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Comment by VikingCoder | Hacker News Reader

> because authorities time and time again have misled them.

I personally feel like most of the problem is exploitation.

When the news has some piece, "New research blah blah blah," you and I and most of our peers know that "new research" is unlikely to stand up to the test of time. Yet it's breathlessly reported by one station, and derided as nonsense on another station.

When the weather report predicts no rain, and it rains, you and I and most of our peers know that the prediction wasn't wrong, that we're just talking about likelihoods.

When polls predicted a 99% chance of Hillary Clinton winning, you and I and most of our peers know that the polls weren't wrong. Sometimes chance comes out that way. Plus, reporting those polls probably impacted the outcome.

The news, and politicians, and talking heads, want our outrage because that's engaging. So they exploit us, by misrepresenting research, science, polls...

Which erodes trust in authorities.

And yes, sometimes authorities did horrific things. Like the Tuskegee Experiment. Or silencing Li Wenliang. Or MK-Ultra. Gulf of Tonkin. Red Flags.

View on HN

> When polls predicted a 99% chance of Hillary Clinton winning, you and I and most of our peers know that the polls weren't wrong.

A bit of a tangent, but polls don't make predictions, people make predictions based on the polling data. Some people predicted Hillary with 99% chance, and 538 predicted Hillary with 66% chance. When dealing with probabilities it's not as simple as "wrong" or "not", but if people were betting then those that bet 99% would have lost a lot of money, and 538 only a little. As a result I trust 538 a lot more now; that's the nice thing about people making specific predictions, you can over time learn who to trust.

Anyhow this tangent ultimately agrees with your point, as you and I know that if a talking head makes a "99%" prediction, it's got at best an 80% chance of actually happening.

And if 538 were consistently wrong, say wrong 80% of the time, then ~538's prediction gets you right 80% of the time. Win!

Doesn't this only works if an election has two possible outcomes? Revotes and voids are possible as well in most cases. In 2022 these things somehow feel like they're much more likely than before...

Sure. Though in many cases these types of events are pretty low probability events.

And lots of people still said 538 got it wrong. No, it didn't.

Or about how Omicron defies statistics. No, it doesn't.

People just don't fucking understand statistics.

How can you objectively say that 538 was right or not?

They use numbers to come up with probabilities, but there are a lot of baked-in assumptions about things like turnout, various sampling errors or biases, etc.

They have reasons for their assumptions, such as using information from previous elections. But the current election may violate those assumptions, but it's hard to say how much and with what probability.

I trust 538 for the most part. But it's just models and those models have assumptions and it's quite possible the assumptions were just wrong in 2016. We only have one data point, so we'll never really know.

You can’t over one poll. It’s really consistency that you’re looking for over many, many polls.

The worst part of figuring out the trustworthiness of a source is putting in the time and effort to comb over all of its output and comparing it to reality, an effort that can take a long time.

Which lends me to ask: how can you say that you trust 538 if you also say there is only one data point? Because there shouldn’t be: 538 made big news during the election of 2008. 538 has been around since 2008 so you should have a lot of polling predictions to comb over.

I actually don’t have an opinion of 538 as I haven’t put in that work.

You can't blame People. Even some Statisticians, with Phd's and written books, don't understand Statistics and confuse basic concepts of their domain:

"The p value and the base rate fallacy" https://www.statisticsdonewrong.com/p-value.html

"Misinterpretations of Significance: A Problem Students Share with Their Teachers?" "https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Heiko-Haller/publicatio..."

Polls also only count the people you poll. If your poll pool has an inherent bias the poll results will reflect that bias.

I feel obliged to point out that reputable poles predicted Clinton's chances at significantly lower than 99%.

Also there was undo foreign influence on the election that didn't become evident until afterwards: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_interference_in_the_20...

Not to distract from your point ... this page : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historical_polling_for_United_... suggests the value was always between 40-50%

... however I assume you meant "reputable polls", not Polish people :)

> the value was always between 40-50%

Those are the raw data from polls (an estimate of the popular vote), not the predictions from them ("who will win" - which is what the original commenter refers to).

Fivethirtyeight had Clinton at 88% less than a month out from election day: https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/2016-election-forecast/...

