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FiveThirtyEight articles on the Internet Archive

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Re: FiveThirtyEight articles on the Internet Archive

#81

Post by shagie »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #66
alberto-m wrote: post #57

I am certainly missing a lot of nuance here, but it seems to me Nate Silver managed to have his cake and eat it too. He surely got good money for selling FiveThirtyEight, and now that the buyer has erased the product, Nate can get back a huge chunk of its readers since he offers very similar analyses on his personal site. Sure, natesilver.net has less brand recognition than fivethirtyeight.com, but it's still decentl…

> Nate can get back a huge chunk of its readers The downside is this furthers the divide between folks who pay for subscriptions and masses who get shoveled ad-powered slop.

https://electoral-vote.com is still up, running, and showing data. It has always been free and ad free.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electoral-vote.com

> Electoral-vote.com is a website created by computer scientist Andrew S. Tanenbaum. The site's primary content was originally poll analysis to project election outcomes. Since the 2016 elections, the site also has featured daily commentary on political news stories.

Re: FiveThirtyEight articles on the Internet Archive

#82

Post by amalcon »

newaccount670 wrote: post #78
amalcon wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

538: "We have no idea who will win. It seems like basically a coin toss." Reality: someone wins. Internet: "How did 538 mess this up so badly?"

Biden got literally 0% of the vote despite 538 predicting him to win. They chose to pretend Biden's mental decline wasn't happening because that was the Democrat party line at the time. How can you trust predictions from someone who is willing to manipulate his results to prop up his political party?

What would you have them do in that period? Give Trump a 100% chance of winning? Make up a candidate who wasn't actually running? Arguably the most realistic thing to do would be to give X% Trump, Y% Some Democrat -- but had they done that, they'd have been rightly criticized for making an obvious vibe-driven decision. You can't change a quantitative prediction based on qualitative observations; all you can do is try to find more and better data sources.

The issue the models had in that period was pretty well documented: the models rated fundamentals (like economic indicators) more highly relative to polls when the election was farther in the future. Those were the same economic indicators that famously do not capture the pain average Americans have felt since COVID, and that politicians across the spectrum have tried to use to deny that pain when they are in power.

You can argue that this issue was well known at the time, and that a better group of analysts might have taken action to mitigate it. I'd argue that myself. It turns out that it's kind of hard, but that's a terrible excuse not to try. That is different than deliberately manipulating results for political ends, though. It's unclear what political ends those would even be -- who exactly benefits from an "unclear winner" forecast in that situation?

Re: FiveThirtyEight articles on the Internet Archive

#83

Post by tardedmeme »

bombcar wrote: post #11
nl wrote: post #3

This is because whoever owns Fivethirtyeight now (ABC?) deleted the whole archive of articles on the site.

Don't we need more than an index of Archive.org because whomever controls the domain could robots.txt these out of existence if they wanted to?

It's not about robots.txt but yes, the owners of 538 can just send a cease and desist letter to get them all immediately removed. Many sites that don't want to preserve history have done this already.

Re: FiveThirtyEight articles on the Internet Archive

#84

Post by derektank »

xattt wrote: post #62
alberto-m wrote: post #57

I am certainly missing a lot of nuance here, but it seems to me Nate Silver managed to have his cake and eat it too. He surely got good money for selling FiveThirtyEight, and now that the buyer has erased the product, Nate can get back a huge chunk of its readers since he offers very similar analyses on his personal site. Sure, natesilver.net has less brand recognition than fivethirtyeight.com, but it's still decentl…

It’s possible NS may have signed a contract saying that he cannot engage in elections prediction for X YZ months to same extent that he did with FiveThirtyEight.

He didn’t. He retained the IP of his election forecast models and he publishes the results from them on his newsletter, The Silver Bulletin

Re: FiveThirtyEight articles on the Internet Archive

#85

Post by xattt »

derektank wrote: post #84
xattt wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s possible NS may have signed a contract saying that he cannot engage in elections prediction for X YZ months to same extent that he did with FiveThirtyEight.

He didn’t. He retained the IP of his election forecast models and he publishes the results from them on his newsletter, The Silver Bulletin

That’s a relief!

Re: FiveThirtyEight articles on the Internet Archive

#87

Post by opsnooperfax »

dreijs wrote: post #56
materielle wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also, they don’t any plans for the IP, and Nate would’ve paid above-market rate just to take over and preserve the content for posterity. He estimates that they deleted 200,000 hours of human labor. This is just some Disney suits being extraordinarily petty.

Yes, just to add to this: in the article by Nate [0] he says that he tried to buy the IP but Disney refused because they were unhappy with some of his prior comments. "I did approach Disney a year or two ago, through my agent, about acquiring the remaining IP. ... We were told to basically get lost: ABC was annoyed with my critical public comments about their management of FiveThirtyEight. It apparently wasn’t a long…

Pride comes before the fall. Sorry, Nate.

Re: FiveThirtyEight articles on the Internet Archive

#88

Post by IAmBroom »

isityettime wrote: post #59
stinkbeetle wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think he did hedge (or "strategically bug fix"). The prediction for Trump went from IIRC around 15 to 30 in the last week or so. It was a big swing, IIRC with a lot of waffle around why it happened but not a lot of verifiable fact. > I still think that’s about accurate. Maybe it should’ve been 40%. It wasn't accurate. This is something people misunderstand about these predictions. If the 2016 election was held 100…

That's the beauty of this brand of pseudoscience. Statistical predictions of singular events like a particular election are totally unfalsifiable. You can just say "I guess we live in 30% world" or whatever, every time.

> Statistical predictions of singular events like a particular election are totally unfalsifiable.

Yes. And the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics was just violated by millions of atoms within my lungs, that happened to increase in energy above the ambient average due to collisions. Clearly thermodynamics is pseudoscience, too!

Re: FiveThirtyEight articles on the Internet Archive

#89

Post by IAmBroom »

defrost wrote: post #26
Barbing wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you think was perceived wrong with the old title?

At a guess (my Telepathy/IP is weak today, I'm not reading dang at usual strength) .. the initially submitted title was "invented" for submission and didn't match the content title. HN veers toward "the guts of the content w/out decoration" - limited additional information, framing, weasel words, perceived slanting, etc. It's uncommon to name an author unless the author themself is an important part of "the story". I…

Try megadoses of Vitamin C - organic, free-range, ethically sourced, of course.

It helped when I developed an allergy to healing crystals.

Re: FiveThirtyEight articles on the Internet Archive

#90

Post by draw_down »

aeternum wrote: post #86

Did FiveThirtyEight really get that much right other than the 2016 election? I remember thinking they were the best data journalists out there, and they had some nice visualizations but did their other predictions actually hold up?

[dead]
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