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PolliGaf 2012 |OT5| Big Bird, Binders, Bayonets, Bad News and Benghazi

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E

el retorno

Member
MasterShotgun said:
BPakR.png


LOL
Click to expand...

Hahaha He's having fun with this now.
 
R

Red Blaster

Member
Nate said on Maher that he looks forward to this being over so he can play videogames

curious what his opinions are on the Eurogamer scandal
 
C

Cloudy

Banned
If the Romney team is so sure they're wining, why are they trolling MI,PA and MN for votes? Shouldn't they just ride the momentum till Election Day?
 
M

markatisu

Member
Cloudy said:
If the Romney team is so sure they're wining, why are they trolling MI,PA and MN for votes? Shouldn't they just ride the momentum till Election Day?
Click to expand...

I saw briefly someone on MSNBC bring up this idea as well, they theorized he realizes that OH, VA, IA are gone, and CO and FL is a toss up so they are looking for some kind of miracle state to give them a path
 
B

Brawndo Addict

Banned
Josh Gerstein ‏@joshgerstein

Isn't the basic problem with the Nate Silver prediction in question, and the critique, that it puts a percentage on a one-off event?
Click to expand...
I realize I'm way late to the game on this one, but I wanted to post about it anyway. I was disappointed that this tweet was largely dismissed as political theater without any basis in reality. It's one thing to know the author's motive was political and that he was probably ignorant of the actual force behind the argument. But many posters dismissed the substance of the argument itself as being asinine and statistically unsound, when in fact it gets to the heart of a fundamental split in statistics. I think this community values knowledge and higher level discourse, we like to learn so to speak, so it was a missed opportunity to separate politics from science.


Statistics is divided into two schools of thought, Bayesians and Frequentists, each with numerous subschools. There are fundamental philosophical differences between the two schools that cannot be reconciled. Some of the major differences are:

Frequentist

  • Probability is objective and refers to the limit of an event's relative frequency in a large number of trials. For example, a coin with a 50% probability of heads will turn up heads 50% of the time.
  • Parameters are all fixed and unknown constants.
  • Any statistical process only has interpretations based on limited frequencies. For example, a 95% C.I. of a given parameter will contain the true value of the parameter 95% of the time.

Bayesian

  • Probability is subjective and can be applied to single events based on degree of confidence or beliefs. For example, Bayesian can refer to tomorrow's weather as having 50% of rain, whereas this would not make sense to a Frequentist because tomorrow is just one unique event, and cannot be referred to as a relative frequency in a large number of trials.
  • Parameters are random variables that has a given distribution, and other probability statements can be made about them.
  • Probability has a distribution over the parameters, and point estimates are usually done by either taking the mode or the mean of the distribution.
Click to expand...

Now maybe the implicit assumption is everyone here is a Bayesian, or that we must act as if we are to facilitate discussion. However, I would wager that most people, through no fault of their own, are unaware of this split in what they thought was an uncontroversial and stable field of math. And if you think the split is meaningless or stupid, consider what kind of statistician you would want testifying for the prosecution or defense at a criminal trial. A Bayesian and a Frequentist could come to very different answers given the exact same question. In fact that's exactly what happened during OJ Simpson's trial and the judge was so confused that he decided not to allow either one to testify.

Anyway, just thought it was an interesting and important point about statistics that shouldn't be lost just because a conservative unwittingly brought it up for the purposes of smearing Silver.

ED: Another way to look at the split is in regards to the coin flip.

When I tell you, "The probability that this coin lands heads is 1/2,"
what do you make of it? There are a couple of ways to think about it.
A frequentist reasons as follows:

If the probability of landing heads is 1/2, this means that
if we were to repeat the experiment of tossing the coin very many
times, we would expect to see approximately the same number of
heads as tails. That is, the ratio of heads to tails will approach
1:1 as we toss the coin more and more times.

