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A comment on How One 19-Year-Old Illinois Man Is Distorting National Polling Averages. Parent comment

Re:How One 19-Year-Old Illinois Man Is Distorting National P... by tiatia on Thursday October 13, 2016 @12:08AM (#12698349)
Nate Silver has been criticized a lot by Mish (http://mishtalk.com/) and Mish was more often correct with his predictions than Nate. (What was Nate's prediction of Trump becoming the candidate? "Trump's chance of becoming the GOP nominee at 2 percent.")

Nate is strongly biased in favor of Hillary. That is fine but that is not scientific. Nassim Taleb said about Nate:

"55% "probability" for Trump then 20% 10 d later, not realizing their "probability" is too stochastic to be probability."

and

"So @FiveThirtyEight is showing us a textbook case on how to be totally clueless about probability yet make a business in it."

Proceed with caution.

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Re:How One 19-Year-Old Illinois Man Is Distorting National P... by matt4077 on Thursday October 13, 2016 @01:01AM (#12698557)
538 didn't give any predictions on the primaries. Yes, they wrote articles saying that he had no chance, but those are separate from their statistical predictions.

And, regarding the volatility: the probabilities reported by 538 are closely linked to betting/prediction markets. Anyone with a better model could parlay into money quite easily.

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Re:How One 19-Year-Old Illinois Man Is Distorting National P... by tiatia on Thursday October 13, 2016 @01:24AM (#12698647)
"538 didn't give any predictions on the primaries."

They gave predictions for every state during the primaries. Also see: https://mishtalk.com/2016/05/19/nate-silvers-self-serving-co...

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Re:How One 19-Year-Old Illinois Man Is Distorting National P... by corin_ on Thursday October 13, 2016 @04:18AM (#12699268)
Something happening after being given a statistically low chance of happening doesn't automatically mean the statistical model was wrong.

If we are standing at a roulette table and I tell you there is a 2.7% chance the ball will land on 4 and it lands on 4, it doesn't mean my low % was incorrect.

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