How One 19-Year-Old Illinois Man Is Distorting National Polling Averages
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
1. Looking at aggregates of lots of polls.
2. Looking at the variance that a poll captures from one iteration of it to another.
Or at least, so he claims. Obviously, he runs a poll aggregator, using a model that heavily weights the trendline of individual polls, so he has a dog in this fight.
I don't understand this criticism. Usually when people bring this sort of thing up, they have a specific criticism in mind (e.g., Exxon Mobil on global warming): they have identified an opinion that is sufficiently, demonstrably, wrong, and then they go looking for a reason how someone might get it wrong, so one conclusion might be is "having a dog in the fight". But the logical chain here goes one way: first you demonstrate that they are wrong, then you ask why.
But what's wrong with someone working with polls in a professional sense, expressing an opinion on best practices in polling and statistics? After all, stuff that Silver writes about is quite consistent with stuff other people write about.
It should, at least in principle, be possible to address the relative merits of polling methodologies objectively, and people like Silver, and Andrew Gelman too (see his blog, in particular the xbox poststratification paper and the more recent differential nonresponse paper discussions), seem to be trying to do just that. But anyone professionally studying polls is going to have some kind of a dog in the fight, in the end. It seems hard to conclude anything based only on that.
Even if, as in this case, I think that despite the bias, Silver is right.
People don't trust Wikipedia because anyone could have written it yet place more trust in books that may just have a veneer of authenticity.
Not that there's anything wrong with getting scooped. But it is an indication that his nose is too far in the meta-model and not in the real world. That's a class of mistake that can lead you to drive off a cliff.
Silver's already touched on this poll and its unusual methodology:
http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/election-update-leave-th...
He didn't get scooped; explaining the technical details isn't his ostensible specialty, adjusting for them is.
I'm just used to Silver providing that--they seem spread pretty thin. As you point out, you have to specialize in something, though...
It's a good article. And yeah, 538 got scooped on this one. But it's not because they weren't paying attention, they just had other stories to write.
He's not deceptive about this--I will give him that. It's all in the open. But it seems to amplify a kind of narrative fallacy if these mistakes aren't revisited anew (rather than just saying "as predicted, since outcome C actually happened, it was due to voter bloc X doing it as we said."
But I can't complain about a pundit class not giving actionable data--that's not their job. Silver's job is to add data to the discussion, and to stimulate the discussion. And I give him a "B" for that.
That said, this cycle, I've rediscovered Sam Wang at http://election.princeton.edu/ and think he maybe gives a purer approach to analysis, one not so much driven by clicks. He doesn't seem to hedge as much as Silver.
If there's a gradual shift in the polls, I'm not sure what that would mean. Which scenario did you have in mind?
I have a feeling that polling is used now a political weapon not a measure of reality.
Unlikely, considering there's one every other day
(that's actually not the best method to evaluate him, because he provides estimates of chances and could be better evaluated with something like the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brier_score that checks for calibration as well, but it's more intuitive).
Nate is strongly biased in favor of Hillary. That is fine but that is not scientific. Nassim Taleb said about Nate:
"55% "probability" for Trump then 20% 10 d later, not realizing their "probability" is too stochastic to be probability."
and
"So @FiveThirtyEight is showing us a textbook case on how to be totally clueless about probability yet make a business in it."
Proceed with caution.
And, regarding the volatility: the probabilities reported by 538 are closely linked to betting/prediction markets. Anyone with a better model could parlay into money quite easily.
They gave predictions for every state during the primaries. Also see: https://mishtalk.com/2016/05/19/nate-silvers-self-serving-co...
If we are standing at a roulette table and I tell you there is a 2.7% chance the ball will land on 4 and it lands on 4, it doesn't mean my low % was incorrect.
Age and level of education are slightly co-variant (you don't get many 18 year olds who have a PhD). Because the age classification and education levels are ordinal you should use an ordinal smoothing [0] function to turn them into pseudo continuous variables. Given the continuous and co-variant independent variables (as well as other categorical independent variables) and a categorical dependent variable the best analysis is probably to use a quadratic discriminant analysis (QDA).