> Fivethirtyeight had Clinton at 88% less than a month out

I.e. a couple weeks before James Comey announced a reopening of the investigation into the email issue?

I agree that 538 was likely over-interpreting their data, but I think this is a bad example because the "facts" on the ground changed significantly in the time period.

I generally put a very high stake of credibility in fivethirty eight. They ended on 71%.

> I agree that 538 was likely over-interpreting their data

I did not say this.

I'm illustrating the original poster's comment about these forecasts being guesses of likelihood.

Of course Nate Silver and co. did not have Comey reopening the case as a factor in their models; that is not an indictment of the model itself.

Yet I'm sure all of us knew folks who had opinions riding on the 85%+ forecasts, and then losing faith in the predictions as they wildly changed over the course of weeks.

I missed your point in the original.

As you say, "88% chance of winning" is not "expected to receive 88% of the vote".

The 538 model attempted to weigh the reliability (recency, reputation, magic pixie dust) of polling data and project a range of outcomes.

And even with a "perfect" model, it can take a while to absorb exogenous events like the Comey surprise.

The causes of 538's prediction error might be unknowable. Or, to be fair, if it was even an error! Would we expect probability to approach 100% in the moments before polling opens? Maybe in some fields, but 538 did not attempt this. IIRC they ended at ~70/30 Clinton. A single roll of a die (1d6) will frequently come up 1 or 2.

"Of course Nate Silver and co. did not have Comey reopening the case as a factor in their models; that is not an indictment of the model itself."

Why is that not an indictment of the model? Stuff happens in politics. Things change.

A month out you should ordinarily have much less certainty than a day before. But their predictions were the opposite, where certainty was falling. Sure, there can be reasons for that kind of inversion, but usually it's just arrogance and neglecting the long tail of black swans.

> Stuff happens in politics. Things change.

"FBI Director going rogue the week before the election" isn't something you could factor into a prediction because it just hadn't ever happened before. It'd be like trying to factor in "What if an asteroid hits Kansas the week before?"

By itself, that's unlikely. But the point of black swans is not that a particular thing will happen, but that there are zillions of low-probability events and they add up to a high probability.

> Fivethirtyeight had Clinton at 88% less than a month out from election day

And the way statistics work, a 90% forecast is truly a 90% forecast - they weren't wrong with this. It's just people think 99% chance of winning basically means "they won". But that's not how it works. So the idea that these numbers are misinformation is incorrect, it's that media is using a metric that the average person has trouble comprehending.

> it's that media is using a metric that the average person has trouble comprehending.

Isn’t that a clear case of disinformation?

The public being too ignorant to interpret analysis isn't disinformation.

I wish everyone thought this way :/

So it's ok to mislead people so long as you are not lying directly?

It's ok to pass on accurate information that requires the public to put in the work to accurately understand it.

It is probably impossible to have the complex dialogue sufficient to inform people both intelligent and willing to put in the work in a way that is not apt to either be misunderstood accidentally or more frequently on purpose.

We're talking about metrics with objective definitions that are taught in schools around the country, not headlines like "The President is cancelling his trip to Africa because he hates black people". I don't know, seems like a huge difference to me...

No. If the media reports that the average salary is $50k/year that is not disinformation even if a lot of people will misinterpret it as meaning "most people make $50k/year" simply because they don't understand that an average is a measure of central tendency, not distribution.

Something like this only rises to the level of disinformation if the media (or whoever) deliberately presents an accurate piece of data in a way that it knows will not be understood.

If metrics that average people don't understand was disinformation than 90% of my job would be disseminating disinformation. It's not. Instead, a large part of my job is explaining the metrics.

>Fivethirtyeight had Clinton at 88% less than a month out from election day:

It is funny seeing this here because it is a great example of how it is hard to fight misinformation.

What you said is technically correct but it is extremely misleading. There is no reason to use 538's projection a month out from the election when you could be using the one from the day of the election which had Clinton at 71%. You seem to have chosen the moment in which Clinton's odds were the highest to suggest the projection was wrong. Your comment is just as factual as if I said "538 was one of the few outlets that had Trump favored a few months before the election". That would also be technically true but it glosses over the fact that they only had Trump favored on a single day out of the several months they did projections.

