Electoral-Vote.com - FiveThirtyEight: An Assessment

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Nate has been reduced to a bumbling Diablosing mess. He really, really, REALLY wants to not go down in history as someone who was wrong about the 2016 presidential election. He was already wrong about the primary, but the general is something else entirely.

To me it seems like Nate is, rather than talking to his Twitter followers, talking to himself. This entire time he keeps giving himself an out, nearly every statement is him covering his own ass. Maybe the debate helped! Maybe it didn't! If it helped, then it was meant to be! If it wasn't, then it wasn't! And then he takes it out on what he calls "Democrats in denial" for people going "dude, what the fuck are you talking about".


I feel like this entire thread has been pulled from some alternate dimension where fivethirtyeight hasn't showed Hillary with a large likelihood of winning every single day since since she became the nominee.

The article just reads like a bunch of math nerd saltiness at how much more attention he gets than them.
 
I feel like this entire thread has been pulled from some alternate dimension where fivethirtyeight hasn't showed Hillary with a large likelihood of winning every single day since since she became the nominee.

The article just reads like a bunch of math nerd saltiness at how much more attention he gets than them.
538's current model seems to be fine, albeit reactive to the point where its predictive value might not be good.

Nate Silver's writing on the other hand is going a bit cuckoo. That good news-bad news tweet he made was embarrassing. That's the equivalent of saying "It will rain tomorrow, unless it doesn't."
 
I feel like this entire thread has been pulled from some alternate dimension where fivethirtyeight hasn't showed Hillary with a large likelihood of winning every single day since since she became the nominee.

The article just reads like a bunch of math nerd saltiness at how much more attention he gets than them.

That isn't true. The Nowcast has Trump up for 5 days and all 3 forecasts have shown a narrowing.

If 538 believes Hillary has a large likelihood of winning, their articles may be from an alternate dimension--from 2 days ago:
http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/election-update-clinton-edge-gets-even-narrower/

Well, folks, this is getting tight. Donald Trump is in his strongest-ever position in FiveThirtyEight’s polls-plus forecast, which gives him a 46 percent chance of winning the election. Trump’s chances are about the same, 45 percent, according to our polls-only forecast, his best standing since it showed him with a 50 percent chance in the midst of his convention bounce.

Our models have been on the move toward Trump for roughly six weeks. But with dozens of polls coming out over the past few days, he’s no longer much of an underdog at all. Hillary Clinton leads narrowly — by 1.5 percentage points — in our projection of the popular vote. But polling weakness in states that Clinton probably needs to win, particularly Colorado and Pennsylvania, makes the Electoral College almost even.
 
That isn't true. The Nowcast has Trump up for 5 days and all 3 forecasts have shown a narrowing.
The Nowcast seems pointless to me. We are not voting today. The entire point of the election forecast is to actually predict the odds for the election, and the Nowcast doesn't do it. I'm not sure why it's even on the site when Silver basically tells people to ignore it.
 
The Nowcast seems pointless to me. We are not voting today. The entire point of the election forecast is to actually predict the odds for the election, and the Nowcast doesn't do it. I'm not sure why it's even on the site when Silver basically tells people to ignore it.

I have a few cynical takes on why the Nowcast exists:

1. By creating a super reactive model that changes daily. You encourage people to visit your site more often. This would please the Disney overlords and drive more people to read the punditry on the site.

2. And then the super reactive Nowcast allows for more data based punditry. If you want to write a super reactive, horse race-style hot take, you can grab numbers from the Nowcast. They will support such narratives. If you want to write a more zoomed out, contrarian style piece, you can pull from Polls only or Polls Plus. Silver have created a sort of all-you-can-eat number buffet to feed his sites punditry.

3. He has no faith in his ability to make a good model, so why not make 3 of them and hedge your bets!

4. He has lost his damn mind.
 
538 was still dead on about the midterms when, as I remember, Wang and Co were pretty off. So, while I understand their point, I think that Nate still has a better record than most when it comes to proven forecasting.

