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PaperclipPerfector  2yr ago (text post)   31941 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 3, 2023

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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/

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