Is this "misinformation" meant to smear 538? Is this just run-of-the-mill bias? Is this an honest mistake? It this specific date chosen intentionally and your motive is just being misunderstood? There is no way for a third party to know the definitive answer to these questions, but if I was 538 I would certainly feel a little attacked by your comment and might jump to calling it misinformation.

A parent commenter stated projections from reputable outlets were "significantly lower than 99%." Given the original claim of "polls predicted a 99% chance," focusing on a reputable source's highest prediction lends credence to the statement.

That projection was made scant weeks out from the election, as well. It's not irrelevant (Oct. median was 85%), and calling my providing a link misinformation is pretty bizarre.

I suspect this is not the first time you've felt obliged to stick up for 538 but you're purely wielding a strawman in this case. I've expressed no judgement.

Anyway, we're talking about the general populace's sentiments around the predictions. Why would we possibly talk about the predictions made the day of the election – those numbers had done no work in shaping that sentiment.

>Given that comment train, wouldn't you focus on the moment they were at their highest? That projection was made scant weeks out from the election, as well.

No, because that 88% was basically a prediction of a prediction because as other people pointed out that occurred before news that changed the makeup of the race. You can't blame them for not knowing the news ahead of time.

It would be like if I predicted the Rams win the Superbowl this weekend, then we find out on Saturday that 10 players will miss the game due to Covid. I might then revise my prediction to the Bengals winning. If the Rams win wouldn't you say my prediction was wrong because of my final prediction? My initial prediction might have been right but that was made with less information and I revised that prediction once I got more information.

Similarly it doesn't make sense to criticize 538 for being less accurate with their early projections when they had less information. As they got more information their predictions became more accurate. It should be obvious that they weren't changing their model in a vacuum to push the odds towards Trump. More information was coming out that improved Trump's odds and the model reflected that.

And to be clear I didn't call your comment misinformation. I used it as an example of why it is hard to categorize misinformation. Some might view your comment as misinformation and some might not. The only value judgement I made was that it is "extremely misleading" and I stand by the categorization regardless of the motive behind your comment.

> Similarly it doesn't make sense to criticize 538 for being less accurate with their early projections when they had less information

It must be a good feeling, then, that I have not criticized them.

> to be clear I didn't call your comment misinformation

Earlier:

> Is this "misinformation" meant to smear 538?

>It must be a good feeling, then, that I have not criticized them.

You were trying to correct someone who was defending the accuracy of the general industry predictions. If you were not directly criticizing 538, the criticism was certainly implied.

>> Is this "misinformation" meant to smear 538?

Are you familiar with the concept of scare quotes? I specifically used quotes there to indicate that I was not directly calling your comment misinformation but was instead using that term with some detachment.

Polling numbers are different than predicted chance of winning. A five point difference in polling numbers is likely to be a 90%+ chance of winning.

You're comparing apple and oranges. The 99% prediction[1] was based on the statistical significance calculated against the polling results, and was not the actual polling numbers suggested in the wiki that you linked.

1. https://archive.is/enzvh

I don't think any polls themselves gave odds, but I would say any aggregator that gave 99% odds was definitely wrong. Nate Silver gave about 70% odds, as did prediction markets - that is much more reasonable.

My own trust in authorities is eroded by more recent and basic things than your list of horrific things.

For example, Afghanistan - decades of war, thousands of American lives, trillions of dollars - all for no clear purpose and whatever we did accomplish there seems to have been reversed in a weekend. The Taliban are still in charge of the country and there was never any accountability for the policy and military failures.

Trump is another example. I often feel like I've walked out of a theater after seeing a convoluted movie. I'm left asking things like "So, was Trump a Russian agent?" If our intelligence services thought he was, then their plan was just to run him down in the press for several years? If they didn't then the mainstream media was misrepresenting them for years?

Most major things fall into this category of "I can't believe our government could possibly be this bad." Climate change - we need green energy but also haven't approved a new nuclear reactor in decades. Infrastructure - it costs infinity billion dollars to build a train, and a new public restroom will take most of a decade. Economy - we're just going to create trillions and trillions of dollars at ever increasing rates and that will be fine somehow. Pandemic - almost too much to talk about stuff going wrong.

