Yeah they sure were bad at predictions. If only they had aggregated all their predictions and compared them to how things actually turned out in one easy assess location. That sure would have been useful..... [0]
reply[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20250306183754/https://projects....
538 was actually pretty accurate!
replyThey had a good article about how their predictions were much better than you'd expect, but obviously I can't link it anymore because ABC removed it.
Did he predict odds? How are you so sure his odds were wrong?
replyThe 70:30 prediction against Trump was far better than most. I did see models back then that considered the state polls mostly or entirely uncorrelated, and those produced obviously garbage with 90% or even 99% in favor of Clinton.
replyBut in the end people pick on Nate because he really enjoys being an asshole on the internet. It's far more about when he acts as a pundit, not as an expert on statistics.
People consistently have a hard time understanding that 30% probabilities happen all the time.
replySurely not all the time.
replyI think given the number of things that can happen with ~30% probability, there's probably something significant happening with ~30% probability at basically all times.
replyWell, we're talking about elections. You have an election where there's a president, 30 or so governors, 33-34 senators, and 438 representatives. Say a total of 64 major offices, or 500 if you count the representatives. You'd expect a 30% chance to happen in 19 major races, or 150 races if you count the representatives.
replySo in an election, that happens all the time. It just doesn't always happen in the race for president.
30% of the time it is all of the time.
replySome say 30% of the time.
replyWhere Presidential politics is concerned, I think it's less a case of misunderstanding probabilities and more the success of party propaganda. Every victory is a landslide with a resounding mandate from the populace, every defeat a crushing humiliation and repudiation of your opponent's Unamerican ideals.
replyI kind of fell off the Nate Silver train toward the end of Trump's first term (so deep in the COVID-19 era...). It feels like around that time 538 shifted heavily away from raw statistics and into punditry, and they seemed less unique among the various political blogs.
replyThose predictions all became worthless anyway when Comey reopened the "emails" issue right before the election and threw fresh meat to all the stupid people who ate that up.
replyThis isn't about Nate's articles (although perhaps those are gone as well).
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