In statistical modeling you don’t really have right or wrong. You have a level of confidence in a model, a level of confidence in your data, and a statistical probability that an event will occur.
So if my model says RFK has a 98% probability of winning, then it is no more right or wrong than Silver’s model?
If so, then probability would be useless. But it isn’t useless. Probability is useful because it can make predictions that can be tested against reality.
In 2016, Silver’s model predicted that Clinton would win. Which was wrong. He knew his model was wrong, because he adjusted his model after 2016. Why change something that is working properly?
But for the person above to say Silver got something wrong because a lower probability event happened is a little silly. It’d be like flipping a coin heads side up twice in a row and saying you’ve disproved statistics because heads twice in a row should only happen 1/4 times.
Silver made a prediction. That’s the deliverable. The prediction was wrong.
Nobody is saying that statistical theory was disproved. But it’s impossible to tell whether Silver applied theory correctly, and it doesn’t even matter. When a Boeing airplane loses a door, that doesn’t disprove physics but it does mean that Boeing got something wrong.
Comparing it to Boeing shows you still misunderstand probability. If his model predicts 4 separate elections where each underdog candidate had a 1 in 4 chance of winning. If only 1 of those underdog candidates wins, then the model is likely working. But when that candidate wins everyone will say “but he said it was only a 1 in 4 chance!”. It’s as dumb as people being surprised by rain when it says 25% chance of rain. As long as you only get rain 1/4 of the time with that prediction, then the model is working. Presidential elections are tricky because there are so few of them, they test their models against past data to verify they are working. But it’s just probability, it’s not saying this WILL happen, it’s saying these are the odds at this snapshot in time.
I see what you’re not getting! You are confusing giving the odds with making a prediction and those are very different.
Let’s go back to the coin flips, maybe it’ll make things more clear.
I or Silver might point out there’s a 75% chance anything besides two heads in a row happening (which is accurate.) If, as will happen 1/4 times, two heads in a row does happen, does that somehow mean the odds I gave were wrong?
It’s forecasting, not a prediction. If the weather forecast said there was a 28% chance of rain tomorrow and then tomorrow it rained would you say the forecast was wrong? You could say that if you want, but the point isn’t to give a definitive prediction of the outcome (because that’s not possible) it’s to give you an idea of what to expect.
If there’s a 28% chance of rain, it doesn’t mean it’s not going to rain, it actually means you might want to consider taking an umbrella with you because there’s a significant probability it will rain. If a batter with a .280 batting average comes to the plate with 2 outs at the bottom of the ninth, that doesn’t mean the game is over. If a politician has a 28% probability of winning an election, it’s not a statement that the politician will definitely lose the election.
You do it by comparing the state voting results to pre-election polling. If the pre-election polling said D+2 and your final result was R+1, then you have to look at your polls and individual polling firms and determine whether some bias is showing up in the results.
Is there selection bias or response bias? You might find that a set of polls is randomly wrong, or you might find that they’re consistently wrong, adding 2 or 3 points in the direction of one party but generally tracking with results across time or geography. In that case, you determine a “house effect,” in that either the people that firm is calling or the people who will talk to them lean 2 to 3 points more Democratic than the electorate.
All of this is explained on the website and it’s kind of a pain to type out on a cellphone while on the toilet.
Just for other people reading this thread, the following comments are an excellent case study in how an individual (the above poster) can be so confidently mistaken, even when other posters try to patiently correct them.
May we all be more respectful of our own ignorance.
Okay. That’s not in dispute. But partial ownership of a company doesn’t make its employees your slaves. Especially when the company has nothing to do with ideological stuff.
Polling guru Nate Silver and his election prediction model gave Donald Trump a 63.8% chance of winning the electoral college in an update to his latest election forecast on Sunday, after a NYT-Siena College poll found Donald Trump leading Vice President Kamala Harris by 1 percentage point.
He’s just a guy analizing the polls. The source is Fox News. He mentions in the article that tomorrow’s debate could make that poll not matter.
Should you trust Nate or polls? They’re fun but… Who is answering these polls? Who wants to answer them before even October?
So yeah take it seriously that a poll found that a lot of support for Trump exists. But it’s just a moment of time for whoever they polled. Tomorrow’s response will be a much better indication of any momentum.
