From last year:
Posted on 10/16/2016 6:31:25 AM PDT by Helicondelta
Evan has a habit. He’s not ashamed of it, but he doesn’t want to reveal too much about himself, lest his colleagues learn how he’s spending so much of his time. Like so many others, the middle-age software developer can’t look away from the presidential election. But his fixation takes a particular form: with every browser refresh, he hopes math will reveal the future.
Evan is a poll obsessive, FiveThirtyEight strain—a subspecies I recognize because I’m one of them, too. When he wakes up in the morning, he doesn’t shower or eat breakfast before checking the Nate Silver-founded site’s presidential election forecast (sounds about right). He keeps a tab open to FiveThirtyEight’s latest poll list; a new poll means new odds in the forecast (yup). He get push alerts on his phone when the forecast changes (check). He follows the 538 Forecast Bot, a Twitter account that tweets every time the forecast changes (same). In all, Evan says he checks in hourly, at least while he’s awake (I plead the Fifth).
...
A compulsion is a repetitive behavior “aimed at preventing or reducing anxiety or distress, or preventing some dreaded event or situation,” according to the clinical definition. In a country as rancorously divided as the US, dread of either a Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton presidency is one of the reigning emotions of this election. If the FiveThirtyEight forecast shows the race leaning toward the candidate you support then you likely feel less fear.
(Excerpt) Read more at wired.com ...
From last year:
Mental goo from yet another demented leftist.
He says it could be the beginning of the end or he could remain a factor for month..
It’s like saying almost certainly maybe?
Marcus writes for Wired, ergo, he’s a lib.
Speaking of Wired, I thought they were on the FR no-go list. Did that change?
Silver assimilates poll data into a model that attempts to compensate for bias in the polls. Since some polls are totally fabricated and manipulated to begin with, that’s like measuring things with a rubber ruler and then attempting to infer the actual truth from the resulting mess.
Yep.
He got lucky a couple times and election results confirmed his own biases. That proves nothing. Let him make some accurate predictions that don’t confirm his worldview!
Been boycotting that 90s relic since 2008.
Used to be an incredible magazine before the SJWs took it over.
Now it’s an analog BuzzFeed.
Beat me to it - I was about to remind all that FiveThirtyEight gave Trump a 2% to become the nominee.
His polls are tripe.
LOL. Old Nate maybe needs to take some Bleach Bit to his Crystal Ball.
Great analogy. Garbage in, garbage out.
Why do we have no go list??? Need to know what is happening on the left
How about a no go posting heading for people here who need a safe space
Several problems with Nate Slaver’s methodology:
1) uses historical precedent for polling agency accuracy and skew
Wouldn’t polling agencies modified their methodology over time to become more accurate?
Why does he discount the USC Dornsife and PPD tracking polls? Similar polls have been shown to be quite accurate over time.
2) Goes “conservative early, aggressive late”
This is clearly stated as part of part of the methodology.
They are willing to put much more weight on new polls.
But the swing over time in the polls is indicative of something not captured in his methodology.
3) The adjustment for poll skew is to the mean, not to the shape of the prior distribution of the sample representativeness
This is a departure from the Bayesian methodology he purports to follow.
To adjust for sampling skew, it is not enough to assume a normal distribution, but rather one would need to adjust the entire distribution.
But this could generate spurious results, such as what happened with the “unskewed” polls in 2012 that showed Romney could win.
It’s better not to adjust for poll skew at all.
I’m not saying Slaver is wrong, just that these are potential sources of error in his results.
“Used to be an incredible magazine before the SJWs took it over.”
Wired was my favorite magazine all throughout the 90s. I only stopped buying it every month when babies, bills, and business took over my life.
I wouldn’t waste a nickel on that (now) liberal rag today.
He has the mental acumen to become a follower of islam. The retard is in full swing.
“Why do we have no go list?”
Because some publications and websites threatened JimRob with legal action for allowing excerpts from their sites to be posted here.
Yes. He TOTALLY missed it with the NCAA and NBA championships this year. That's a good thing.
It had a sharp, anarchist/libertarian cultural edge that really captured the spirit of the emerging Internet and the tech industry in general. It was a 90s-early 00s version of the great 70s magazine, Omni (which I also read, though I was quite young at the time).
It's become conventional and boring.
I didn’t realize Silver is gay. Geesh... another one...
I still have a few copies of Omni. A wonderful magazine!
Do they really just make up the numbers? Pull them out of thin air?
Polls can be skewed by taking an unrepresentative sample of the population, and a smart analyst can take that into account.
Of course, even a smart analyst might not spot some bias in the data, but it's not likely that most polls are completely fraudulent.
When Silver got Trump's prospects wrong -- which was most of the time -- was when he ignored the numbers and relied on his own judgement of what was possible.
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