Reverse-engineering the problematic tail behavior of Fivethirtyeight forecast • Hacker News Board

Re: Reverse-engineering the problematic tail behavior of Fivethirtyeight forecast

#241

Post by runawaybottle » Mon, Oct 26, 2020, 6:00 PM UTC

rsynnott wrote: post #229

runawaybottle wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it’s certainly more grounded in reality if you realize 538 is basically finished if they miss the mark again. If you listen to what they say, they admit they were not able to measure for the no-colllege male demographic in 2016, or in other words, they couldn’t model identity politics. Why couldn’t they do that? I’m not sure, but they are certain they can this time around because they saw the 2016 data and no…

> If you listen to what they say, they admit they were not able to measure for the no-colllege male demographic in 2016, or in other words, they couldn’t model identity politics. Why couldn’t they do that? I’m not sure, but they are certain they can this time around because they saw the 2016 data and now believe they have more complete data to not make the same mistake again. I think you possibly misunderstand what 5…

No, I don’t think so. If you build a model out of pollsters asking stupid questions, you deserve some blame.

I’ve got some basketball statistics to populate 538s model if their interested. Lebron did pretty good this season, hopefully they can correlate that with the black vote.

Their model is not transparent on any level, because if they make it transparent, we’d easily be able to see why it’s ridiculous.

Re: Reverse-engineering the problematic tail behavior of Fivethirtyeight forecast

#242

Post by mrtnmcc » Mon, Oct 26, 2020, 7:24 PM UTC

amscanne wrote: post #218

mrtnmcc wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd argue negative correlation on conditionals distributions can be reasonable here. In that particular WA-MS example, if Trump suddenly took more liberal positions and somehow won WA (e.g., announces he's pro abortion), he would in fact be more at risk of losing Mississippi. The idea that these two states are in play already is fringe and would require some major idealogical (or other third variable) shifts.

But then the correlations with the other 48 states are broken. In that insane scenario, Mississippi now votes for Biden (because I guess he’s suddenly come out as pro-life as well), but Alaska still goes for Trump. The negative correlations don’t make sense. Maybe it’s a small problem and the model is solid overall, but... I don’t think you can justify that one effect.

I think you have to look at the joint distribution with Alaska included to draw any conclusions. Just looking at separate marginals will be uninformative.

Re: Reverse-engineering the problematic tail behavior of Fivethirtyeight forecast

#243

Post by chki » Tue, Oct 27, 2020, 1:47 PM UTC

jerkstate wrote: post #232

chki wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Similar to how "not every Trump Voter is a >>Proud Boy<<" not every Biden supporter is a yard-sign stealing communist. Actually the extremists are in the minority in both groups. If you start going down that road and base your vote on how bad the worst people on the other side are, democracy is pretty much collapsing already.

Sure - I am above my quota for politics posts on HN but since this article is about problematic tail behavior I'll go ahead anyways. You are right that probably a very small minority of Trump opposers are actually stealing yard signs. However, a larger component are advocating for censorship of opinions and facts that disagree with their worldview, and many more will readily shut down any opposing discussion about im…

I just remembered this thread when I came across this story of a club owner being harassed after appearing in an Ad for Joe Biden https://www.billboard.com/amp/articles/news/politics/9471700....

Essentially I think that those narratives about one side "shutting down" the other side are not true for either party. In my opinion they are mainly the result of filter bubbles where you are constantly presented to all the outrageous things that the other side is doing (the above mentioned article is clearly an example) while actually people remain largely civil and are not tied to their political identity in such an extreme way.