It just seems strange because I don’t think that many people are on the fence. Perhaps I’m crazy, but I feel most people know exactly who they’re voting for already. Makes me wonder how valid this cross-section was that was used as the sample set. If it accurately represents the US, including undecided voters, then… 😮
but I feel most people know exactly who they’re voting for already
The cross-section of people you know are more politically off the fence than the entire nation. Those that aren’t online at all are also more undecided and less likely to interact with you.
The key to doing statistics well is to make sure you aren’t changing the results with any bias. This means enough samples, a good selection of samples, and weighing the outcome correctly. Even honest polling in pre-election is hard to get right, and because of that it’s easy to make things lean towards results if you want to get certain results, or or getting paid to get those results.
There’s only one poll that matters, and that poll should include as large of a sample as possible, and be counted correctly. Even though some will try to prevent that from happening.
It’s a chance of winning, not a poll, so 64% is high but not insane. Silver is serious and it’s a decent model. Knowing the model there’s a pretty good chance this is a high point for Trump but it’s not like he’s pulling this out of nowhere, he has had similar models every election cycle since like 2008.
If it’s overstaying Trump it’s because his model is interpreting the data incorrectly because of the weirdness of this election cycle. I personally think that is likely the case here.
This isn’t a poll. That’s why the number is so high. His model is also automatically depressing Harris’ numbers because of the convention right now. (It did the same thing to Trump after his convention)
Nate has been upfront in his newsletters about the factor dropping off the model after today, but then it’s also the debate. Things are likely to be far more clear going into the weekend because we’ll have post debate polling being published and no more convention adjustments.
Nate is not with 538 anymore. Disney didn’t renew his contract. However, he got to keep the model that he developed and publishes it for his newsletter subscribers. 538 had to rebuild their model from scratch this year with G Elliot Morris.
Now Nate hosts the podcast Risky Business with Maria Konnikova. The psychologist who became a professional poker player while researching a book. It’s pretty good.
All prediction models only give you odds, not flawless accuracy. He has been closer in every election than most everyone else in the prediction market.
Social media isn’t a search engine. If an article is referring to someone by name in the title, they almost certainly have a Wikipedia page the questioner could read rather than requesting random strangers on a message board provide answers for them (in the form of multiple answers of varying bias and accuracy).
Wanting to learn isn’t the problem, it’s not spending the tiniest bit of personal effort before requesting service from other people.
Yeah. I think we take our easy navigation for granted sometimes. Like… I can get most information pretty quickly and not have a lot of trouble discerning what I need to do to get that information.
But not everyone is as “natural” at surfing. Maybe they have trouble putting things in perspective, they don’t know how to use a tool like Wikipedia, or even - maybe they just don’t like researching.
I’m so glad we have people that are great at keeping up with everything. But we have to remember that presenting and teaching information accurately and helpfully is a skill that we need desperately.
Who is this guy and how serious should we take this information? This is by far the highest number I’ve seen for Trump so far.
He’s quite a well known pollster. Up until recently he was responsible for Five Thirty Eight, but it got sold and he left.
He got the 2016 election wrong (71 Hilary, 28 trump) He got the 2020 election right (89 Biden, 10 Trump)
Right and wrong are the incorrect terms here, but you get what I mean.
He didn’t get it wrong. He said the Clinton Trump election was a tight horse race, and Trump had one side of a four sided die.
The state by state data wasn’t far off.
Problem is, people don’t understand statistics.
If someone said Trump had over a 50% probability of winning in 2016, would that be wrong?
In statistical modeling you don’t really have right or wrong. You have a level of confidence in a model, a level of confidence in your data, and a statistical probability that an event will occur.
So if my model says RFK has a 98% probability of winning, then it is no more right or wrong than Silver’s model?
If so, then probability would be useless. But it isn’t useless. Probability is useful because it can make predictions that can be tested against reality.
In 2016, Silver’s model predicted that Clinton would win. Which was wrong. He knew his model was wrong, because he adjusted his model after 2016. Why change something that is working properly?
You’re conflating things.
Your model itself can be wrong, absolutely.
But for the person above to say Silver got something wrong because a lower probability event happened is a little silly. It’d be like flipping a coin heads side up twice in a row and saying you’ve disproved statistics because heads twice in a row should only happen 1/4 times.
