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by lacewing 23 days ago
Again, I don't think any of this matters. People were not coming there to have "information communicated to them". They were coming there for the satisfaction of knowing the results before everyone else. And FiveThirtyEight couldn't realistically deliver on that.
3 comments
rurp 23 days ago
That makes as much sense as visiting ESPN and expecting them to tell you who will definitely win the Super Bowl next year. Anyone expecting that is going to be disappointed often no matter what.

I thought it went without saying but a good analyst can't predict the future in politics, sports, or anything else. What they can do is make good probabilistic estimates of what is likely to happen. 538 wasn't pretending to do anything more than that.

If people want magic predictions there are plenty of touts and scammers willing to offer them, they don't need to waste time with charts and numbers though.

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lmm 23 days ago
> a good analyst can't predict the future in politics, sports, or anything else. What they can do is make good probabilistic estimates of what is likely to happen. 538 wasn't pretending to do anything more than that.

Well, sure, but how big is the market for that, really? Particularly for a binary outcome like an election, knowing who's going to win is fun, reading a pundit telling you who's going to win can be fun, but ultimately the man in the street is going to take whatever the pundit said and reduce it to candidate X or candidate Y, and you can only do so much better than replacement level at that.

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anon7000 23 days ago
I think anyone who actually operates that way is very misguided, but it’s a fair point. But either way, 538 was such a nice site for just looking at the data in a fresh way at the time, and it’s a shame that went away.

If people are expecting anyone to have a magic prediction algorithm for things like this… I mean there’s only so much one can say. It’s not realistic.

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nomel 23 days ago
I'm very curious to see how polymarket fairs, compared to the news agencies. I suspect prediction markets will be the norm, going forward. Polls can't fully capture the element of anonymity that's required for an accurate poll of something controversial.
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bombcar 23 days ago
My experience was that prediction markets were lagging indicators and basically followed something akin to an aggregate opinion of polls.

This is especially viewable if you watch them during the 2020 election.

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