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by pessimizer
2064 days ago
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There's nothing scientific about any of this trash. It's a weird conflation of the degree of the incompetence of pollsters and the degree to which opinions can be changed within a span of time. And it's completely unfalsifiable. When Trump wins, the true believers will say "We gave him a 9.684% chance of winning! It's only your ignorance that makes you think we were wrong" and they go back to poring over their race tables. It's an orgy of false precision. edit: the entire debate is based on the weird assumption that if a prediction about a particular state is wrong, then pollsters must have systematically gotten middle-class Hispanic women over 40 wrong, therefore the odds of other states will change. It's all based in the reification of particular categories that are axiomatically significant for their profession. |
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> It's an orgy of false precision.
The false precision is pretty obviously coming from you, not the FiveThirtyEight pages that never show more than two (or rarely three) significant figures, and emphasize in every other way they can that the numbers are approximate and uncertain. Have you seen the width of the 80% confidence intervals on their graphs?
As for falsification: all of their predictions are for testable outcomes. We'll always know soon enough who actually wins an election, and which states they won, and by what margin, and who turned out to vote. That's all public record. The only part of the post-hoc analysis that is non-trivial is figuring out how a candidate fared with specific demographic groups. It's imperfect, but between exit polling and precinct-level demographic information and election results, it certainly is possible to detect large pre-election polling errors resulting from inaccurate demographic weighting.