I think people underestimate Nate's model at their own peril. Just because I'd like Hillary to have a more comfortable lead doesn't make it so.

I think it's inevitable that liberals would turn on 538 once it started showing them things they don't want to hear. As anyone who remembers 2004's "the undecideds are going to break for Kerry" refrain should recall, unskewing is not limited to the right.

That having been said, there are still things that make me skeptical about his model. Like how a Google Consumer Survey with an absurdly small sample size of 73 was enough to make him predict that Trump would win a record share of the vote for a Republican in DC (polls-only) or very close to the record (polls-plus). His numbers have since come down due to a UPI/CVoter tracking poll. Given that the Republican vote in DC, while never good, experienced a sharp drop in the 1990s from which it has never recovered and Trump is not projected to do anything near a record for Republicans nationally, this is a dubious conclusion. If that's what the polling data shows, so be it, but a Google Consumer Survey of 73 people (which is not a traditional poll) should not be moving the needle that much in a well-designed model. Frankly I wouldn't include such a "poll" at all, but certainly it received too high a weight.

As others have also commented on, the large swings in his win probabilities are also concerning. This could be justified in an election where the polls are super volatile, but they haven't been unusually so this cycle. They are more volatile than 2008 and 2012, but that's more that the polls were more stable than usual those cycles, which in some sense made those elections easy to forecast. It really makes me wonder how his model would've done in 2000, an election where the polls saw frequent and often dramatic swings throughout the cycle (going, for instance, from Gore +11 to Bush +11 in the span of a couple of weeks in October). Nate suggests that a high number of undecided/third party responses is at least somewhat responsible for this. While he has a point, that really calls into question some of those 80-90% win probabilities that he was giving Clinton back in August.

It is true that Silver outperformed Wang in 2014, but Wang outperformed Silver in the primaries and arguably in 2012 as well (it depends on how you choose to evaluate but in any case their performance was pretty similar in 2012). He's also had other misses, such as UK 2010, where his model understated Labour's seat share while overstating the Liberal Democrats and overall basically performing no better than a simple model of averaging all the polls and assuming a uniform swing. I'll give him a pass on UK 2015 given the systematic polling error in that election. Silver's overall forecasting record is pretty good, but it's not perfect either. Maybe his model is outperforming the others, or maybe it's being exposed somewhat this cycle. Either way we should find out in November (though we should expect the various models to converge somewhat).

Really though a lot of the criticism directed at Nate has less to do with his models than with his punditry. During the primaries he was often smug and arrogant in declaring that people were wrong to think that Trump would win the nomination, then he offered a mea culpa after he was wrong, and then went right back to old habits. This is the thing that I dislike the most about Nate. As others have noted, he's in many ways become the very thing he criticized.
 
I think it's inevitable that liberals would turn on 538 once it started showing them things they don't want to hear. As anyone who remembers 2004's "the undecideds are going to break for Kerry" refrain should recall, unskewing is not limited to the right.

That having been said, there are still things that make me skeptical about his model. Like how a Google Consumer Survey with an absurdly small sample size of 73 was enough to make him predict that Trump would win a record share of the vote for a Republican in DC (polls-only) or very close to the record (polls-plus). His numbers have since come down due to a UPI/CVoter tracking poll. Given that the Republican vote in DC, while never good, experienced a sharp drop in the 1990s from which it has never recovered and Trump is not projected to do anything near a record for Republicans nationally, this is a dubious conclusion. If that's what the polling data shows, so be it, but a Google Consumer Survey of 73 people (which is not a traditional poll) should not be moving the needle that much in a well-designed model. Frankly I wouldn't include such a "poll" at all, but certainly it received too high a weight.

As others have also commented on, the large swings in his win probabilities are also concerning. This could be justified in an election where the polls are super volatile, but they haven't been unusually so this cycle. They are more volatile than 2008 and 2012, but that's more that the polls were more stable than usual those cycles, which in some sense made those elections easy to forecast. It really makes me wonder how his model would've done in 2000, an election where the polls saw frequent and often dramatic swings throughout the cycle (going, for instance, from Gore +11 to Bush +11 in the span of a couple of weeks in October). Nate suggests that a high number of undecided/third party responses is at least somewhat responsible for this. While he has a point, that really calls into question some of those 80-90% win probabilities that he was giving Clinton back in August.