Silver made a prediction. That’s the deliverable. The prediction was wrong.
Nobody is saying that statistical theory was disproved. But it’s impossible to tell whether Silver applied theory correctly, and it doesn’t even matter. When a Boeing airplane loses a door, that doesn’t disprove physics but it does mean that Boeing got something wrong.
Comparing it to Boeing shows you still misunderstand probability. If his model predicts 4 separate elections where each underdog candidate had a 1 in 4 chance of winning. If only 1 of those underdog candidates wins, then the model is likely working. But when that candidate wins everyone will say “but he said it was only a 1 in 4 chance!”. It’s as dumb as people being surprised by rain when it says 25% chance of rain. As long as you only get rain 1/4 of the time with that prediction, then the model is working. Presidential elections are tricky because there are so few of them, they test their models against past data to verify they are working. But it’s just probability, it’s not saying this WILL happen, it’s saying these are the odds at this snapshot in time.
I see what you’re not getting! You are confusing giving the odds with making a prediction and those are very different.
Let’s go back to the coin flips, maybe it’ll make things more clear.
I or Silver might point out there’s a 75% chance anything besides two heads in a row happening (which is accurate.) If, as will happen 1/4 times, two heads in a row does happen, does that somehow mean the odds I gave were wrong?
Same with Silver and the 2016 election.
Would you mind restating the prediction?
It’s forecasting, not a prediction. If the weather forecast said there was a 28% chance of rain tomorrow and then tomorrow it rained would you say the forecast was wrong? You could say that if you want, but the point isn’t to give a definitive prediction of the outcome (because that’s not possible) it’s to give you an idea of what to expect.
If there’s a 28% chance of rain, it doesn’t mean it’s not going to rain, it actually means you might want to consider taking an umbrella with you because there’s a significant probability it will rain. If a batter with a .280 batting average comes to the plate with 2 outs at the bottom of the ninth, that doesn’t mean the game is over. If a politician has a 28% probability of winning an election, it’s not a statement that the politician will definitely lose the election.
How about this:
Two people give the odds for the result of a coin flip of non-weighted coins.
Person A: Heads = 50%, Tails = 50%
Person B: Heads = 75%, Tails = 25%
The result of the coin flip ends up being Heads. Which person had the more accurate model? Did Person A get something wrong?
Yes. But you’d have to run the test repeatedly and see if the outcome, i.e. Clinton winning, happens as often as the model predicts.
But we only get to run an election once. And there is no guarantee that the most likely outcome will happen on the first try.
If you can only run an election once, then how do you determine which of these two results is better (given than Trump won in 2016):
You do it by comparing the state voting results to pre-election polling. If the pre-election polling said D+2 and your final result was R+1, then you have to look at your polls and individual polling firms and determine whether some bias is showing up in the results.
Is there selection bias or response bias? You might find that a set of polls is randomly wrong, or you might find that they’re consistently wrong, adding 2 or 3 points in the direction of one party but generally tracking with results across time or geography. In that case, you determine a “house effect,” in that either the people that firm is calling or the people who will talk to them lean 2 to 3 points more Democratic than the electorate.
All of this is explained on the website and it’s kind of a pain to type out on a cellphone while on the toilet.
Just for other people reading this thread, the following comments are an excellent case study in how an individual (the above poster) can be so confidently mistaken, even when other posters try to patiently correct them.
May we all be more respectful of our own ignorance.
But what if there’s a 28% chance said poster is right?
He works for Peter Theil now, so I take everything he says with a huge grain of salt.
Because of Polymarket? Not everything is a conspiracy.
Because Peter Thiel is a right-wing billionaire piece of shit whose little bitch boy is J. D. Vance.
Okay. That’s not in dispute. But partial ownership of a company doesn’t make its employees your slaves. Especially when the company has nothing to do with ideological stuff.
He’s just a guy analizing the polls. The source is Fox News. He mentions in the article that tomorrow’s debate could make that poll not matter.
Should you trust Nate or polls? They’re fun but… Who is answering these polls? Who wants to answer them before even October?
So yeah take it seriously that a poll found that a lot of support for Trump exists. But it’s just a moment of time for whoever they polled. Tomorrow’s response will be a much better indication of any momentum.
