Comment by sparrish
12 hours ago
This makes no sense. Sure, he got nearly every prediction wrong but so have their meteorologists. Why just pick on poor ol' Nate?
12 hours ago
This makes no sense. Sure, he got nearly every prediction wrong but so have their meteorologists. Why just pick on poor ol' Nate?
Yeah they sure were bad at predictions. If only they had aggregated all their predictions and compared them to how things actually turned out in one easy assess location. That sure would have been useful..... [0]
[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20250306183754/https://projects....
538 was actually pretty accurate!
They had a good article about how their predictions were much better than you'd expect, but obviously I can't link it anymore because ABC removed it.
The 70:30 prediction against Trump was far better than most. I did see models back then that considered the state polls mostly or entirely uncorrelated, and those produced obviously garbage with 90% or even 99% in favor of Clinton.
But in the end people pick on Nate because he really enjoys being an asshole on the internet. It's far more about when he acts as a pundit, not as an expert on statistics.
People consistently have a hard time understanding that 30% probabilities happen all the time.
Surely not all the time.
4 replies →
Some say 30% of the time.
Where Presidential politics is concerned, I think it's less a case of misunderstanding probabilities and more the success of party propaganda. Every victory is a landslide with a resounding mandate from the populace, every defeat a crushing humiliation and repudiation of your opponent's Unamerican ideals.
I kind of fell off the Nate Silver train toward the end of Trump's first term (so deep in the COVID-19 era...). It feels like around that time 538 shifted heavily away from raw statistics and into punditry, and they seemed less unique among the various political blogs.
538 was sold in 2018 with Trump's first term ending early 2021.
Those predictions all became worthless anyway when Comey reopened the "emails" issue right before the election and threw fresh meat to all the stupid people who ate that up.
This isn't about Nate's articles (although perhaps those are gone as well).
He doesn’t have the faintest idea how to turn the keys.
Did he predict odds? How are you so sure his odds were wrong?
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