It is true that Silver outperformed Wang in 2014, but Wang outperformed Silver in the primaries and arguably in 2012 as well (it depends on how you choose to evaluate but in any case their performance was pretty similar in 2012). He's also had other misses, such as UK 2010, where his model understated Labour's seat share while overstating the Liberal Democrats and overall basically performing no better than a simple model of averaging all the polls and assuming a uniform swing. I'll give him a pass on UK 2015 given the systematic polling error in that election. Silver's overall forecasting record is pretty good, but it's not perfect either. Maybe his model is outperforming the others, or maybe it's being exposed somewhat this cycle. Either way we should find out in November (though we should expect the various models to converge somewhat).

Really though a lot of the criticism directed at Nate has less to do with his models than with his punditry. During the primaries he was often smug and arrogant in declaring that people were wrong to think that Trump would win the nomination, then he offered a mea culpa after he was wrong, and then went right back to old habits. This is the thing that I dislike the most about Nate. As others have noted, he's in many ways become the very thing he criticized.

Definitely fine with Silver being criticized about his wiffle waffle punditry. But I think that there are folks who notice this habit and then conclude that it's because ESPN or it's because he has a vested interest in keeping the horse-race going are fooling themselves. It all seemed rather far fetched to me that a person whose reputation was built on data-journalism is gonna throw that out the window to participate in the same tired horse race narrative that's no better than whatever drek CNN or MSNBC or Fox is putting out there.
 
Yeah, the issue is not that liberals or democrats or whatever are upset with Silver and 538 for their horserace "dead heat" punditry, or at least that's not what I created this thread to be about. Which is why I started this thread with electoral-vote, an original site that did this type of analysis.

Rather, it is the fact that his level of work, his data analysis, and his terrible punditry has significantly decreased since he moved to ESPN.

Again, tonight, he's tweeting about Democrats "unskewing" polls... when no one really is doing this. (cue the "who the hell are you talking to" gif). What does Silver do? He "skews" poll results to fit his punditry narrative of trendlines, "adjusted leaders", and other metrics he created for his volatile flawed model that can more way too much from just one. single. poll.

This wasn't the case in 2012. He was the cool cucumber seeing the "signal in the noise". Now, maybe it's ESPN, or maybe it is his ego after that election and his media/book tour, or maybe his broken ego after the, again, laughably bad performance in the primaries, he's hedging bets. Who knows.
 
Bumping this with more "insightful" commentary from Silver and 538...

Silver via Twitter: Reminder: Cubs will win the World Series and, in exchange, President Trump will be elected 8 days later. https://twitter.com/No_Little_Plans/status/730249485713051648

CwUAMMgWgAQiZ-t.jpg

 
I've defended FiveThirtyEight on GAF quite a bit, but I'm at my limit with how much his model overreacts to new polls. High skepticism months ago was more believable because there were less polls and uncertain variables, but it's just ridiculous now.

FiveThirtyEight is a good idea that's been implemented poorly.
 
The media is really running with their shitty horse race narrative now. I just turned on CNN for 5 minutes, and then MSNBC for 5 minutes, and here's what I saw:

CNN was going over an electoral map, state by state. The whole time, they have Clinton at 272 "safe" EVs, right under a "270 needed to win" graphic, and yet the whole segment was about how Donald Trump can win. At the end, Don Lemon asked "who has the momentum?" and they say Trump does. Un-fucking-believable.

I switched to MSNBC and they had a Democratic former governor of Michigan on making the strangest argument I've seen yet: that Hillary only having one scandal (e-mails) is a disadvantage versus Trump having so many, because it makes the argument against her simpler. Whereas to argue against Trump, you have to cover so many scandals that they're too overwhelming and a voters "eyes will glaze over", so none of it affects him.