A Bayesian, however, would interpret that statement in a different
way:

For me, probability is a very personal opinion. What a probability
of 1/2 means to me is different from what it might mean to someone
else. However, if pressed to place a bet on the outcome of tossing
a single coin, I would just as well guess heads or tails. More
generally, if I were to bet on the roll of a die and was told that
the probability of any face coming up is 1/6, and the rewards for
guessing correctly on any outcome are equal, then it would make no
difference to me what face of the die I bet on.
Click to expand...
 
C

Cloudy

Banned
Brawndo Addict said:
I realize I'm way late to the game on this one, but I wanted to post about it anyway. I was disappointed that this tweet was largely dismissed as political theater without any basis in reality. It's one thing to know the author's motive was political and that he was probably ignorant of the actual force behind the argument. But many posters dismissed the substance of the argument itself as being asinine and statistically unsound, when in fact it gets to the heart of a fundamental split in statistics. I think this community values knowledge and higher level discourse, we like to learn so to speak, so it was a missed opportunity to separate politics from science.


Statistics is divided into two schools of thought, Bayesians and Frequentists, each with numerous subschools. There are fundamental philosophical differences between the two schools that cannot be reconciled. Some of the major differences are:



Now maybe the implicit assumption is everyone here is a Bayesian, or that we must act as if we are to facilitate discussion. However, I would wager that most people, through no fault of their own, are unaware of this split in what they thought was an uncontroversial and stable field of math. And if you think the split is meaningless or stupid, consider what kind of statistician you would want testifying for the prosecution or defense at a criminal trial. A Bayesian and a Frequentist could come to very different answers given the exact same question. In fact that's exactly what happened during OJ Simpson's trial and the judge was so confused that he decided not to allow either one to testify.

Anyway, just thought it was an interesting and important point about statistics that shouldn't be lost just because a conservative unwittingly brought it up for the purposes of smearing Silver.
Click to expand...

Really good insight but I'm pretty sure most of the models account for Bayesian drift. I'm not a statistician but Sam Wang has 2 probabilities on his website and he says the numbers should converge on Election Day

Oh and that was a political reporter we were making fun of not some random conservative :p
 
A

Angry Grimace

Two cannibals are eating a clown. One turns to the other and says "does something taste funny to you?"
I love watching Dick Morris now because you can play the Dick Morris drinking game

Dick references a secret poll - 1 drink
Dick mentions the Surge/Mittmentum - 1 drink
Dick suggests Sandy will increase Romney turnout - 2 drinks
Dick claims minorities are hiding their support for Romney - 4 drinks
Dick says Romney should be confident in OH since all polls show him leading - 3 drinks
Dick mentions Nate Silver - finish drink
 
O

Oblivion

Fetishing muscular manly men in skintight hosery
Guys, I has a question.

So the way Romney seems to be trying to weasel his way out of the whole "Let Detroit Go Bankrupt" thing is by saying that he didn't have a problem with government intervention, it's just that he was worried who would be getting the benefits of the bailout. Romney would prioritize the shareholders and creditors and not the actual workers (union thugs).

Is that a winning argument?
 
B

Brawndo Addict

Banned
Cloudy said:
Really good insight but I'm pretty sure most of the models account for Bayesian drift. I'm not a statistician but Sam Wang has 2 probabilities on his website and he says the numbers should converge on Election Day

Oh and that was a political reporter we were making fun of not some random conservative :p
Click to expand...

I didn't mean to imply that we can't discuss polls or that they're somehow fundamentally inaccurate. Just that if someone says "Isn't there an issue with using statistics to calculate the probability of a one-off event" it's a legitimate question that is actually pretty interesting to explore. Now that I know he's a political reporter it makes me more sympathetic because I can interpret the tweet as a plea for help in understanding why people are critiquing Silver's model. Maybe he wants to understand what's going on behind the scenes, he knows there's something about one-off events and probability, but he's unsure if it could be that simple.

Or maybe he thought he was blowing up the model with what he thought was irrefutable logic, I dunno.
 
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