I could go on and on but the main thing is that the people in charge, the government and the media, seem incompetent to a degree that beggars belief. Why should I trust these people?

I'd even add basic things like the TSA to the list: the government says this is required for everyone to be safe, but every single study or analysis shows it is ineffective and security experts universally deride it; and yet, the "authority"--which might literally be the agent at the scanner with a smug attitude about the whole thing--is adamant this is important and that maybe you are a terrorist for nothing other than making a sarcastic joke about the situation.

No one wants to sign a bill pulling back TSA, and then see the headline "TSA would have stopped this terrorist."

Voters are not reasonable, and the media fans those flames.

Is that supposed to make me feel better, or worse? ;P I will say that if everyone (including the agent at the gate who doesn't seem to want to admit this to even themselves) said that out loud--instead of claiming it was a critical security measure--it would make me feel a lot better about the whole thing and I might not even be upset about it anymore (though at that point you might also see the public opinion holding it together change).

My elderly parents were both submitted to full body pat downs and my dad had to pull up his pant leg to demonstrate that yes, his leg brace was a medical device.

Neither of them are physically capable of overwhelming my preschooler nephew let alone an air flight attendant.

So much theater for so little security.

Looking back on this comment, I probably should have included that this happened within the last month, as if we haven't had 20 years of practice figuring this out.

Note that leaving known agents in place is a recognized approach. e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthony_Blunt

I don't think the approach is applicable if the agent is in position to do serious harm.

Not even the ballsiest, most scheming intelligence officer would let a known agent have the nuclear suitcase, though.

do they usually let them be President for a full term of four years with no consequence aside from relentless media assault?

I'm left asking things like "So, was Trump a Russian agent?"

The fact is, he never had to be. He is a fool and it was easy to predict his behavior would be far better for Russia than that of Clinton, and so Russia did everything it could to support him and damage his opponents, no collaboration necessary.

And yet Crimea and east Ukraine happened on Obama's watch and Kyiv will fall on Biden's watch. Cool eh?

All the stage setting for them Kyiv on Trump's watch. If Trump had won a second term it would still have happened. We ascribe entirely too much power to the office of the President sometimes.

It is clear Russia is taking advantage of Biden's fear of military action. China, North Korea, Iran all have been more aggressive. The outcome in Afghanistan gave everyone the impression America will back down. Trump kept everyone off balance.

> The outcome in Afghanistan gave everyone the impression America will back down. Trump kept everyone off balance.

You mean the outcome of the withdrawal plan that Trump agreed to? Biden was damned if he did and damned if he didn't:

- The US is weak for withdrawing

- The US doesn't stick to its agreements

That's a false dilema. Biden wasn't criticized for withdrawing from Afghanistan, he was criticized for doing a bad job at withdrawing.

What should he have done differently to have done a good job?

Kept Bagram air base until the evacuation was complete for starters.

Not droning innocent civilians and then fibbing on the way out would have been nice as well.

Maybe not left so much heavy equipment and arms?

And stage for that was set by those laughable red lines in Syria. Remember that?

US resolve is non existent that much is true. It has little to do with Trump or Biden for that matter. When Obama let Assad use gas Putin took notice, everything else comes from that.

About Afghanistan.. it was not the withdrawal it was the laughable way it was done. Abandoning Bagram.. what dumbfuck thought of that? We DO know what idiot approved it though.

Governments are incentivized to do everything wrong at every level.

* Unlike a business, governments don't earn revenue from providing services that people want. They earn revenue through taxes, which they get to collect regardless of how well they govern.

* Unlike shareholders, politicians have zero skin in the game and are therefore incentivized to be as wasteful as reckless as possible. If a politician passes an overly generous pension plan that ends up bankrupting the state several decades in the future, the politician will suffer no consequences whatsoever.

* Unlike monarchs, politicians don't own the state, its land, or its resources. They merely get to control the state for a short period of time. That means they are incentivized to extract as much personal wealth out of the state as rapidly as possible during their short tenure.

