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A few words about FiveThirtyEight

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Re: A few words about FiveThirtyEight

#71

Post by bnralt »

Uehreka wrote: post #40
qqtt wrote: post #24

As someone who was super interested in the 538-style of election coverage in 2008, I've kind of fallen "out of love" so to speak with election models and forecasting in general. I'm not really convinced about what it adds to the conversation around elections. We can all look at various polls and get an assessment of who is generally ahead. Weighted polling aggregators and forecasting models just collect all these pol…

I find the modeling super useful, many conventional media outlets still don’t properly communicate probabilities to their audience. For instance, I vividly remember the following exchange between Nate and some news anchor in during one of the 2016 conventions: Anchor: So Nate, you say Trump has a 25% chance of winning, can you tell us exactly what that means? Nate: Sure. So imagine I flipped two quarters, and they bo…

I see this argument a lot, but it's contradictory. You're simultaneously arguing that people don't understand statistics because they're treating a 25% chance as no chance to win, but then you're doing the same by saying that the other predictions, in the 15% to 2% range[1] are "cope forecasts" that people who followed them "looked extremely foolish" (the only major 99% forecast was PEC, but Wang said that's because the model broke down and the actual forecast was around 5% [1]).

25%, 15%, 5%, even 2% chances happen with a decent amount of frequency. I don't understand how people can say that people don't understand probability because they think a 25% chance won't happen, but then turn around and treat a 15% chance the very same way.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/upshot/presidential... [2] https://web.archive.org/web/20171120175008/https://election....

Re: A few words about FiveThirtyEight

#72

Post by genewitch »

nobody9999 wrote: post #64
genewitch wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you sure about that? 89% of counties turned red. Looking at 1.5% total difference is missing the forest for the trees. Trump got all swing states. To quote: "this is absolutely a mandate." https://youtu.be/zG3n2IeaTPA edit: facts cannot be insolent. The youtube link is a guest on the view named Stephen something, from this week, saying the words that i typed into the comment box. Not clicking it is doing yourself…

> https://youtu.be/zG3n2IeaTPA >note: not clicking that because you disagree with me is really doing yourself a disservice. I won't click the link because I'm here for discussion with the users of this site, not some random video you thought was interesting/useful. Why do you find it interesting/useful? What arguments are made? How do those arguments comport with your beliefs? Let's have a discussion. So tell me what…

lol TIL "The View" is "some rando on youtube"

And to answer your question, the video is a guest on the view who i don't know, saying the exact numbers i quoted. I was quoting the person on the view, which aired yesterday or something.

what's interesting, is instead of discussing what i said prior to the link, you chose to instead try and make me feel bad for linking a video.

Keep it classy, HN.

Re: A few words about FiveThirtyEight

#73

Post by genewitch »

bee_rider wrote: post #69
nobody9999 wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> https://youtu.be/zG3n2IeaTPA >note: not clicking that because you disagree with me is really doing yourself a disservice. I won't click the link because I'm here for discussion with the users of this site, not some random video you thought was interesting/useful. Why do you find it interesting/useful? What arguments are made? How do those arguments comport with your beliefs? Let's have a discussion. So tell me what…

Also it is a video. Asking literate people to go watch a video is disrespectful of their time.

It is a video of a guest on the view saying the words that i typed. It was "citing a source."

Re: A few words about FiveThirtyEight

#74

Post by genewitch »

aaronbrethorst wrote: post #63
genewitch wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you sure about that? 89% of counties turned red. Looking at 1.5% total difference is missing the forest for the trees. Trump got all swing states. To quote: "this is absolutely a mandate." https://youtu.be/zG3n2IeaTPA edit: facts cannot be insolent. The youtube link is a guest on the view named Stephen something, from this week, saying the words that i typed into the comment box. Not clicking it is doing yourself…

Counties don't vote and Trump's popular vote "mandate" is smaller than Clinton's popular vote win in 2016. Here's a fun stat: literally 40 states have a population that is less than the population of Los Angeles county alone. Why doesn't Los Angeles itself have 80 senators? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_United_States_presidentia... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024_United_States_presidentia... Setting aside 200…

Out of curiosity, do you recall seeing a "county map" of the blue votes in the 2020 election?

