Comment by stinkbeetle
10 hours ago
It's not nonsense. What's nonsense is to say Nate's prediction for the election was accurate or correct. It trivially was not.
What it would be reasonable to say is if his model had correctly predicted the outcome of a significant sample of elections, then you could say his model has some accuracy or predictive power. But it still would never have been accurate or right in the specific instances it got wrong, that's just a misconception about how statistics and predictive models work. I hope this helps.
What are you even classifying as accurate or correct? Do you take every 51% prediction from FiveThirtyEight and if the result is a win you consider that forecast accurate? And every 49% prediction must result in a loss? This just not how statistical forecasts work.
>What it would be reasonable to say is if his model had correctly predicted the outcome of a significant sample of elections, then you could say his model has some accuracy or predictive power.
I don't know why you're couching that in a hypothetical, FiveThirtyEight has repeatedly done that exercise.
>But it still would never have been accurate or right in the specific instances it got wrong
It is core to the concept of a probability that the result is going to go the opposite way from the prediction sometimes! It's meaningless to call it "wrong".
It's so interesting to see how someone could so confidentially wrong and clearly show no knowledge of statistics.