Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Why we should care about the Nate Silver vs. Nassim Taleb Twitter war

towardsdatascience.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 212 posts

Re: Why we should care about the Nate Silver vs. Nassim Taleb Twitter war

#71

Post by coldtea »

VintageCool wrote: post #58
kingkawn wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seems like in addition to whether they're more swingy than they should be, are they being presented in a way that is interpreted as more certain or authoritative than they can possibly claim?

The 2016 election was swingy and it was uncertain. In 2008 and 2012, the political media was myopically focused on the twists and turns of the horse race and called it 50-50 dead even. Nate Silver's 538 modeled the election as basically stable with only small polling shifts, and the only change in the last month was a steady decline in the remaining time that McCain (or Romney) had to significantly shift the polls. I…

>The 2016 election was swingy and it was uncertain.

In retrospect. In real life, only a few pundits called it from the start (even explaining the mechanics, including Taleb and that Dilbert guy).

Most of the press and pundits was all certain about a specific outcome until the very last minute.

Re: Why we should care about the Nate Silver vs. Nassim Taleb Twitter war

#72

Post by ummonk »

VintageCool wrote: post #55
hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed. The more I read the more I got embarrassed for the author, mainly because his points were so ridiculously flimsy. I thought this was one of the worst: > Because FiveThirtyEight only predicts probabilities, they do not ever take an absolute stand on an outcome: No ‘skin in the game’ as Taleb would say. This is not, however, something their readers follow suit on. In the public eye, they (FiveThirtyEight) are j…

This "Twitter fight" began with Nate Silver talking to the media, trying to convey both his prediction and its uncertainty: https://thehill.com/homenews/sunday-talk-shows/414759-nate-s... > "So in the House we have Democrats with about a 4 in 5 chance of winning," Silver told ABC's "This Week." > "But no one should be surprised if they only win 19 seats and no one should be surprised if they win 51 seats," Silver add…

I normally like Taleb's insights but it was obvious when following this that he (and Dinesh D'Souza) were ridiculously misconstruing Nate Silver's comment. Two outcomes being "extremely possible" in no way means they have a 50/50 chance of happening. It merely means that neither outcome has a low enough chance that you should assume it won't happen.

Re: Why we should care about the Nate Silver vs. Nassim Taleb Twitter war

#73

Post by [deleted] »

VintageCool wrote: post #55
hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed. The more I read the more I got embarrassed for the author, mainly because his points were so ridiculously flimsy. I thought this was one of the worst: > Because FiveThirtyEight only predicts probabilities, they do not ever take an absolute stand on an outcome: No ‘skin in the game’ as Taleb would say. This is not, however, something their readers follow suit on. In the public eye, they (FiveThirtyEight) are j…

This "Twitter fight" began with Nate Silver talking to the media, trying to convey both his prediction and its uncertainty: https://thehill.com/homenews/sunday-talk-shows/414759-nate-s... > "So in the House we have Democrats with about a 4 in 5 chance of winning," Silver told ABC's "This Week." > "But no one should be surprised if they only win 19 seats and no one should be surprised if they win 51 seats," Silver add…

[deleted]

Re: Why we should care about the Nate Silver vs. Nassim Taleb Twitter war

#74

Post by blurbleblurble »

I'm still waiting for somebody to talk about how tightly coupled Nate Silver's forecasts are to the political processes he attempts to forecast.

What if Nate Silver were to run around on the football field before each play whispering in the players' ears about the how likely they are to win, according to his latest forecast. Imagine that they believed in him, or at least felt some degree of superstition when he came around.

I just think there's something innately flawed about public forecasting of an election. Mathematically and maybe even ethically. I'm still trying to figure out how to articulate why I feel that way.

It could even be argued that polling itself could influence opinions by introducing bias at a critical moment when someone is being asked to consider who they are voting for. What if that's the moment when they make up their mind?

P.S. https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fphy.2015.00077...

Re: Why we should care about the Nate Silver vs. Nassim Taleb Twitter war

#75

Post by dagw »

azernik wrote: post #35
kingkawn wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seems like in addition to whether they're more swingy than they should be, are they being presented in a way that is interpreted as more certain or authoritative than they can possibly claim?

That is actually an issue they've acknowledged and tried to address. People also tended to see percentages and think they reflected vote percents. To address this, for the 2018 election cycle 538 started displaying their odds as numerical ratios (5 in 9, for example) to try to reduce the aura of certainty.

538 started displaying their odds as numerical ratios

Did that actually make things clearer to people? Speaking only for myself, I find ratios quite hard to works with and reason about. I certainly couldn't tell you instantly for example if 5/9 is more or less than 4/7 or how big the difference between the two are without first doing some mental arithmetic. Perhaps people in the US are more used to working with ratios since their measurement systems tend to be ratio based.

