Re:FiveThirtyEight relaunches on NYTimes.com
by spec on Thursday August 26, 2010 @02:21AM
(#1635233)
You are absolutely and factually wrong. He absolutely calls them predictions when he is right. Here is a direct quote from Silver: "predicting 49 of 50 states correctly in the presidential election." http://fivethirtyeight.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/08/25/welcome-...
Re:FiveThirtyEight relaunches on NYTimes.com
by philwelch on Thursday August 26, 2010 @02:40AM
(#1635273)
OK--he does, in fact, use the word "prediction", but on the same token, he's still fairly open about his predictions being probabilistic in nature, and about the predictions changing over time as more evidence is presented.
But you're going to have to do better than pounce on my word choice if you want to prove your point.
Silver doesn't make "predictions", he gives odds. Giving odds implicitly admits that there exists a chance of beating those odds, and attempts to quantify how big or small that chance is. Sure, improbable things happen. That does not make them not improbable. Really, if someone is giving probabilities, you don't just count how many times the lower-probability events happened against him, you take all of his 20% probabilities and look to see whether about 20% of them ended up happening.
Look at it the other way--if all of Nate Silver's "predictions" came true, he'd be way more wrong than if some of them didn't come true, because he's not predicting things with 100% probability! Of all the things he thinks are 70% likely to happen, he's just as wrong if 100% of them happen as if 40% of them happen--he's only right if 70% of his 70% shots happen!