[0] http://epub.ub.uni-muenchen.de/2100/1/tr015.pdf and http://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/ordPens/ordPens.pdf
It's very humorous when Trump cites this poll considering what an outlier of civilized humanity he is. Matches nicely.
Dividing them in small groups and calculating the proportion of people in each isn't the best approach though.
You have two distributions of ages here; both are known (within reasonable comparatively minute errors), no need to estimate. The distribution of ages of the electorate, strictly not known, but so so close to known compared to all the other estimates you have to deal with. And the distribution of the ages of your pollees, you simply ask them their age (estimating whether they are lying to you about their age is an infinitely deep philosophical hole you'll never get out of).
Maybe clickbait++, or maybe the NY Times felt better about fingering a young black guy than a competing paper.
I see no harm in headlines that create interest as long as they are not misleading.
The title should reflect the _poll_, not the man. HE himself is doing nothing. The title is misleading as I assumed the article would discuss grassroots activities by this man and how he's making great strides to influence polls. I would learn who he is, what he is doing, and how his actions have been effective. But, this is not the case. He has no idea and in fact this man is entirely irrelevant as an individual.
It’s worth noting that this analysis is possible only because the poll is extremely and admirably transparent: It has published a data set and the documentation necessary to replicate the survey.
It does point out an aspect of the poll that may undermine its utility in accurately predicting the result of the election, but it's a pretty dry fact, the repeated inclusion of a heavily weighted voter.
If Trump takes 10-20% of the black vote, then the poll did a good job predicting the results. I don't expect that to happen.
This is what your parent comment was referring to.
Individuals are usually even more imperfect than most news outlets when it comes to having limited sources of information and unexamined preconceived notions about things. No one is off the hook for being personally responsible for trying to understand all sides of a debate or being as educated as possible on all sides of an issue. I only say this because I see huge correlations between people complaining about bias in news outlets (regardless of political leanings) and people who don't see just as much bias in their own preferred media inputs.
All are biased knowingly. We don't live in utopia, newspapers/media are paid enterprises.
To put it in context: there's a story I've heard once or twice about Walter Cronkite, during the JFK administration. JFK supported a bill to provide funding to the state of Alaska to construct mental health facilities, of which the state had (at the time) none, and a few of the more out-there Republicans who opposed him spun this into a conspiracy theory that JFK was secretly building Soviet-style gulags in Alaska, and would deport all his political enemies there once construction was finished (a sort of precursor to today's allegations the FEMA is a front for (insert Democratic president here)'s secret labor camps for his/her enemies). Cronkite supposedly refused to dignify the allegations with any kind of airtime, knowing that the mere act of mentioning the JFK-labor-camp stuff on a national news broadcast would implicitly legitimize it.
(and, btw, the leaks have three stories in the "top news" block on the top left, and an above-the-fold story in the politics section right now)
So in common American usage, not liberal. If you're a socialist though, "liberal" would accurately describe the whole Democratic party, who favor somewhat regulated capitalism and mild social liberalism.
There's nothing at all wrong with this article in a vacuum, but there does appear to be a bias in article selection. (Although I suppose that some of that must also be simply because 'Trump' sells newspapers (or clicks or what have you.))
Anyway, the story turns out to be a great example about survey design tradeoffs.
This post had an additional benefit: I've been able to observed the votes for my comments go up and down like a roller coaster for the past hour, as the readers of HN apply their own biases. Rather interesting, especially as the number of actual responses is relatively small.
What can we learn about HN's user base from the ultimate comment score, I wonder?
Note my first post. I intentionally left it open-ended to spark discussion. In an election cycle where online propaganda and sockpuppetry have been confirmed, I don't think my question is in the same league as those posed by flat-earthers or 9/11 conspiracy theorists.
As for the motivation, as a purveyor of facts I have to imagine that the NYT is frustrated at Trump's complete disregard for them, and his disregard of polling is a big part of that.