Re: Why we should care about the Nate Silver vs. Nassim Taleb Twitter war

#76

Post by logifail »

ummonk wrote: post #72
VintageCool wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This "Twitter fight" began with Nate Silver talking to the media, trying to convey both his prediction and its uncertainty: https://thehill.com/homenews/sunday-talk-shows/414759-nate-s... > "So in the House we have Democrats with about a 4 in 5 chance of winning," Silver told ABC's "This Week." > "But no one should be surprised if they only win 19 seats and no one should be surprised if they win 51 seats," Silver add…

I normally like Taleb's insights but it was obvious when following this that he (and Dinesh D'Souza) were ridiculously misconstruing Nate Silver's comment. Two outcomes being "extremely possible" in no way means they have a 50/50 chance of happening. It merely means that neither outcome has a low enough chance that you should assume it won't happen.

>> Two outcomes being "extremely possible"

What on earth is a professional like Silver doing using the word "extremely" in that context?

If I'd have written that kind of statement in school, the teacher would have crossed it out in red pen and told me to rephrase.

If I toss a coin, are the outcomes "heads" and "tails" both supposed to be "extremely possible", with "landing on its edge" being merely "unlikely"?

(In case you can't already tell) I'm with Taleb on this one.

Re: Why we should care about the Nate Silver vs. Nassim Taleb Twitter war

#78

Post by dagw »

blurbleblurble wrote: post #74

I'm still waiting for somebody to talk about how tightly coupled Nate Silver's forecasts are to the political processes he attempts to forecast. What if Nate Silver were to run around on the football field before each play whispering in the players' ears about the how likely they are to win, according to his latest forecast. Imagine that they believed in him, or at least felt some degree of superstition when he came…

I just think there's something innately flawed about public forecasting of an election.

It used to be the case in France that you weren't allowed to publish polls two weeks before an election for just this reason. They eventually scrapped this with the argument that the all 'elites' had access to internal and private polls anyway so all you where doing was denying the 'people' the same access to information that the 'elites' had.

It could even be argued that polling itself could influence opinions by introducing bias at a critical moment when someone is being asked to consider who they are voting for.

This is a pretty well known effect, to the point that many political strategists try to avoid publishing or drawing attention to polls showing their candidate too far ahead in case it makes voters complacent and decide to stay home. The ideal situation is to make people convinced the polls show the candidates tied 50-50 going in to the election and that 'your' vote could easily swing the whole election.

Re: Why we should care about the Nate Silver vs. Nassim Taleb Twitter war

#79

Post by ThrowMeDown01 »

ummonk wrote: post #72
VintageCool wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This "Twitter fight" began with Nate Silver talking to the media, trying to convey both his prediction and its uncertainty: https://thehill.com/homenews/sunday-talk-shows/414759-nate-s... > "So in the House we have Democrats with about a 4 in 5 chance of winning," Silver told ABC's "This Week." > "But no one should be surprised if they only win 19 seats and no one should be surprised if they win 51 seats," Silver add…

I normally like Taleb's insights but it was obvious when following this that he (and Dinesh D'Souza) were ridiculously misconstruing Nate Silver's comment. Two outcomes being "extremely possible" in no way means they have a 50/50 chance of happening. It merely means that neither outcome has a low enough chance that you should assume it won't happen.

As the blog post rightly said, they present 538 present the forecast in a way that they are never wrong. I can see the point. I also fond the comparison of NFL vs. Senate forecasts meaningful. This kind of "forecasting" seems to be the current version of crystal balling and astrology. They (models) don't really know anything (no causation, and definitely nothing close to an actual model of the real world like in physics). It's a bit like high-performing fund manager sand CEOs who fail to replicate their successes after they were crowned "person of the year", depending on what exactly they forecast a bit better than that because even without having any models that model actual causation, since the world is pretty stable overall (compared to what the universe could throw at us) even correlations may hold for a while.

As for the "50/50" here, I don't think this is meant as being exact numbers (after all, the whole point of the issue is that those exact numbers don't really tell you anything, if anything still is possible and any outcome can be justified later), but simply as the common usage of a phrase in the vernacular for "we don't know either way".

Re: Why we should care about the Nate Silver vs. Nassim Taleb Twitter war

#80

Post by simonh »

tempestn wrote: post #68
comex wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had to look this up, so for the benefit of anyone else curious: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Almost_surely TL;DR: Infinities being weird as usual.

Good read. From that page, here's an example that nicely illustrates the concept: Imagine throwing a dart at a unit square (i.e. a square with area 1) so that the dart always hits exactly one point of the square, and so that each point in the square is equally likely to be hit. Now, notice that since the square has area 1, the probability that the dart will hit any particular subregion of the square equals the area o…

Interesting. Of course to do the experiment as described you would have to determine the point the dart hit with infinite precision. If there is any limit to the precision with which you can determine the point of impact, then the probability that the dart hits close enough to the diagonal that you can't tell if it was hit or not becomes finite.
Post reply on HN