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Electoral College Decision Tree

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371–373 of 373 posts

Re: Electoral College Decision Tree

#371

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Polls don't predict anything. Semantic nitpicking. Clearly, my comment was about how well the polls reflected reality. > Some of the poll-based forecasts made errors like.... You're making a different statement than the person I'm responding to, who said that the polls didn't align with reality because they did not weight for education. That is something that is easy to verify. I was simply asking if it was verifie…

> You're making a different statement than the person I'm responding to, who said that the polls didn't align with reality because they did not weight for education. Yes, I'm disagreeing; the polls in 2016 reflected the actual outcome very well (they were off, but not unusually far; the entire idea that there was an unusual error is based on overemphasis of fairly new poll-based predictors, especially one at the NYTi…

> If you want to fit a particular single result you can change how you handle any factor and get a perfect match.

That's not how it works. Weighting education samples to match the population they were sampled from is not fitting a particular result.

> Yes, I'm disagreeing

Then your point is irrelevant to the question I was asking. newacct583 said there was a particular problem with the polls, and I pointed out that if the polls had that particular problem, there is an easy way to check. I asked if that check had been done.

Re: Electoral College Decision Tree

#372

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Polls don't predict anything. Semantic nitpicking. Clearly, my comment was about how well the polls reflected reality. > Some of the poll-based forecasts made errors like.... You're making a different statement than the person I'm responding to, who said that the polls didn't align with reality because they did not weight for education. That is something that is easy to verify. I was simply asking if it was verifie…

> I was simply asking if it was verified by showing that weighting by education made the 2016 polls align with reality. To try and answer your technical question: yes and no. I know why you think this would be easy to do. But this is harder to do than you're thinking because the problem with education was both weighting and sampling . So, yes, you can play with the weights and get a corrected result. (That's literall…

The weights can be computed by comparing how often different educational levels appear in the samples vs. the population. They should not be wiggled in order to get a particular outcome.

nl linked to a paper showing that the analysis I asked for was done and did not have the affect that newacct583 claimed it would have.

Re: Electoral College Decision Tree

#373

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My deepest apologies for opining, comrade throwawaygh

> My deepest apologies for opining, comrade throwawaygh Opining without doing any research is lazy and undermines good conversation. Your exchange with GP literally amounts to a "uh huh / nuh uh". Name-calling, FWIW, is even less productive. >> you needn't know, it was corrected There were long reports on what went wrong (and what didn't) in 2016 polling. For example, https://www.aapor.org/Education-Resources/Reports…

"They have been corrected"
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