I'm not convinced you understand how representative democracy actually works. Are you really arguing for establishing a monarchy in the US, as you seem to be?

> They earn revenue through taxes, which they get to collect regardless of how well they govern.

Who is the "they" earning revenue? What does "how well they govern" mean, and who is the "they" doing the governing? These definitions are important. What are you actually complaining about here?

> If a politician passes an overly generous pension plan that ends up bankrupting the state several decades in the future, the politician will suffer no consequences whatsoever

Really. Gosh, that sounds very different from every corporate executive ever.

> That means they are incentivized to extract as much personal wealth out of the state as rapidly as possible during their short tenure.

Really. Gosh, that also sounds very different from every corporate executive ever.

> I'm not convinced you understand how representative democracy actually works. Are you really arguing for establishing a monarchy in the US, as you seem to be?

Not at all, I was just juxtaposing the incentives at play between the two systems.

> Who is the "they" earning revenue? What does "how well they govern" mean, and who is the "they" doing the governing? These definitions are important. What are you actually complaining about here?

I thought the subject of the sentence was clear ("they" meaning the government). The government earns money by demanding it through force. Private businesses (and non-profit charities) earn revenue by providing services that people are willing to pay for. Businesses that sell stuff people don't want will earn $0 in revenue. Do you disagree?

> Really. Gosh, that sounds very different from every corporate executive ever. > Really. Gosh, that also sounds very different from every corporate executive ever.

I agree with you to some extent. However, a corporate executive is generally compensated with shares in the company, so they have a pretty large incentive to keep the company in tact at least. Politicians have no such incentive whatsoever.

Our intelligence services are not rogue nor do they have the power to take out a democratically elected president. To think otherwise is just conspiracy theories with no basis.

My recollection is probably a bit off, but IIRC, the FBI knowingly and repeatedly lied to the FISA court ("material misstatements") in order to obtain secret search warrants to spy on the Tump campaign based on opposition research which was directly funded by the Clinton campaign, who had hired a former MI6 spook to find or make up dirt who also happened to be working for the bureau and was secretly leaking everything to the press! There were basically no consequences for anyone involved, including the FBI. I wouldn't believe that story line in a movie.

The FBI continually goads citizens into being terrorists or on occasion, convinces them to kidnap a governor, then arrests them and claims victory! We could look a little further back in time to the aftermath of 9/11, and the role the CIA played in the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, or the even the FBI doing its best to destroy the civil rights movement.

That's certainly the Republican narrative of that FISA warrant. The inspector general report that found "material misstatements" found no evidence of politically-motivated or intentional abuse. It was basically technical sloppiness.

The Iraq WMD lies were driven directly from the White House, it was not a rogue CIA. For J. Edgar Hoover's FBI you have a point, but it led to many reforms by the Church Committee in the 70s.

Have you read the key judgements from the 2002 NIE on Iraq?

> High Confidence:

> - Iraq is continuing, and in some areas expanding, its chemical, biological, nuclear and missile programs contrary to UN resolutions.

> - We are not detecting portions of these weapons programs.

> - Iraq possesses proscribed chemical and biological weapons and missiles.

> - Iraq could make a nuclear weapon in months to a year once it acquires sufficient weapons-grade fissile material.

https://www.dni.gov/files/documents/Iraq_NIE_Excerpts_2003.p...

That unclassified public NIE "summary" was manipulated by Bush and Cheney. If you can find the classified full NIE it has much more nuance and strong dissents. Instead of showing rogue agencies it's evidence of full White House control.

https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB254/index.htm

I would agree that the White House placed a ton of pressure on the CIA to come up with a justification to invade Iraq, but the whole thing smacks of them trying to cover their own asses after the fact. Yes, there were dissenting opinions, but the IC still signed off on the NIE, including the summary, and top officials at the CIA have their share of the blame as much as Bush and Cheney:

> On the other hand, senior CIA officials mentioned the uranium claim in congressional testimony at the same time, permitted it to be included in a December 2002 “fact sheet” on Iraq, and mounted only tepid opposition to inclusion of the charge in President Bush’s 2003 State of the Union Address, where it would become notorious as the “16 Words.”

