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by Closi 2061 days ago
> Anyway, if you want my hot take, the conditional forecasting is to save their ass on election night from being embarrassingly wrong again.

Well Nate Silver wrote a full critically acclaimed book about why these types of forecast are more useful (and accurate) in reality because they account for uncertainty - he has been doing this for years, ever since he used to write similar algorithms to help bookies pick odds for sporting events, so I think your hot take isn’t based in any world of facts or knowledge on this.

Don’t trust a forecaster that says with certainty that a certain candidate will win, unless they have also bet their life’s earnings on it. Showing your statistical confidence level isn’t a bad thing.
1 comments
runawaybottle 2061 days ago
I think it’s certainly more grounded in reality if you realize 538 is basically finished if they miss the mark again.

If you listen to what they say, they admit they were not able to measure for the no-colllege male demographic in 2016, or in other words, they couldn’t model identity politics. Why couldn’t they do that? I’m not sure, but they are certain they can this time around because they saw the 2016 data and now believe they have more complete data to not make the same mistake again.

They are looking at elections as if there are hundreds of millions of elections that happen every day and the data speaks for itself. No sorry, there’s very few elections to extrapolate the way they are doing it, and you really need to do sociopolitical analysis of things like a demographic identity bloc (no-college whites that feel some way about things) that really get you the accurate undercurrents that can sway an election.

Lastly, it doesn’t take a genius to sit there at 10pm on election night and go ‘well if Florida and Michigan went this way, then probably so will these other states in flux’. ‘Our forecast becomes more accurate as we get the actual poll closing numbers on election night’, ah I see, you’re all geniuses, I should have known.

Anyways, we’ll know soon enough.

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wtallis 2061 days ago
> If you listen to what they say, they admit they were not able to measure for the no-colllege male demographic in 2016, or in other words, they couldn’t model identity politics. Why couldn’t they do that? I’m not sure,

You seem to have a fundamental misunderstanding of what FiveThirtyEight is trying to model, versus what pollsters are trying to model with the numbers they publish that FiveThirtyEight consumes. The kind of demographic weighting you're complaining about FiveThirtyEight being bad at is something the pollsters do, and is outside the scope of FiveThirtyEight's forecasting models.

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rsynnott 2061 days ago
> If you listen to what they say, they admit they were not able to measure for the no-colllege male demographic in 2016, or in other words, they couldn’t model identity politics. Why couldn’t they do that? I’m not sure, but they are certain they can this time around because they saw the 2016 data and now believe they have more complete data to not make the same mistake again.

I think you possibly misunderstand what 538 _do_ a bit. Their data is based on polling, so they can only work on what the pollsters do. Historically, pollsters didn't pay that much attention to education, beyond using income or class as a proxy for it; one middle-class white man was pretty much like another. This worked quite well historically, but no longer does (and it's not just a US phenomenon; it was also a contributor to polling problems for Brexit, notably).

In their current model, 538 assume a higher rate of uncertainty than last time round; also, some pollsters now model education. But really there's not that much they can do about stuff that pollsters don't ask about.

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runawaybottle 2061 days ago
No, I don’t think so. If you build a model out of pollsters asking stupid questions, you deserve some blame.

I’ve got some basketball statistics to populate 538s model if their interested. Lebron did pretty good this season, hopefully they can correlate that with the black vote.

Their model is not transparent on any level, because if they make it transparent, we’d easily be able to see why it’s ridiculous.

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Closi 2061 days ago
> I think it’s certainly more grounded in reality if you realize 538 is basically finished if they miss the mark again.

What does missing the mark mean though? In 2016 they proposed a c30% chance that Donald would win, and a 70% chance Hillary would win. Does that mean they were wrong? Not really, because that's how probabilistic forecasting works - and they stated their confidence interval - they were 70% confident that Hillary would win, but thought there was a 30% chance Donald would win.

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