Caltrops - Balance of Power - It's a good thing Silver refused to admit he's wrong. Oh wait.

Forum Overview :: Balance of Power

by skip 11/06/2016, 6:11pm PST

Nate Copper wrote:

...was laughable when announced, and only appreciated in value now. Maybe you forgot :^)

The man wrote a huge article admitting that he fucked that up predicting Trump and even bothering to figure out why he fucked up so it doesn't repeat. I despise pompous blowhards like Denton never say they're wrong or bother to change policies even when they sorta admit it, not a guy who wrote this:

But I don’t think this defense is complete — at least if we’re talking about FiveThirtyEight’s Trump forecasts. We didn’t just get unlucky: We made a big mistake, along with a couple of marginal ones.

Short of a public pillory I'm not sure what else you want from him. I realize that it probably was just reported as "Silver admits he's stupid" at the alt-right and ctrl-left sites, which hate the guy for reasons I don't understand, but I can't ridicule an earnest attempt to examine and rectify a failure publically.

Constant course correction would strike me as less of a prediction model, and more about trying to meet a snapshot of current sentiment. Polling stands to be as strong as the sample set, accuracy of the weighting, honesty of respondents etc.

I'm going to do something I shouldn't and assume you're actually curious about if this is right or not. He grades and weights polls by their methodological rigor and his polls-plus model also uses historical data. But making predictive models without current or new information is fraught with a lot more problems than using one that's outdated and there have been models that don't use polls at all which don't do nearly as well. An idea that Taleb endorses when he's not trying to stir up shit because nobody's paid attention to him in 2 hours.

What about Nassim Taleb and the black swan notion of the power of fractional probability? Can one assume that his ideas figure in your models?

My work is pretty compatible with what he is saying a lot of the time. One thing he critiques is the idea that you can have pristine models that have clean mathematical assumptions, and they will work as well as they are supposed to. If you go back and look at the financial crisis, you had credit rating agencies that had models that said, “Oh these CDOs, collections of mortgage debt, are completely safe.” They gave them a triple-A rating, which implies they have only a 0.1% chance of defaulting. Thirty percent of them defaulted. You had an error of 30,000% between how the models claimed to be and how they really are.

You find the same thing if you look at some predictions of elections, where going back to 1992, you’ll have political scientists at a conference say, “We have these models that will exactly predict what the election will be months in advance without looking at polls.” Well, you have to look at polls.

Let's enjoy some HIGH NATE SILVER

Nah. I'll pass on drinking that hatorade. He's taken the Ezra Klein/Tucker Carlson route of being a fairly sharp guy who decided to earn lots of money by starting a site with a ratio of good:clickbait writers of 1:10. 538 hasn't completely deteriorated like those sites though since I still find their sports/political predictions useful. I dislike that it's the route he's taken but I can't fault him for needing to attract clicks and that's how the game is currently played. We can bond over Brianna Wu instead.

Has Nate Silver been right about anything this election? by Why, Jerry? 11/05/2016, 2:37pm PDT NEW

Cu Later by Nate 'three percent' Copper 11/05/2016, 9:50pm PDT NEW

Beating the odds doesn't change the odds by skip 11/06/2016, 9:36am PST NEW

Bias admitted NT by but the gloating isn't in hindsight 11/06/2016, 2:25pm PST NEW

You're gloating b/c they predicted >90% primary results correctly? NT by skip 11/06/2016, 3:23pm PST NEW

It was in regards to the 3% prediction of the Republican nominee's path by Nate Copper 11/06/2016, 4:55pm PST NEW

It's a good thing Silver refused to admit he's wrong. Oh wait. by skip 11/06/2016, 6:11pm PST NEW