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Disney erased FiveThirtyEight

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Re: Disney erased FiveThirtyEight

#251

Post by gh02t »

ngriffiths wrote: post #196
this_user wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I agree, it's far from pointless. The 538 model is arguably close to the best you can do considering how difficult the task is, but it's important to understand it as purely a reflection of the polling data (and 538's reliability scores for polls), and that polling data is inherently flawed. After all, there are only 2 ways to perform a perfectly accurate poll: either know the outcome a priori, or run the election. We shouldn't be too surprised when models like 538 fail to correctly predict the outcome, because that's not what they represent. It's an analytical tool for understanding the current state of polling.

Re: Disney erased FiveThirtyEight

#252

Post by amalcon »

xmcp123 wrote: post #243
amalcon wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Obama is a very unique case. I wouldn't exactly call him a firebrand, but his public persona managed to give the perception of being a steady hand on the tiller who also had big ideas. The only other presidential candidate in my lifetime to give a similar impression was Al Gore, but he leaned more into the "steady hand" thing to his detriment. He also, as you note, had far less charisma than Obama.

I think you would be surprised by how not completely unique Obama was! The Democrats have had a number of pretty high quality, charismatic candidates, but for some reason they never receive the party backing on the national stage, at least not for the presidency. The Democrats seem to lean in to almost inheriting nominations. Hillary Clinton, Biden, Kamala, etc. “The heir apparent”. Honestly the most unique thing abo…

I mean, I followed the 2020 primary. Basically everyone who thought they had an outside chance seemed to be running there. I liked Buttigeg and Booker then, because they most fit the Obama mold -- well-spoken, charismatic, unifying rhetoric, credible claims (at the time) that they could take on the establishment, no serious baggage. Realistically, both were closer to Al Gore than Obama in execution, but still.

Booker clearly never had a chance in the primary to begin with, even moreso than Harris. Buttigeg suffered from never finding a strong enough constituency -- he wasn't loud enough to pull from the populist wing (who went to Bernie), but never made a serious play for any of the other major wings. He couldn't do that the way Biden did (by calling in favors with other popular Democrats) because he didn't have the connections, but didn't even try to do it the way Warren did (by advocating specific policies).

Meanwhile, Bernie never really tried to expand his coalition outside the populist and leftist wings (which he basically took all of). It turns out that those groups are not enough to win a democratic primary on their own. He was also perceived as a liability in the general -- remember, Democrats hadn't totally given up on Florida yet, and embracing the term "socialism" is a massive liability there.

Warren was somewhat effective in building a broad coalition, and had a similar strategy to Obama. She maybe could've pulled off that style of insurgent campaign. Her candidacy was doomed because of two factors: first, she is just not charismatic enough to compete with Bernie for the populist and leftist wings, but they are absolutely required for an insurgent campaign. Second, even if she had won the primary, she is a massive liability in the general election for a lot of reasons -- which ensured she was never going to win a primary when the primary concern was stopping the bleeding that Donald Trump was seemingly-deliberately causing.

Once you've ruled out Booker, Buttigeg, Sanders, and Warren, you're basically left with Biden vs. a crowd of other boring people. Is it really surprising that the guy who can barter for endorsements and trade on Obama's legacy managed to beat people like Klobuchar?

Now, you might say it's possible that those people (Booker, Buttigeg, Sanders, Warren) would have all made better candidates than Harris in 2024, and could have succeeded with Biden out of the field. I'd agree with that! I am not trying to argue that none of these people are better than Harris; I'm trying to argue that none of them are what Obama is. They were either trying to do something very different than what he did, or much worse at it. They all also lost significant "outsider" cred by 2024 for various reasons.

Re: Disney erased FiveThirtyEight

#253

Post by guywithahat »

tkzed49 wrote: post #3
dionian wrote: post #2

Call me a skeptic, but it's certainly odd all the errors always lean to one side. Maybe this has to do with the leftward trend of the mainstream press. > What happened in 2024 isn’t something I’d have scripted, though. Basically, their new election model was literally broken, continuing to show Joe Biden virtually tied with Trump even after his disastrous debate. (Evidently because Morris’s design for it had been ove…

Why would a left-leaning press engineer errors predicting the victory of the left? Wouldn't this lull supporters of the Democrats into a false sense of security and enable Republican wins?

I think it's more of a systemic issue than top-down manipulation. Like, as a hypothetical, they're disregarding some people as being extremist when in reality they have reasonable, representative views. This produces biased results, and people who agree with the results share them because it supports their world view. The shares and new revenue reinforce the companies decision to produce biased reports, and the effect is politicians read these popular reports thinking they're accurate and make policy decisions around them, when in reality they're just a political wish-list.

Re: Disney erased FiveThirtyEight

#254

Post by NeutralCrane »

ninth_ant wrote: post #31

> I did too much bragging in the media and didn’t anticipate the extent to which public opinion toward FiveThirtyEight would shift once we became a corporate-backed incumbent rather than an eccentric upstart Can’t speak for everyone else, but it wasn’t this for me. It was about 2016 presidential that lost me. He tries to justify this later about how theirs was better than other outlets but I don’t care. Call it emoti…

Hard to believe that even 10 years later, people who don’t understand probability are still hung up on an event with a 30% chance of happening, happening.

