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A comment on Why we should care about the Nate Silver vs. Nassim Taleb Twitter war. Parent comment

Re:Why we should care about the Nate Silver vs. Nassim Taleb... by leereeves on Tuesday December 18, 2018 @01:43PM (#18709280)
Nate Silver didn't always hedge his bets; early in the election he was making emphatic (and wrong) predictions like these:

> The lesson, rather, is that Trump’s campaign will fail by one means or another.

> Donald Trump Is Winning The Polls — And Losing The Nomination

> Our emphatic prediction is simply that Trump will not win the nomination. It’s not even clear that he’s trying to do so.

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Re:Why we should care about the Nate Silver vs. Nassim Taleb... by grzm on Tuesday December 18, 2018 @01:49PM (#18709333)
Do you have dates for those quotes? I suspect many (if not all of them) refer to pre-nomination model. Silver explicitly addressed how he messed up the primary model by not trusting the numbers in his 18 May 2016 blog post "How I Acted Like A Pundit And Screwed Up On Donald Trump: Trump’s nomination shows the need for a more rigorous approach."

https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/how-i-acted-like-a-pund...

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Re:Why we should care about the Nate Silver vs. Nassim Taleb... by leereeves on Tuesday December 18, 2018 @02:20PM (#18709657)
Yes, they were pre-nomination articles. At that time Silver was acting in the way an earlier comment in this thread said he does not act:

> saying things with false-certainty and then basking in self-proclaimed genius when luck happened to run in his favor

Something seems to have gone wrong at 538 after their stellar performance in 2012. In 2016 even their Congressional predictions were only 90% accurate. Or perhaps 2016 was simply different from past elections.

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