Reverse-engineering the problematic tail behavior of Fivethirtyeight forecast

Re:Reverse-engineering the problematic tail behavior of Five... by ceilingcorner on Sunday October 25, 2020 @01:09PM (#24887847)

That isn't the criticism. The criticism is the appellation of it being "unlikely."

For example: anyone paying attention to the Rust Belt ±1980-2016 would have dramatically upped Trump's chances in Pennsylvania and Michigan. FiveThirtyEight had Hillary with 70%+ chance of winning both, which to me, shows a deep ignorance of actual cultural factors.

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Re:Reverse-engineering the problematic tail behavior of Five... by yongjik on Sunday October 25, 2020 @01:27PM (#24888026)

> anyone paying attention to the Rust Belt ±1980-2016 would have dramatically upped Trump's chances in Pennsylvania and Michigan.

There was a very decent chance that Clinton could have won in 2016 (if any factor had gone slightly better for her), and if that had happened, nobody would be saying this now. This is literal hindsight bias.

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Re:Reverse-engineering the problematic tail behavior of Five... by ceilingcorner on Sunday October 25, 2020 @01:30PM (#24888064)

Aren't you doing the exact same thing that you're accusing me of?

My view is simple: the media completely, totally got 2016 wrong, mostly for sociological reasons. The people making the predictions simply had a huge blind spot. Brexit is another similar situation. The fact that Hillary almost won or Brexit almost didn't happen isn't really the point, because both things were never expected to be even remotely that close. Had the predictions been "Pennsylvania will be close", it would be relevant, but those weren't the predictions.

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