Re: Disney erased FiveThirtyEight

#255

Post by robotresearcher »

DANmode wrote: post #198
3eb7988a1663 wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yeah I do understand that. It occurred to me right away that getting people used to partial transparency might be explained by the difficulty of doing opaque drawing on heads-up displays.

Re: Disney erased FiveThirtyEight

#256

Post by johnnyanmac »

sixtyj wrote: post #230
zombittack wrote: post #122

At this point in my life I have zero patience or sympathy for the story of a man selling his company to a massive conglomerate and then feeling betrayed or somehow sad/regretful when said conglomerate destroys it or weaponizes it. I'm simply tired of this hindsight virtue signaling. They don't care about us. That means even you, Nate Silver. Btw was a big fan back then! Signal and the Noise was a great book.

His book is really good reads indeed. Sometimes you get an offer that is financially irresistible. And after thousands of hours of hard work you finally get some reward. Betrayed? That’s why people have lawyers to let them draft really good contract proposal so they aren’t ripped off. But public whining is somehow a common tactic for getting attention online :)

> But public whining is somehow a common tactic for getting attention online :)

Because it works. Not all the time, but a significant number of times. Public backlash from a fanbase is a lot cheaper than a legal battle.

We're well into the attention economy these days. I don't blame someone for using the tools society dealt out to its effect.

Re: Disney erased FiveThirtyEight

#257

Post by johnnyanmac »

ascagnel_ wrote: post #246
Eric_WVGG wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of the most frustrating things about getting older — besides all the fun stuff that happens to your knees and hair — is the fact that younger generations just take what has been normal their whole lives and say “yes this is the normal state of affairs.” We used to have laws and limits regarding media ownership. One company couldn’t own every radio station in most of America. Distributors couldn’t own studios. Etc…

> (And if you’re left-leaning, you can’t pin this mess on the “corporation-friendly” Republican Party because it was Bill Clinton who put his signature on this mess!) I would argue Clinton's presidency moved the Democrats from a center-left party to a center-right party, given its platform of welfare reform and free trade at the expense of labor rights and the social safety net.

Yeah, we've only had 3 dem presidents in 30 years and they all collectively moved the dial a certain way. That's an entire generational upbringing of leadership that's a dim shadow of what Carter, FDR, and the ghost of JFK managed to do for its people.

Neoliberal ideals are really good at keeping a machine running in the direction it's already going. And we arguably needed that with Biden for a short spell. It's never going to change the direction of the machine, though. And we're heading off a cliff

Re: Disney erased FiveThirtyEight

#258

Post by etruong42 »

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…

This is also my experience at Google, and I have not really figured out the incentives. Plenty of people seem _perfectly comfortable_ with the idea that they are being paid tens of millions of dollars when nothing that they do matters. And it takes enormous effort to get anything actually done in the face of our enormous bureaucracies. I have a few hypotheses:

  - Career progression is still a motivation. If there are enough sufficiently motivated people in the organization (whether they come from upper management, middle management, or frontline workers), leaders need to harness that motivation and move it in a direction and potentially dole out career rewards. Otherwise, that motivation that is not properly harnessed can be destructive.
  - Similar to the previous hypothesis, they might axed _because_ nothing they do matters. So they may thrash about, making enough noise and movement to convince enough people that they might actually be doing something important, and it would be risky to dismiss them from their position.
  - Turf wars/politics/etc. If you do "nothing", then you look replaceable. If you're just a very expensive paper-weight, someone may try to usurp your highly-paid paperweight position. Thus, the nash equilibrium is to do something that makes your position less likely to be usurped by making it look difficult or that you are uniquely qualified to do it.

Re: Disney erased FiveThirtyEight

#259

Post by rurp »

MostlyStable wrote: post #213
softwaredoug wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We should have a drinking game in Nate Silver thread anyone complains about 2016 prediction. Then everyone piles on to point out how probabilities work.

I long ago stopped commenting on threads (in /r/CFB) about the SP+ college football model because it go so, so, so tiring correcting the exact same misunderstandings about things as fundamental as what the model was even purporting to do let alone, how it worked. It is incredibly disheartening to me to see the staggering level of statistical illiteracy on display in any online conversation about a statistical model.…

I've long resigned myself to the fact that a lay audience will usually struggle to understand basic statistics. On HN though I don't expect to see those same issues much but have been surprised to see how many posters have trouble differentiating between 30%, 50%, and 99% probabilities.

Re: Disney erased FiveThirtyEight

#260

Post by Bratmon »

bambax wrote: post #221
zombittack wrote: post #122

At this point in my life I have zero patience or sympathy for the story of a man selling his company to a massive conglomerate and then feeling betrayed or somehow sad/regretful when said conglomerate destroys it or weaponizes it. I'm simply tired of this hindsight virtue signaling. They don't care about us. That means even you, Nate Silver. Btw was a big fan back then! Signal and the Noise was a great book.

This comment is maybe a little too aggressive but I kind of share the sentiment. Mostly, after reading this long article, I'm surprised he never quite explains why he never tried to go at it independently? He says > I’ve always had a fairly entrepreneurial spirit but that doesn't square well with being a cog in the huge Disney machine.

He's been independent since 2023
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