I'm not even sure I disagree, but if that's the reality then we're all literally living in Idiocracy.

538 changing their model for more clicks is nothing compared to the rest of the media's whoring for ratings.
 
The media is really running with their shitty horse race narrative now. I just turned on CNN for 5 minutes, and then MSNBC for 5 minutes, and here's what I saw:

CNN was going over an electoral map, state by state. The whole time, they have Clinton at 272 "safe" EVs, right under a "270 needed to win" graphic, and yet the whole segment was about how Donald Trump can win. At the end, Don Lemon asked "who has the momentum?" and they say Trump does. Un-fucking-believable.

I switched to MSNBC and they had a Democratic former governor of Michigan on making the strangest argument I've seen yet: that Hillary only having one scandal (e-mails) is a disadvantage versus Trump having so many, because it makes the argument against her simpler. Whereas to argue against Trump, you have to cover so many scandals that they're too overwhelming and a voters "eyes will glaze over", so none of it affects him.

I'm not even sure I disagree, but if that's the reality then we're all literally living in Idiocracy.

538 changing their model for more clicks is nothing compared to the rest of the media's whoring for ratings.
That's actually an interesting point that I hadn't thought of. Hillary's controversy is more contained and has been for some time. Donald says so much stupid shit that there's never enough time for something to properly fester and grow like the email nonsense.
 
I think they're Diablosing over at 538 and are either trying to scare people into voting or genuinely panicking.

They continue to say shit like "yeah we're more "bullish" toward Trump" and "OUR model is taking so many factors into account!", yet when you see things in practice you see some clownshoes weighing of nonsense polls and wonder to yourself just what the hell they're doing. That's not bullish, or taking factors into account. That's just giving every possible excuse to give Trump an advantage and make him look several magnitudes more likely to win than he is.

I don't know how I'll manage but I'm gonna try to go on a blackout. The signal-to-noise ratio has completely lopsided to the latter in the past week.
 
An animated graph of all the major polling trackers. Silver's frequently diverges from the pack, especially in the last week.

https://twitter.com/jshkatz/status/793553664724140032
Aggregating the aggregators, love it.


And I mean, the good part about the data-driven methodology is that it's all performance based and we'll have cold, hard results to compare their predictions against each other's after the fact.

538 did well in post election predictions, so if that streak breaks now, people will naturally gravitate towards other, more accurate poll aggregators next time around.
 
Aggregating the aggregators, love it.
Yeah, it's from the Times. They literally aggregate the (nine) aggregators, including their own:

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/upshot/presidential-polls-forecast.html?_r=0

(Scroll down to the table.)

I'm waiting for a few other sites to do it, and then another site can aggregate the aggregations of the poll aggregators.

I do get a kick out of how polling firms have complained that 538 helped commoditize polls, and now 538 has so many competitors they are in turn becoming commoditized.
 
Yeah, it's from the Times. They literally aggregate the (nine) aggregators, including their own:

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/upshot/presidential-polls-forecast.html?_r=0

(Scroll down to the table.)

I'm waiting for a few other sites to do it, and then another site can aggregate the aggregations of the poll aggregators.

PollyVote aggregates a lot of different models (of a lot of different types: aggressors, econometric models, experts, betting markets, etc.) and has been within like +/- 1% of the popular vote the past couple of times. They have Clinton with a 6.2% lead.
 
PollyVote aggregates a lot of different models (of a lot of different types: aggressors, econometric models, experts, betting markets, etc.) and has been within like +/- 1% of the popular vote the past couple of times. They have Clinton with a 6.2% lead.

Oh wow. We're already there. Neato. (Thanks, looks like an interesting site.)
 
To be fair, Sam Wang has been pretty critical of Silver/538 this whole election cycle. He's been pretty tame about it and right (imo), but its clear its gotten under Silver's skin.
All I've seen has been very tame from PEC. And PEC is based on solid statistical methodological grounds. There cannot be an objectively correct model, so why the beef from Silver? Silver's baseball joke is so childish.
 