If they knew it was a lie, and repeated that lie to Congress, pawning it off as just 'Bush lied, people died' (which, not saying that was your position, but that's what your comment initially came off as, hence my reply) absolves the CIA of the blame they justly deserve for their part in Iraq. But you're right that they certainly were not a rogue agency.

I think GP was referring to Kevin Clinesmith who pleaded guilty to deliberately falsifying documents presented to FISA courts.

Both of those are certainly wrong.

The intelligence services are rogue in the sense they violate our rights, lie to Congress without punishment, and have zero effective oversight. Common people don't control the intelligence services, the legislative branch doesn't, the executive branch doesn't (unless Trump's plan was to make himself look bad), and the intelligence services have their own secret courts. There is no sense in which they aren't rogue. They don't even explain how they spend their budgets

They also have the power to take out a democratically elected president. For instance, they could've published the information they had linking Trump to Putin. They could've convinced the House and the Senate to impeach or Trump's cabinet to remove him.

The intelligence services are a perfect example of the unbelievable malfunction of our government. They are evil, in the sense of being torturers and murders who violate American rights and ignore the law. They are incompetent in the sense that they fail in spectacular and embarrassing ways even against adversaries that they outmatch on paper.

Intelligent services have been abused by presidents many times but there is no credible evidence that they act in opposition to a sitting president. Obama's FBI issued the Trump campaign FISA warrants but Trump installed his own people at the CIA/DOJ/FBI etc. The closest rogue agents against Trump were the whistleblowers like Colonel Vindman that were mostly rooted out and attacked relentlessly to discredit them.

>> Our intelligence services are not rogue nor do they have the power to take out a democratically elected president.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1953_Iranian_coup_d%27%C3%A9ta...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salvador_Allende

>> To think otherwise is just conspiracy theories with no basis.

Your certitude here is making you look quite ignorant of history.

In August 2013 the U.S. government formally acknowledged the U.S. role in the coup by releasing a bulk of previously classified government documents that show it was in charge of both the planning and the execution of the coup, including the bribing of Iranian politicians, security and army high-ranking officials, as well as pro-coup propaganda.[28][29] The CIA is quoted acknowledging the coup was carried out "under CIA direction" and "as an act of U.S. foreign policy, conceived and approved at the highest levels of government".[30]

I think you and I blame different people for that.

I blame voters for wanting easy answers, having a NIMBY attitude to anything, want scapegoats, won't raise taxes in good times, won't help their neighbors in bad times, blame everyone else for their problems, demand instant results, get bored waiting for long-term solutions, care more about style over substance...

Politicians exploit all of those things. And so do talking heads.

> ...the people in charge, the government and the media, seem incompetent to a degree that beggars belief.

Not exactly true, two important things intersect:

1. Running a country is much harder than it looks. The machinery they maintain is older, hoarier and covers more diverse topics than anything and they are constantly being lied to about whether it is working. It is a point I struggle to get across to people as a small-government proponent, but the people in power physically cannot understand the levers they are pulling and the effects the pulling achieves. Most of them aren't even numerate and the complexity at work here is beyond any human. They're flying blind and often setting up bad systems with bad incentives.

2. The goals of the polity are not your goals. The swing voter, in the moment that they vote, appears to be a different and much simpler creature from anything that turns up in normal conversation. The politicians have to deal with that swing voter rather than do what the politician may think is prudent (which, to be honest, is a good thing even if it sometimes throws up terrible results).

You missed the subplot where the Hillary Campaign via intermediaries paid a foreign national to 'develop' the Trump Russia Conspiracy.

It's not your fault it was poorly edited and paced.

Looking like there may be a sequel and probably a spin-off.

A note on Afghanistan, the military started the war paying farmers to stop growing poppy in an attempt to defund the Taliban. The next season farmers planted more, expecting to be paid to burn thier crops again. No dice. Crop production ramped up, flooding the market with Heroine and subsequently rounding out the pain pill opiate crisis in the US with a swell of Afghanny (circuitously routed through south American drug Lords) heroine. And the Taliban got funding for decades. Now the media is aghast at how much regular people hate the government now. Trump support is just a big fat middle finger to an inept establishment that currently has it's pants down around it's ankles.

