Article from a few weeks ago, but now that G. Elliott Morris is taking over without Nate’s models, I’m curious what lemmy’s think about political polling analysis from FiveThirtyEight?
What is he, a religious leader now?
He was a good modeler and handicapper. His model happened to work well for the 2016 election. That’s it. He’s not a fucking oracle.
538 hasn’t done anything important or impressive since 2016 either.
I didn’t trust Nate Silver anyhow. Maybe it’ll be an improvement?
Why did you not trust him? A history of invalid models, or personality?
My trust in him dropped after being exposed to his activity on twitter. It seemed like he had a habit of trying to apply his knowledge to things he didn’t understand or where he was missing the point. I’m no longer on twitter and can’t remember specific examples, so it may have been more that that format did not work for him.
I remember him having some weird COVID takes. Statistically we should just get out there because only a few of us would die. He seemed to think it was odd that people were staying in for no reason. That completely missed the point that if your family is the statistic, it just fucks your whole life up.
Heh, I remember thinking, statistically, he’s probably not wrong for a population but that completely missed the prisoner’s dilemma of making sure you’re not the statistic.
Agree! This describes my experience exactly. On a related note about format, I thought Jody Avirgan, Five Thirty Eight’s podcast producer early on, was a good foil for him, drawing him into conversation and occasionally pushing back on points that sounded wild or tone deaf.
I did not trust 538 before. I think a few major US election voter turnouts suffered because too many people thought the 538 results meant that their candidate was a sure thing.
That’s a problem that could emerge with any system used to predict the outcome of any election.
If you make a prediction, you’re arguably telling people not to vote.
I think it was the elitist confidence that the media including 538 applied to 538.
So confidently predicting an outcome is the problem?
538 is just data-backed fortune-telling.
I think releasing polls to the public is a bad thing for this reason. We ban releasing boat totals before the polls close for this exact same reason.
Based on the article, it looks like this change would make that a lot worse, since the main point of contention between Silver and the new guy seems to be that the new guy’s models are a lot more certain of the results too early. So candidates are going to look like the sure thing far more now most likely.
That’s not good. Specifically, I believe Trump beat Clinton because of 538.
That’s not really accurate. The polls were going back and forth for over a month leading up to the election, and the FBI announce they were re-opening the case into Clinton’s emails 3 days before voting day. The polls just didn’t have the time to reflect that change.
Weird take.
538 was one of the few groups saying that Trump had a decent chance. They were widely mocked for it. Anybody who believed 538 should have been motivated to get out the vote for Clinton.
And they turned out to be right.
How is that “Trump beat Clinton because of 538”?
Maybe I misremembered 538 for another popular poll at the time.
Was it 538, or just the utter idiocy of the average American? Just because the polls say he has a 33% chance of winning, doesn’t mean stay home, it means the opposite.
Thems worse odds than Russian roulette.
I trust it more, I’d say.
I knew of Nate Silver back when his claim to fame was as a sabermetrician and the creator of a statistical model used to predict how baseball players would perform in the future based on present and prior statistical data. That was PECOTA. I actually liked PECOTA. In the long run I think you’d call it a useful failure. But Nate’s baseball takes were actually very good and quite objective in nature. And he obviously was very good working with statistics.
I got amped up when I learned he was taking his skills into the arena of political analysis. If you remember the early years had a mix of success and failure but was usually good enough to draw onlookers. But something went wrong with all that after a few years – Silver started showing bias in favor of candidates that he had consulting deals with. The objectivity just wasn’t there, he was acting as a paid spokesman would. And the quality of his predictions suffered, as did his demeanor after a while. It was disappointing.
I regard the guy as someone with a deep understanding of political statistics and data who can help paint a very detailed picture, but he displays too much bias to be trusted to remain objective when it matters. It’s kinda like having a defense lawyer. You always know in advance whose side they will take.
Whoever the new guys is, I guess we’ll see whether he will remain a statistician, or follows Silver into trying his hand at becoming an influencer.
Morris has also built robust polling analysis models, so it will be interesting to see how (or if) his models manifest themselves on 538.
As to Nate, he can well and truly go fuck himself. His arrogance is staggering, as demonstrated by his behavior at the onset of COVID in early 2020. He seemed to argue with every epidemiologist that crossed his path early in the pandemic, simply because he believed HE knew better about the impacts of a global pandemic than they did. Because as we all know, being a statistical analysis guru makes you an expert in epidemiology (yes, I’m being sarcastic).
The dude is so far up his own ass that the only way he can see outside is through his belly button.
Sounds like he thinks he’s a Hari Sheldon figure. Someone should have told him Foundation was science fiction.
I will wait and see. I treat all polls as biased to a degree, and just historical snapshots.
Article from a few weeks ago, but now that G. Elliott Morris is taking over without Nate’s models, I’m curious what lemmy’s think about political polling analysis from FiveThirtyEight?
GEM is generally fine from what i’ve seen; it’s also hard to feel sympathetic for Nate even though 538 is his baby. a lot of his colleagues don’t like him (because he apparently presided over a very bro-ey, douche-y culture) and he’s kind of a dipshit disaffected libertarian who loves to speak out of his ass on things he doesn’t understand via Twitter.
Looking at he the feud, I’d say this new guy is going to be wrong more often simply because he argues for certainty early on. And that’s going to just make people hate polls and hate math that much more. Nate wasn’t perfect but he was better than most.
I didn’t trust it WITH him!
