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PaperclipPerfector  10mo ago (text post)   30495 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 3, 2023

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Nate Silver left FiveThirtyEight amid layoffs and Elliott Morris, ABC's new hire immediately set about ruining it. A threat he sent to conservative polling company Rasmussen Reports:

Rasmussen must explain the nature of its relationship with several right-leaning blogs and online media outlets, which have given us reason to doubt the ethical operation of the polling firm... Failure to reply, or failure to notify us of an intent to speedily reply, by the end of the day on Friday, June 30th, 2023 will be taken as a final concession of our grounds for a ban. The ban would take effect imminently thereafter.

As Nate Silver puts it, Why, unless you’re a dyed-in-the-wool left-leaning partisan, would having a “relationship with several right-leaning blogs and online media outlets” lead one to “doubt the ethical operation of the polling firm”?. I agree with Silver's overall attitude on the new direction of his company: hope ABC will stop use of 538 brand so it isn't associated with me.

Some people are probably mad at ABC for being partisan hacks but frankly that's business as usual. I'm mad because FiveThirtyEight was one of the only good analysis sites out there and these vandals are going to turn it into another factory pumping out generic progressive sludge. God damnit! 538 was the best in the business, where am I supposed to go for election forecasts now?

Nate Silver has been one of my favorite commentators for a long time, since well before he was primarily in the politics business due to his clear writing on baseball analytics. Every time he comes up in a controversy of some sort, I'm reminded of why I'm a fan - whether I agree with him or not, I think he really, truly does his best to get things right via careful, non-partisan analysis. Silver has been incredibly consistent on how to use pollsters predictively, part of which is including pollsters that have known house effects and simply correcting for that when incorporating them into the analysis.

As a result of his insistence on avoiding partisan hackery, Silver takes a ton of shit from people on Twitter and other elements of the commentariat that are just less competent at actually analyzing things than him. Amusingly, this used to come largely from the right-wing, who kept making fun of his model for giving Trump a roughly 30% chance to win the 2016 election, because apparently grasping that 2:1 underdogs win pretty often is basically impossible for some people. That Silver is now more controversial on the left than the right is another example of what I view as American progressives dissociating themselves from ground truth, with that phenomenon accelerating aggressively with Covid, Summer of Floyd, and gender ideology.

"Amusingly, this used to come largely from the right-wing, who kept making fun of his model for giving Trump a roughly 30% chance to win the 2016 election, because apparently grasping that 2:1 underdogs win pretty often is basically impossible for some people."

I'm going to push back on this as a mis-recollection of the actual facts.

Trump's rise badly damaged Silver's credibility, but its wasn't Trump's general election win, it was his GOP nomination.

Examples that aged poorly:

https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/donald-trump-is-winning-the-polls-and-losing-the-nomination/

https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/donald-trumps-six-stages-of-doom/

To his credit, Silver has largely fessed up to screwing this up:

https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/how-i-acted-like-a-pundit-and-screwed-up-on-donald-trump/

Another article delving into the details of this:

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2016/01/nate-silver-said-donald-trump-had-no-shot-where-did-he-go-wrong.html

All in all, I'm a Silver fan, in the grand scheme of things, I think he does a pretty good job, but the Trump nomination screw up showed that he's not immune to certain biases.

Amusingly, this used to come largely from the right-wing, who kept making fun of his model for giving Trump a roughly 30% chance to win the 2016 election, because apparently grasping that 2:1 underdogs win pretty often is basically impossible for some people.

Oh, not this again. The 30% chance was from polls right before the election, the thing people had with 538 was how polls changed completely from day-to-day. On October 17th 2016 the 538 predicted Hillary with 88.1% after it was basically 50:50 on July 30th, then two weeks later on November 4th only it dropped 24 percentage points down to 64.5% for Hillary. The point is that Silver does not have the prediction, he has series of dozens of predictions that swing wildly so it is hard to pinpoint if he was "right" as there is many possible definitions of that.