I have shamed my family
It just seems strange because I don’t think that many people are on the fence. Perhaps I’m crazy, but I feel most people know exactly who they’re voting for already. Makes me wonder how valid this cross-section was that was used as the sample set. If it accurately represents the US, including undecided voters, then… 😮
The cross-section of people you know are more politically off the fence than the entire nation. Those that aren’t online at all are also more undecided and less likely to interact with you.
I listen to those news things that interview people on the street and I’m amazed at how many are uninformed and can go either way.
He’s not polling, he is aggregating all of the polls into a prediction model. Either way it is just a snapshot in time.
The key to doing statistics well is to make sure you aren’t changing the results with any bias. This means enough samples, a good selection of samples, and weighing the outcome correctly. Even honest polling in pre-election is hard to get right, and because of that it’s easy to make things lean towards results if you want to get certain results, or or getting paid to get those results.
There’s only one poll that matters, and that poll should include as large of a sample as possible, and be counted correctly. Even though some will try to prevent that from happening.
This quote sums it up:
𝘾𝙝𝙖𝙨𝙚
@chsrdn
In the future we won’t elect presidents. We’ll have a primary, then Nate Silver will go into a spice trance and pick the winner.
3:41 AM · 7 nov 2012
That used to be true, but in recent years he has gotten a lot more conservative, so I personally take his predictions with a huge grain of salt.
Yes, I kinda agree. Let’s see his model’s brier score in November :)
It’s a chance of winning, not a poll, so 64% is high but not insane. Silver is serious and it’s a decent model. Knowing the model there’s a pretty good chance this is a high point for Trump but it’s not like he’s pulling this out of nowhere, he has had similar models every election cycle since like 2008.
If it’s overstaying Trump it’s because his model is interpreting the data incorrectly because of the weirdness of this election cycle. I personally think that is likely the case here.
This isn’t a poll. That’s why the number is so high. His model is also automatically depressing Harris’ numbers because of the convention right now. (It did the same thing to Trump after his convention)
Nate has been upfront in his newsletters about the factor dropping off the model after today, but then it’s also the debate. Things are likely to be far more clear going into the weekend because we’ll have post debate polling being published and no more convention adjustments.
You shouldn’t take it seriously. The 24-hour news cycle depends on data like this. It just doesn’t tell us anything.
Their models have been really accurate for the last several election cycles. They’re part of fivethirtyeight.com
No, Nate is not part of 538 anymore. He now works for a crypto betting website partly owned by Peter Thiel.
I’ll let you decide how neutral that makes him.
Peter Thiel, the same guy who sold Republicans on JD the couch fucker Vance
While that is also my pet name for JD, keep in mind it is aspirational, not historic.
Nate is not with 538 anymore. Disney didn’t renew his contract. However, he got to keep the model that he developed and publishes it for his newsletter subscribers. 538 had to rebuild their model from scratch this year with G Elliot Morris.
Now Nate hosts the podcast Risky Business with Maria Konnikova. The psychologist who became a professional poker player while researching a book. It’s pretty good.
Well, he did predict Clinton would win in 2016 so there’s that.
He’s renowned for being wrong for several previous elections
All prediction models only give you odds, not flawless accuracy. He has been closer in every election than most everyone else in the prediction market.
Who is Nate Silver? Really?
Hey man there is a mountain of people who don’t know things and are scared to ask. learning is always a good thing
XKCD 1053
Social media isn’t a search engine. If an article is referring to someone by name in the title, they almost certainly have a Wikipedia page the questioner could read rather than requesting random strangers on a message board provide answers for them (in the form of multiple answers of varying bias and accuracy).
Wanting to learn isn’t the problem, it’s not spending the tiniest bit of personal effort before requesting service from other people.
Or he could have a conversation on a conversation forum.
Yeah. I think we take our easy navigation for granted sometimes. Like… I can get most information pretty quickly and not have a lot of trouble discerning what I need to do to get that information.
But not everyone is as “natural” at surfing. Maybe they have trouble putting things in perspective, they don’t know how to use a tool like Wikipedia, or even - maybe they just don’t like researching.
I’m so glad we have people that are great at keeping up with everything. But we have to remember that presenting and teaching information accurately and helpfully is a skill that we need desperately.