I switched to MSNBC and they had a Democratic former governor of Michigan on making the strangest argument I've seen yet: that Hillary only having one scandal (e-mails) is a disadvantage versus Trump having so many, because it makes the argument against her simpler. Whereas to argue against Trump, you have to cover so many scandals that they're too overwhelming and a voters "eyes will glaze over", so none of it affects him.

The all too well known three stooges syndrome

treschoflados.jpg
 
I switched to MSNBC and they had a Democratic former governor of Michigan on making the strangest argument I've seen yet: that Hillary only having one scandal (e-mails) is a disadvantage versus Trump having so many, because it makes the argument against her simpler. Whereas to argue against Trump, you have to cover so many scandals that they're too overwhelming and a voters "eyes will glaze over", so none of it affects him.

I'm not even sure I disagree, but if that's the reality then we're all literally living in Idiocracy
Yeah, I can't say I disagree. Critics and press can hammer away at 1-2 Clinton weak points relentlessly until the cows come home, day in and day out. So that makes those weak points seem like a really big deal.

Trump has a half-dozen rotating scandals running at any one time, so each one can only receive so much coverage. The net effect is that it seems like all his scandals are small-time and easily dismissed because they only get a few days' worth of media attention. Maybe he sexually assaulted someone 10-20 years ago but since CNN stopped talking about it I guess those claims were invalid.

By contrast, Clinton's emails are of utmost importantance since we have been hearing about them for 6-9 months.
 
To be fair, Sam Wang has been pretty critical of Silver/538 this whole election cycle. He's been pretty tame about it and right (imo), but its clear its gotten under Silver's skin.

Yeah, really didn't like how Wang started speculating about the integrity of 538, that's kinda a dick move. While meanwhile passive-aggressive Twitter shots aren't really cool either. There's no need to have competition between models like this, if anything more models are good since it shows how the race differs depending on which assumptions you make.
 
Is the race actually tightening or is the drop of Hillary over the last week (about 7%) on 538 just made up?

From what I can tell, the polls are tightening, but it's from something like a 6 point Clinton lead in aggregate to a 5 point Clinton lead in aggregate (I haven't looked up the exact number lately). So she's still the very likely winner.
 
The thing is, so do the other people. Nate got all the credit but numerous statisticians predicted 2008 and 2012 spot on - Sam Wang being one of them. Those are the people who are now critisicing Nate for descending into desperate punditry, and for a model that is *clearly* going a bit wonky.

Wang got 2014 pretty wrong, though. Silver fared much better.

It also isn't clearly going wonky. It just has a higher degree of uncertainty, for reasons that have been explained.
 
Wang got 2014 pretty wrong, though. Silver fared much better.

It also isn't clearly going wonky. It just has a higher degree of uncertainty, for reasons that have been explained.

Yep. People point to 2008 and 2012, but even PEC admits that it wasn't hard to get the presidential elections right in those years. Meanwhile, 538 fared much better in 2014 than PEC. I remember even having a conversation with a friend on which model was going to fare better on the eve of the election, and we both agreed 538 but hoped PEC was right.

Not saying that Wang isn't doing good work, but, at least, from my viewpoint, 538 has been more reliable than PEC, especially in the downballot. Additionally, it's not like each model is obfuscated. You can read why 538's model is so much wider than the rest of the lot very easily. It's because there are still quite a few undecided voters, which is unusual for this time in the election cycle. In past cycles undecideds were much lower by this point, so the outcome of the election was much more certain. Without that knowledge, the model is much more conservative. I think most of the other models either proportionally assign undecideds, which is why their models are much more sure on a Clinton presidency.
 
Is the race actually tightening or is the drop of Hillary over the last week (about 7%) on 538 just made up?