I stand by my claim that polls in general are more then useless, it is akin to using aggregator to predict weather on a particular day 2 years from now somewhere. You either use absolutely obvious and thus useless take (it will be warm because it will be in the middle of summer - California will remain blue), but you will not know the specifics of events close to the day, such as specific front forming in Arctic or whatnot and thus your predictions are useless until the very day. Silver's polls are useless to watch prior to election because they are for sure to be subject to wild swings so they are not really predictions in that sense, and they are useless to watch on election day because you will have results anyway very soon without needing to then put forth lame defense of how often 1:2 or 1:10 or 1:100 event happens.

Of course it is perfect for Silver's business, we have elections only every few years so it can take decades of data to prove that he is actually full of shit. By that time he will be multimillionaire, in that sense I say well played.

538 is pretty well calibrated even accounting for the number of updates they make.

Let's see your calibration plot if you think this is what "full of shit" looks like.

Look at their politics calibration, it does not look nearly as well as sports one. It is also because of this:

When calculating the calibration and skill scores for forecasts that we updated over time, such as election forecasts that we updated every day, we weighted each update by the inverse of the number of updates issued. That way, we counted each forecasted event equally, regardless of how many updates we issued to the forecast.

Nevertheless at minimum stop spreading stupidity like "538 predicted 30% chance of Trump winning". They made 150+ predictions with wildly different number assigned. Having articles that "Today 538 predicts politician X winning with 90% probability" means nothing, in a week there may be a new prediction reassigning it to 50%. At best you may gauge who is favorite and who is not, but one does not have to be an expert for that.

The House predictions (which have the most data points) are also well calibrated.

Again, if it's bullshit, it's trivial to do better. Post chart.

I don't give a shit about "good calibration" in this context. This is endless debate also with Scott's prediction. What I am interested in is usefulness of the info 538 provides. Look at the daily graph of predictions for 2016 elections and please tell me what it is good for. You are somebody who finds 538 useful, what is it that you are getting from them?

I basically never check 538 because I don't really care who wins federal office. My point is merely that their predictions are better than "bullshit" by virtue of their calibration. If you don't give a shit about calibration then what's the basis of your opinion? Again, recall that the daily swings are factored into the calibration.

Of course it is perfect for Silver's business, we have elections only every few years so it can take decades of data to prove that he is actually full of shit

538 doesn't just do Presidential races, it does all Congressional races too, and other bits here and there like primaries. They did a short post about the historical performance of their forecasts (sports and politics) a while ago and the overall picture is that they do reasonably well.

https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/checking-our-work/

I like the idea of what he was trying to do with polling, though I wish it were done for more things along the same lines. I’ve never seen anyone attempt to predict the outcome of business or technology or social events using polling data, and it seems like it would be interesting to try. Even stuff like whether a theory is likely to prove true, I think the idea of simply using the data published in the mainstream to try to publicly predict trends before they happen on a blog site would probably be an interesting read even beyond just politics.

I'm not sure how much it makes sense to use polling data to predict other kinds of events. My understanding is that using polling to predict elections makes sense because you're essentially running the election early on a sample, so going from there to estimating the election results is what statistics is good at. And there are a lot of polls on elections people care about so you have enough data to do something with.

The other really useful polling is economic indicators, because so many rely on the confidence of large groups of people. If small business owners collectively think bad times are coming and stop investing, bad times will come. If consumers are collectively optimistic, they will spend money, and times will be good.

Except for those situations you have other actors who can change because of the collective belief. If business owners think bad times are coming then the federal reserve sees the polling sentiment and prints a bunch of money to prevent bad times. The economy is now an area where that doesn’t play out before policy makers play a hand too. You need unexpected events to cause bad times now.

But does the Federal Reserve engaging in rate-adjusting and QE/T policies act by economic force, or does it act by publicly stating that its actions will have such-and-such effect which will then impact expectations? A lot more of the latter. Interest rates rise, smart people "know" that means a recession is coming, money managers look at each other and say "you can't fight the Fed," investment pulls back, and bingo a recession.

That hasn’t happened in 16 years. The game has changed. The fed pumps more money into the system then people have more money and hence spend more. They’ve canceled the thing you speak of.

Business confidence Index is already a thing. Don't know how reliable it is as a predictor, however.

I think this and basically the stuff like whether or not people are really optimistic about new technology or whether experts in afield think an event is likely or not.

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