Also, 538 was the most accurate model during the election. They were the only ones fighting against the narrative that it was a sure win for HC.
What about 538's data is suspect, given that it merely aggregates the data put out by a wide variety of other organizations (of all political bents)?
For instance, in the recent case where Buzzfeed released a massively unsubstantiated intelligence "dossier," CNN reported that Buzzfeed had done it and that it had been given to Trump and Obama in a briefing. Those two pieces of information are important and valid to report. CNN never said the document was accurate and didn't itself publish it specifically because it's not verifiable. How is that "fake news?"
Edit: You also did not answer my second question.
Thats fake and a lie, and they were exposed quickly about that.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/201...
Is that occurrence enough to conclude that all their reporting, on everything, is flawed? Because if so I think I could find similar examples from effectively any mainstream source, and any partisan (HuffPo, Breitbart, et.c) ones as well.
Who exactly should we trust when our criteria exclude everyone?
August. CNN edits footage of sister of man shot by Milwaukee police to make it sound like she was calling for peace. She was calling for riots in white cities.
November. Random street interview? Nope, their own cameraman. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QSfS2u-SmoI
Repeatedly and continually edits/mistates Trump remarks, not just on Muslims and Mexicans.
Repeatedly libels Assange with false statements about his charges.
"hands up don't shoot" never happened.
The list goes on and on, and your second question is irrelevant.
My original post made an analogy about CNN. It has very little / nothing to do with 538. There, second question answered.
It is websites that steal CSS and styles from official news sites. That then create a fake news paper and publish 100% fiction. The Denver Guardian http://www.snopes.com/fbi-agent-murder-suicide/ is an example of "Fake News". Nothing published by CNN or FiveThirtyEight is fake news. Incorrect, sure, possibly biased but not "Fake News".
[1]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fake_news_website (links to numerous examples of proper usage)
B) The data in the link contains data that is not just about politics. Data includes such non-political topics as, say, "Where Do People Drink The Most Beer, Wine And Spirits?" to "How Americans Like Their Steak".
"Fake news" has unfortunately become a convenient euphemism that usually means the person saying it doesn't like a particular site's political stance. Fine, but what do the above type statistical sets have to do with election politics in the first place?
C) To be honest, since the data sets actually are present, a "this is fake news" sort of post seems lazy. If you have issues with 538's reporting, dive into R and report on any issues you find. Or do you think all of these datasets are fake? That's a tall claim without proof.
So this is a statistics package by the people who best interpreted the available evidence. Missing a 66% confidence forecast happens 1 out of every 3 times, it's not a big miss.
538 was very clear from the outset that the model's goal was predicting likelihoods, not being an oracle. It said there was a 1 in 3 chance of the election coming out like it did. That's not inaccurate - it was unlikely, but it still happened.
Plus, 538 didn't make the data. It aggregated data others made.
What exactly was bad in that hypothesis?
In this case, input data was skewed/biased/inaccurate for a number of reasons (sample choices, underreporting, etc.). Thus even the best predictions were wrong.
It really kind of is actually. It's an implication that the output was garbage, and it clearly wasn't.
Here is their final forecast: https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/final-election-update-t...
They gave Trump a 28.6% chance and pointed out that the model had an unusual amount of uncertainty.
Given the lead Clinton ended up with in the popular vote and the small margin Trump won by in the critical states the prediction seems pretty reasonable to me.
What do you think his chances should have been?
Good job predicting the outcome of the election. But no way will you be able to do better than 538 in the long run.
I agree with this entirely (assuming you are talking generally, not about 538 specifically). There were people in the GJP Superforecasting project giving Clinton 98% chance of the win 2 months out, which in a 2-person race is just ridiculous (There were people giving Trump that as well, but a lot less of them).
How did you come to this 50/50 prediction though? I can't find the report now, but I believe that Trump data science team gave him a 35% chance of winning, and that was only in the last 10 days of the campaign (they gave him much less prior to that).
To go from the 28%/35% (538/Trump Team) range to 50% seems a pretty big jump.
I haven't done the maths, but to make it a 50/50 doesn't that mean polls in Michigan etc would have had to be around 10% incorrect (to give him sufficient margin to make it that sure)?
That seems a pretty big difference to what the error actually was.