It's tightening. Say what you will about the 538 model, but the podcasts have been very educational. They explained a few days ago that it isn't so much a matter of Clinton losing support (even their model has her losing only a rough percentage point in the popular vote) so much as the remaining undecideds seem to be "coming home" to Trump. The more likely explanation is that they're disillusioned republicans who've finally decided to bite the bullet. As a result, Trump has surged about 3 percentage points or so in the popular vote which has cut Clinton's lead in nearly half in a very short time.

However, they also explained how the map has changed since 2012: Clinton is earning a lot more college educated white voter support than Obama but the problem is that those people are concentrated in safe states; either the blue ones (where they've always voted Democrat anyway) or the red ones like Texas (that's closer to swing state in a long time but still safe Republican). Because of this, her popular vote advantage doesn't translate to as great an EV advantage as Obama's did which puts her at a larger disadvantage with the same level of national support.

Looking over an aggregate of the aggregates, it does look like 538 is a massive outlier right now however. Not just in terms of the win probability but the projected EVs too. Most models seem to put her at about 320 EVs regardless of their stated win probability, 538 is the only model that has her below 300. Then again there are only a handfull of models that outright state the projected EVs so it's not like we're talking about a particularly large data pool here. It bears repeating that 538 also accounts for the possibility of polling error and general uncertainty. They mentioned in what I think was yesterdays or before yesterdays podcast that barring some massive unexpected factor, Trump can only win if there's both a polling error and Clinton's GOTV effort falls.
 
Is the race actually tightening or is the drop of Hillary over the last week (about 7%) on 538 just made up?
It's more like the race is "tightening", but that's because the 7,8, 12 point leads that Clinton had out of the third debate and the Access Hollywood tape were statistical noise that didn't actually reflect the voting preferences of the electorate.

Jon Favrueau and Dan Pfeiffer of Keepin it 1600 (former Obama staffers) have talked about how in the wake of the first 2012 debate Obama's share in the public polls plummeted, while their internal polls showed them with a steady lead. Modern internal polls are almost always superior to public polls for a number of reasons.

And there was some reporting dropped yesterday about how the Trump internal pollsters have admitted that they're showing Clinton up 5.
 
Looking over an aggregate of the aggregates, it does look like 538 is a massive outlier right now however. Not just in terms of the wins probability but the projected EVs too. Most models seem to put her at about 320 EVs regardless of their stated win probability, 538 is the only model that has her below 300. Then again there are only a handfull of models that outright state the projected EVs so it's not like we're talking about a particularly large data pool here. It beats repeating that 538 also accounts for the possibility of polling error and general uncertainty. They mentioned in what I think was yesterdays or before yesterdays podcast that barring some massive unexpected factor, Trump can only win if there's both a polling error and Clinton's GOTV effort falls.

I'd rather take 538s pessimistic numbers than a hyperbolic postive one, if only to get more people scared by the Trump surge so they get out and vote.
 
Wang's been vocally critical of 538 since long before this election cycle. Nate wrote about it in his book even.

And I mean, the good part about the data-driven methodology is that it's all performance based and we'll have cold, hard results to compare their predictions against each other's after the fact.

But how will you do this? If one model puts a Clinton victory at > 50% and another puts a Clinton victory at some other value > 50%, and then she wins: how will you say which one was more accurate? Even if a model puts an outcome at < 50% but then it happens, you can't necessarily say the model was wrong, it could just be dumb chance. Or the model was faithful to the data that were available, but the data were bad.

You can't evaluate a forecaster based on a single event.
 
Real talk.

If it comes out later that Nate Silver was intentionally overestimating Trump's chances because he didn't want Clinton voters to get complacent... then I would totally and unconditionally forgive him because the alternative this election is so horrifying and threatens foundations of democracy and potentially the world.

I don't actually think he's doing that. I think it's more likely he was super burned about getting Trump's primary chances so wrong that he's over correcting a bit. But I also think that this election is so damn crazy that it really could be as volatile as his predictions are. If there is an outlier year, it has to be this one, right?
 
That animated GIF of the pollsters needs to be updated. Silver now has Clinton at 66.7. The free fall continues! Who wants to bet he'll have the election at 50/50 by Monday?
 
