Comment by lacewing
7 hours ago
I don't understand why this is surprising. People didn't go to FiveThirtyEight to marvel the science behind it. The science was just supposed to give you what you came there for: the actual election results.
In the end, it turned out that predicting elections is still very hard, and that for all the fanfare, FiveThirtyEight performed only slightly better than what you could find in any other reputable newspaper, so it kinda lost its appeal.
> it turned out that predicting elections is still very hard
So maybe we shouldn't be doing it. The value of predicting an election in the large out in public seems kind of dubious, and it's more like gambling than actually being useful. A candidate only runs, and continues running, if they think they can win. All predictions like these do is confuse voters leading up to election day and while they are voting. It keep candidates from making strong cases for their platform, keeps the voters from listening to the candidates' platforms, and encourages team-based partisan politics.
> FiveThirtyEight performed only slightly better than what you could find in any other reputable newspaper
FiveThirtyEight gave Trump double the odds of the next highest reputable prediction, which was The New York Times Upshot (15%). Princeton Election Consortium gave Trump less than 1%.
That is not "only slightly better" to anyone who's statistically literate.
A FiveThirtyEight reader in 2016 was significantly better calibrated regarding Clinton’s chances than a reader of other reputable newspapers.
This embodies what 538 and its defenders miss about 538's appeal:
People didn't come to 538 for explanations on subtle points of statistical literacy (although those were provided). They came because, for whatever reason, they wanted to know who would win the election.
People not trained in statistics treated like the scoreboard at a football game- it's always better to be winning, but score is a near perfect predictor in the last minute.
Once 538 stopped delivering perfect predictions and started delivering "Actually the difference between 1% and 30% are way bigger than you think" lectures, the appeal disappeared. There are better places to learn math from.
Speak for yourself. That's not why I read FiveThirtyEight.
The purpose of FiveThirtyEight was never to be an oracle for the average person. It was always a deliberately wonky site for a wonky audience. They were very clear about that in the articles they published and topics they covered.
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538 was never about magically making polls more reliable, and only people that don't understand what polls are could think that (caveat: lots of people don't understand how polls work).
538 was about analyzing and communicating the information from those polls in an easily accessible form. If you came to the site for that, you weren't mad that they "predicted poorly something that was impossible to predict from the data sources they used" ... you were just mad at Trump for winning (despite polls suggesting otherwise).
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.
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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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.
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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Polls became much less interesting as an Entertainment category once we all had experience with how unreliable they are.