91–100 of 102 posts
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?
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You misunderstand my point. I am talking about the actual election that happened where these many random events that could have resulted in a different outcome did not happen. I was being a bit facetious maybe in my point. But the point is that the thing that is to be predicted is the actual real event that occurs in this universe. Silver made a prediction, and it was wrong. "Oh but it was only a 70% prediction" You…
Statistical likelihood is a measurement of the known data at the time. If you engage with the content otherwise then it's on you if you have the wrong takeaway. No one who makes a prediction based on a statistical model is going to be right every time. That doesn't mean it's not right to make a prediction. The statistical modeling can help you to be correct more often than not. And if you were going to be truly fair…
The prediction is for one single outcome at one point in time. The prediction can not be that Clinton 70% wins it, or wins it 70 out of every 100 times because there is no 100 2016 elections. Those things may apply to his mathematical models, but obviously the models are attempting to predict the real world. Try to weasel out of it as much as you like, but the prediction was that Clinton would win, and the prediction was wrong.
"Oh he was only giving the odds for his model, you don't understand it's your fault he mislead you" -- no. Every analyst and pundit has a model or a system, obviously nobody thinks any of them can see the future. Nate Silver was very explicitly predicting the outcome of the election. As you can see from all his commentary articles that came out along with the numbers.
And yes, 538's vaunted models and data science fell over when encountering situations that had not been seen or anticipated or built on before, obviously. We didn't need Einstein or even Nate Silver to tell us that. That's the problem isn't it. All this hamming up of "data science" and "mathematical models" is meaningless. Your data and math can be perfect and correct, but if they fail to provide an understanding of the world, then they are perfectly useless.
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It's not nonsense. What's nonsense is to say Nate's prediction for the election was accurate or correct. It trivially was not. What it would be reasonable to say is if his model had correctly predicted the outcome of a significant sample of elections, then you could say his model has some accuracy or predictive power. But it still would never have been accurate or right in the specific instances it got wrong, that's…
What are you even classifying as accurate or correct? Do you take every 51% prediction from FiveThirtyEight and if the result is a win you consider that forecast accurate? And every 49% prediction must result in a loss? This just not how statistical forecasts work. >What it would be reasonable to say is if his model had correctly predicted the outcome of a significant sample of elections, then you could say his model…
When somebody gives a prediction of the outcome of an election? I classify it as correct if they predicted the candidate who wins.
> Do you take every 51% prediction from FiveThirtyEight and if the result is a win you consider that forecast accurate? And every 49% prediction must result in a loss? This just not how statistical forecasts work.
No, but it is the way to map statistical forecasts to reality. He was quite explicitly predicting the outcome of the actual election. That prediction was incorrect.
The whole rating of the accuracy of these models is really snakeoil dressed up as science. There is a lot less rigorous science and a lot more feelings and adjusting numbers and twiddling formulas retrospectively than you were probably led to believe.
Would a 99-1 for Trump model have been worse or less accurate than a 51-49 for Clinton model? Despite predicting the correct outcome whereas the Clinton model predicted the incorrect outcome?
> I don't know why you're couching that in a hypothetical, FiveThirtyEight has repeatedly done that exercise.
Not really with much rigor. Where are their reproducible published papers and data sets? They made their name with a bit of luck on a fairly predictable election, but were unable to show a significant advantage in their methods across a number of elections.
> It is core to the concept of a probability that the result is going to go the opposite way from the prediction sometimes! It's meaningless to call it "wrong".
No no, that's not true. There are two different things here. Firstly, if you had a model and method of predicting elections that you applied to a sample of elections and showed that it had a good ability to correctly predict, then you can say your model is a good prediction across typical elections. The model getting one wrong does not make it a bad model over a set of elections. It absolutely is wrong for that particular election though. And secondly if you use a model to make a prediction about a particular election, when your prediction turns out to be wrong, it was not retroactively correct because it just followed the model and you claim the model is good. That's just not how statistics or predictions work.
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Where did anyone suggest you were paid to post opinions of Nate Silver?
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…
Yes, he did: https://www.crainsnewyork.com/real-estate/residential/cny-na...
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Statistical likelihood is a measurement of the known data at the time. If you engage with the content otherwise then it's on you if you have the wrong takeaway. No one who makes a prediction based on a statistical model is going to be right every time. That doesn't mean it's not right to make a prediction. The statistical modeling can help you to be correct more often than not. And if you were going to be truly fair…
I know what statistical likelihood is. I don't have a problem with them using a model or models and doing some statistics on it to develop these predictions, or even necessarily with the way they report their predictions as a % chance to win. I have a problem with the insinuation that "70% Clinton" is somehow a prediction of a singular real event or that Trump winning is consistent with said prediction "because if we…
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I know what statistical likelihood is. I don't have a problem with them using a model or models and doing some statistics on it to develop these predictions, or even necessarily with the way they report their predictions as a % chance to win. I have a problem with the insinuation that "70% Clinton" is somehow a prediction of a singular real event or that Trump winning is consistent with said prediction "because if we…
You are asserting an insinuation that 538 never made. That is the disconnect here.
https://fivethirtyeightindex.com/graphics/ https://fivethirtyeightindex.com/illustrations/
The archive.org backend is at https://archive.org/details/fivethirtyeight-collection and will almost certainly outlive my site.
Unfortunately most of the most important visualizations are broken in the archived version. Including the gun deaths visualization and I think the P-hacking interactive https://web.archive.org/web/20230205124354/https://fivethirt... It's kinda sad to know no one else will get to experience those interactive visualizations. Though its nice to see the approval comparison page still works https://web.archive.org/web/202…