooo »

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...

From the article:

> Being dismissive of Trump’s chances early on in the Republican primary was the biggest analytical mistake of my career, and I think I deserved a lot of blame for that.

He went on to write a whole retrospective, which is exactly what you'd want to see:

https://web.archive.org/web/20160527093831/https://fivethirt...

So unless your standard is "pollsters must be perfect at all times", I dunno what else should be asked of Silver here.

Re: Disney erased FiveThirtyEight

#232

Post by lmm »

palata wrote: post #219
lmm wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes and no. It's a two-party system and a lot of people vote for candidate X to stop candidate Y getting in. Indeed IIRC a lot of democrat messaging around the previous election was explicitly about stopping Trump rather than the merits of whoever their guy was.

Enough people did not vote against Trump is my point. "The democrats" voted against Trump, otherwise they don't really count as part of "the democrats" for this election, right?

> Enough people did not vote against Trump is my point.

The argument is that there were enough people who voted against Biden-Harris, or against the DNC process, to swing it.

Re: Disney erased FiveThirtyEight

#233

Post by shermantanktop »

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.

But I could accuse you (to be clear, I'm not) of making that statement out of a desire to "virtue signal."

You are stating your opposition to feelgoodery, thereby currying favor with those in your anti-feelgoodery camp by showing how anti-feelgoodery you are. But secretly of course I'm saying you don't really believe that. You are not that opposed to feelgoodery, you're just trying to get brownie points and make yourself feel good (ironically).

Again, that's not what I think, but IMO that's what the use of the phrase has mostly become.

Re: Disney erased FiveThirtyEight

#234

Post by softwaredoug »

pclmulqdq wrote: post #181

I think Nate Silver is off the mark as to what Disney wanted to get out of this. Entertainment companies like Disney make plays where they buy a huge portfolio of entertainment assets and see which ones manage to hit it big. They invest resources and they help quite a lot, but it does come down to the entertainer to take it all the way. In other words, a Disney executive probably bought 538 expecting that it might be…

The real problem is that FiveThirtyEight wasn’t run as an independent P&L. They didn’t have autonomy to make business / product decisions like as Nate says putting up a paywall etc. they were treated as pure creatives.

The real lesson for both sides is to not divorce “creatives” from the business. Arguably that’s one of the biggest mistakes of legacy media and why platforms like YouTube have been so successful: creatives run the business. There’s not a long complicated feedback loop between creatives / business decisions.

Re: Disney erased FiveThirtyEight

#235

Post by FergusArgyll »

Brendinooo wrote: post #231
FergusArgyll wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

From the article: > Being dismissive of Trump’s chances early on in the Republican primary was the biggest analytical mistake of my career, and I think I deserved a lot of blame for that. He went on to write a whole retrospective, which is exactly what you'd want to see: https://web.archive.org/web/20160527093831/https://fivethirt... So unless your standard is "pollsters must be perfect at all times", I dunno what el…

I'm fine with him[0]. I don't like the apologists who explain patronizingly that 30% odds happen 3/10 times. He gave Trump much much lower odds early on and only put it at 30 in the last few weeks.

[0] I'd say the better defense of him is: the whole model is built on polls, the pollsters stink, people should complain about pollsters, not their aggregators.

Re: Disney erased FiveThirtyEight

#236

Post by pjmlp »

_carbyau_ wrote: post #179
halJordan wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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"

Maybe I'm old but this smells like a new generation coming to terms with the concept of a sellout. It's not new. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Selling_out "While this perceived inauthenticity is viewed with scorn and contempt by members of the subculture, the definition of the term and to whom it should be applied is subjective. While the term is most associated with the 1970s- and 1980s-era punk and hardcore subcult…

As GenX and to bring the usual generation discussion, it appears the more recent ones are too fluffy, like expecting everything nice, do no harm, feel betrayed when it was already obvious from the start how it would end up, and so on.

Re: Disney erased FiveThirtyEight

#237

Post by amalcon »

macintux wrote: post #190
xmcp123 wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Democrats reliably back the color "beige" as a candidate. Obama was different, and he won back to back. Biden succeeded, barely , because Trump was fresh in everyone's mind. But for some reason the Democrats have been allergic to charisma for far too long. Voting in the US, it feels like I am forced to choose between evil and incompetence.

Your description sounds more like evil vs boring , which is an easy choice for me. And frankly I’ll vote for incompetence over evil too. Because, y’know, evil.

Hell, when it comes to government, I easily prefer boring to not-boring in an executive all else being equal. Which it wasn't here, but still.

I want the firebrands with big ideas to improve things in the legislature, and steady hands on the tiller in the executive. Unfortunately it seems that my compatriots want firebrands in both places.

Re: Disney erased FiveThirtyEight

#238

Post by xmcp123 »

macintux wrote: post #190
xmcp123 wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Democrats reliably back the color "beige" as a candidate. Obama was different, and he won back to back. Biden succeeded, barely , because Trump was fresh in everyone's mind. But for some reason the Democrats have been allergic to charisma for far too long. Voting in the US, it feels like I am forced to choose between evil and incompetence.

Your description sounds more like evil vs boring , which is an easy choice for me. And frankly I’ll vote for incompetence over evil too. Because, y’know, evil.

I call it incompetent because this style of uncharismatic beige has repeatedly failed to be elected, but keep being run in general elections.

I vote for the incompetence too, it’s just very fucking frustrating.

Re: Disney erased FiveThirtyEight

#239

Post by xmcp123 »

amalcon wrote: post #237
macintux wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your description sounds more like evil vs boring , which is an easy choice for me. And frankly I’ll vote for incompetence over evil too. Because, y’know, evil.

Hell, when it comes to government, I easily prefer boring to not-boring in an executive all else being equal . Which it wasn't here, but still. I want the firebrands with big ideas to improve things in the legislature, and steady hands on the tiller in the executive. Unfortunately it seems that my compatriots want firebrands in both places.

I don’t think the choice is necessarily boring vs firebrands.

Obama is a great example. He was not a firebrand, not boring, and was elected twice in a row.

Charisma matters.

Re: Disney erased FiveThirtyEight

#240

Post by munchler »

causalmodels wrote: post #225
munchler wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this is all true, but it dodges the bigger issue. A presidential election has a binary outcome: yes/no, win/lose. If your statistical model doesn’t contain this single bit in its output, then it doesn’t meet the minimum requirement for being a prediction. Now you might say that it was on me as a consumer to understand this in 2016, but I remember the look of total shock on Nate Silver’s face when he called th…

> If your statistical model doesn’t contain this single bit in its output, then it doesn’t meet the minimum requirement for being a prediction. I would be fascinated to know how you model a coin flip.

Well, that’s my point. You can model a coin flip, but you can’t predict it. A model and a prediction are two different things.
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