I think it's more accurate to see the government's primary function as deciding who gets what sinecure, not accomplishing things. I would wager that's the historical norm.

Your list of failures, among others (homeless industrial complex), make much more sense through this light: they're all wealth transfers to political friends.

> When polls predicted a 99% chance of Hillary Clinton winning, you and I and most of our peers know that the polls weren't wrong. Sometimes chance comes out that way.

Andrew Gelman just wrote about the difference between aleatoric and epistemic uncertainty: https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2022/02/03/epistemic-...

And it sounds like you're confusing them here. "Sometimes chance comes out that way" is something that applies to aleatoric probabilities. But major elections are not uncertain in an aleatoric sense; they are uncertain in an epistemic sense, and the polls were correct to worry about why they were wrong.

you and I and most of our peers know that the polls weren't wrong

I mean, sure, if you don't think pollsters have any responsibility for due diligence. The polls were an accurate representation of what people were willing to admit to planning and doing, but a lot of people weren't willing to say they were voting for Trump. Popular culture and media spent months telling those people they were isolated deplorables who had no chance, but in the voting booth nobody can shame you. Asking people over the phone whether they were going to vote for Trump was like asking them if they liked being spanked in bed.

One thing to think about here is that US electoral system practically counts different peoples votes differently. A voter in Georgia mattered a lot more than a voter in California or Wyoming. Small polling errors in either state are inconsequential, but hugely consequential in Arizona, Georgia, North Carolina, etc. Lots of polls are national polls, not state polls too. As it happens, the average of national polls predicted the vote totals overall very well. But that doesn't matter. Because it still came down to a few thousands of voters in a handful of states.

Right now the press is fuelling a frenzy over Russian troops, trumpeting "eminent war!!" daily. It is rediculius, completely unfounded, incendiary, false, and just plain dumb...but clicks matter.

Russia has has something 130,000 troops positioned just outside Ukraine's borders and in Belarus. They have tanks, missile systems, amphibious landing ships, medical units, established supply lines, etc.

They actually invaded Ukraine in 2014 and took Crimea.

I mean, the possibility of an invasion is not exactly far-fetched.

Did you not get this memo? https://www.state.gov/briefings/department-press-briefing-fe...

>you and I and most of our peers know that the polls weren't wrong

They were wrong though, multiple key polls in battleground states were far outside their margin of error, indicating methodology failures or bias. As an example, the national ABC/WaPo poll on November 3-6, 2016 claimed a +4% Clinton result, with a 2% margin of error. [1] That's an indictment of their methodology, and it's an indictment of Nate Silver who weights them as an "A+" pollster.

I also don't think anyone needs to misrepresent research and science, since huge swathes of it are fraudulent anyway. From the reproducibility crisis to outright fraud and lies, trusted institutions have been desecrating their reputation for years.

The CDC now enjoys a trust rating around 50%, because of incompetence and lies. News media is worse, because they lie more than they tell the truth.

[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/11/07/po...

That poll has it 47% to 43% Clinton when the actual results were 48.2% to 46.1% Clinton. The only real discrepancy is they overestimated the vote totals for 3rd party candidates. The numbers they had when excluding 3rd parties was 49% to 46% Clinton. Do some blending of those two and they basically nailed it. Is this really the poll you want to call out as fundamentally flawed?

>As an example, the national ABC/WaPo poll on November 3-6, 2016 claimed a +4% Clinton result, with a 2% margin of error. [1] That's an indictment of their methodology, and it's an indictment of Nate Silver who weights them as an "A+" pollster.

Your link says 2.5% margin of error and not statistically significant. What am I missing? Ironically the comment appears to be misinformation.

>Clinton’s edge in the Post-ABC poll does not reach statistical significance given the poll’s 2.5 percentage-point margin in sampling error around each candidate’s support

>As an example, the national ABC/WaPo poll on November 3-6, 2016 claimed a +4% Clinton result, with a 2% margin of error

The end result was roughly Clinton: 48%, Trump: 46%, which is right at the margin, not "far outside".

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