Real talk.

If it comes out later that Nate Silver was intentionally overestimating Trump's chances because he didn't want Clinton voters to get complacent... then I would totally and unconditionally forgive him because the alternative this election is so horrifying and threatens foundations of democracy and potentially the world.

I don't actually think he's doing that. I think it's more likely he was super burned about getting Trump's primary chances so wrong that he's over correcting a bit. But I also think that this election is so damn crazy that it really could be as volatile as his predictions are. If there is an outlier year, it has to be this one, right?

I think it's more likely that he's doing the same thing he's always done.

Another thing that's consistent with the past would be that people who disagree with him and try to second guess his methods will do so regardless.
 
As a math nerd, I find it strange that people are dumping on Nate's model before we have a result. Why do we want all of the models to herd together? If Nate gets 49 or 50 states right again then this thread will be pretty funny.

The big thing that Silver has been talking about is how there are a lot of undecided voters this year as compared to 2012 or 2008. 49-46 is a lot more certain than 43-40. His model weighs that gap heavier than others and we get to see the results in 5 days. Nate is a man with a model, not some political prophet. His numbers don't move on a whim. His model isn't being tweaked. He just has less confidence than others. And that's okay. Maybe he's right or wrong but it's hard to prescribe blame when we don't even have a result yet, especially with some of the mediocre to bad polls on the dem side that have been coming out these last few days.
 
I don't know about the model, but that thing about how the Utah-only Mormon candidate could become president (for real guys), at least in tone, was extremely clickbaity.

I mean, using it as a way to demonstrate what a clusterfuck our electoral system is one thing, but pretending even for a moment like it's a plausible scenario to drive traffic is absurd.
 
I really don't get the hate boner a vocal minority on gaf has towards Silver. It's just weird and petty. Also people seem really incapable of divorcing the man's opinion from his statistical analysis. The analysis has little to do with his views. His methodology is publicly available.

People are acting like he goes in and personally edits the results of the algorithm. That's not how it works at all.
 
It seems like 538 has become exactly the opposite of what they were originally founded for. Not sure if it's because they were bought by ESPN, who loves horse races, or if it's just Silver being Silver. But it's a shame. No one went to 538 for clickbait articles.
 
As a math nerd, I find it strange that people are dumping on Nate's model before we have a result. Why do we want all of the models to herd together? If Nate gets 49 or 50 states right again then this thread will be pretty funny.

That would be glorious.

Anyhow, these protracted election cycles are a nightmare, and probably responsible for a lot of this shitreporting that's epidemic. Canada just went through an unprecedented 78 day election cycle, and that felt like forever, let alone the US' (I want to say) 18 month cycle. No wonder pollsters are going nuts!
 
I really don't get the hate boner a vocal minority on gaf has towards Silver. It's just weird and petty. Also people seem really incapable of divorcing the man's opinion from his statistical analysis. The analysis has little to do with his views. His methodology is publicly available.

People are acting like he goes in and personally edits the results of the algorithm. That's not how it works at all.

I don't have a hate boner, but I'm REALLY curious if overrating a poll that caused a monstrous tightening was done just to drive clicks closer to election day. As I said on twitter, they're either ahead of a curve, or such a tremendous outlier that it'll ruin their credibility forever going forward.
 
Is "538 is doing it for the clicks for ESPN" the new Polygon gave that game an 8 for teh clicks maannn. It just seems like people are rejecting 538 because it's given them more anxiety about the election and they would rather find data that conforms to what they want to see. It's a more conservative model and maybe that's ok.

It's perfectly fine to criticize the model or criticize bad twitter punditry but it seems like much of this is a knee jerk reaction to something that slightly threatens your emotional investment of the election. Kinda like the many review threads where people spend pages attacking the one or two outlier reviews because IGN gave that game you preordered and were super hyped about a 7. So now you have to nick pick the shit out of the review and join others in relentlessly mocking the reviewer.

Maybe some of y'all need to stop nervously refreshing the forecast.
 
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