Re: A few words about FiveThirtyEight

#75

Post by genewitch »

roenxi wrote: post #62
genewitch wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you sure about that? 89% of counties turned red. Looking at 1.5% total difference is missing the forest for the trees. Trump got all swing states. To quote: "this is absolutely a mandate." https://youtu.be/zG3n2IeaTPA edit: facts cannot be insolent. The youtube link is a guest on the view named Stephen something, from this week, saying the words that i typed into the comment box. Not clicking it is doing yourself…

Sure. And what was the probability of something like that happening? About a coin flip. It is an election using First-Past-the-Post counting. A 50:50 probability doesn't mean the final count will be close, it (usually, anyway) means there is evens odds which side is about to win decisively. The county results are expected to correlate, as are the swing states in all likelihood.

the probability of 89% of blue counties (in 2020) switching to red counties is a 50-50 chance? can you show your work?

Re: A few words about FiveThirtyEight

#76

Post by kemayo »

red_hare wrote: post #33

I started listening to the 538 Politics podcast a lifetime ago when they did The Gerrymandering Project. The deep intertwining of history, intentions, and statistics made the narrative compelling. I learned so much about how our democracy worked that I would never have known otherwise. So, I kept listening and kept learning. It was sometimes difficult, not because of their storytelling skills, but because the news wa…

Yeah, they've been on my podcast subscription list for at least 5 years now, and I'll miss having them around.

I had growing conflicted feelings about the site's overall impact on media, sadly. It felt like, although it was good that they existed as a dedicated organization, they contributed to (or were a symptom of) the overall media landscape's slide into politics coverage as mostly coverage of the horse-race. Sometimes I want to hear what the Scottish teens think a news story means... but more often I want something deeply reported about policy.

Re: A few words about FiveThirtyEight

#77

Post by kemayo »

genewitch wrote: post #74
aaronbrethorst wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Counties don't vote and Trump's popular vote "mandate" is smaller than Clinton's popular vote win in 2016. Here's a fun stat: literally 40 states have a population that is less than the population of Los Angeles county alone. Why doesn't Los Angeles itself have 80 senators? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_United_States_presidentia... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024_United_States_presidentia... Setting aside 200…

Out of curiosity, do you recall seeing a "county map" of the blue votes in the 2020 election?

Why would we have? It's pointless. As the GP said, land doesn't vote.

The more interesting map is the one where you weight the display by population, since it gives a much more accurate representation of how the USA is divided: https://engaging-data.com/pages/scripts/d3Electoral/countyel...

The tool on that website is actually pretty informative to play with if you want to quickly see how adjusting the map style can change the perception. https://engaging-data.com/county-electoral-map-land-vs-popul...

Re: A few words about FiveThirtyEight

#78

Post by danorama »

genewitch wrote: post #74
aaronbrethorst wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Counties don't vote and Trump's popular vote "mandate" is smaller than Clinton's popular vote win in 2016. Here's a fun stat: literally 40 states have a population that is less than the population of Los Angeles county alone. Why doesn't Los Angeles itself have 80 senators? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_United_States_presidentia... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024_United_States_presidentia... Setting aside 200…

Out of curiosity, do you recall seeing a "county map" of the blue votes in the 2020 election?

I don’t personally recall, but it’s kind of a silly idea to break down presidential votes by county anyway. At least counting states matters legally in elections. And counting people matters as a way to judge desires and sentiments.

Counting by counties combines the unrepresentativeness of the Electoral College with the legal irrelevance of the popular vote.

Re: A few words about FiveThirtyEight

#80

Post by roenxi »

genewitch wrote: post #75
roenxi wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure. And what was the probability of something like that happening? About a coin flip. It is an election using First-Past-the-Post counting. A 50:50 probability doesn't mean the final count will be close, it (usually, anyway) means there is evens odds which side is about to win decisively. The county results are expected to correlate, as are the swing states in all likelihood.

the probability of 89% of blue counties (in 2020) switching to red counties is a 50-50 chance? can you show your work?

https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/2024-election-forecast/

You'll note that the distribution mode for a Trump win was 312 electoral votes; which is what he got. They do a good forecast - it suggests there was a 50-50 chance Trump wins, and if he wins the most likely outcome is ... exactly what happened.

If it was a Harris win the best bet is she would have gotten 319 electoral votes with high correlation in the swing states too.

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