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Comment by re5i5tor | Hacker News Reader

100%. Never trusted him again.

You remember incorrectly.

https://www.vox.com/2016/11/3/13147678/nate-silver-fivethirt...

I question this view. Why? He forecast, and whats more provided the error bounds which gave Trump a chance to win. Outside of a crystal ball, what else could be expected?

> I question this view. Why?

I think because what's the point of following the projections if at the end of the day they're indistinguishable from a coin toss? This applies to all polling. It's vaguely interesting but when (in Trump's case) a candidate can be consistently far behind for months and then still win because ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ that's how probability works, then what's the point of having followed the polls?

In this case the candidates were very close. Fivethirtyeight's estimate had Hillary at 48.5% of the vote and Trump at 44.9% (and the rest on other canditates), only 3.6% apart.[1]

Usually, when things aren't quite so close, polls are a more useful gauge since they're more likely to be correct about who'll win as the gap widens.

[1] https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/2016-election-forecast

Why are you looking at the %vote, though? In that very link, 538 has Hillary as 71% chance of winning. That is not close at all.

I'm not arguing that something can ever be treated as a certainty, just that there's "no point" in following the polls since even a lopsided 71-28% prediction will go either way, and is indistinguishable from a 50-50 prediction on election night.

What I mean is, the reason it's 71%-28% is that the actual % difference between predicted votes is very small. Once the estimated votes are say 10% apart, then you start getting a prediction that's more like 99%-1%, and the polls are much more likely to be telling you accurately who will actually win.

In this case the prediction is pretty close to just a 50/50 coin flip, but that's quite unusual and reflective of the chance legitimately being close to 50/50. Therefore I wouldn't say it invalidates polls in general.

The whole point of a poll/stat prediction from the intuitive human standpoint is to get a good gauge on how likely outcomes are

Silver, as well as all other mainstream polls/predictions in the race had Hillary winning by “the greatest margin in presidential history”

You can try and whitewash it but we all remember that. We all remember how hopeless trump looked and how bulletproof hillary’s victory was

To say Silver and all the other polls weren’t framing this as a landslide victory for hillary and a humiliating defeat for trump is just living in a false alternate reality in one’s mind.

And judging by these responses that seems to be the more common state of mind for folks here to be in…

> Silver, as well as all other mainstream polls/predictions in the race had Hillary winning by “the greatest margin in presidential history.” You can try and whitewash it but we all remember that

We don't need to remember though; we have the Internet Archive.

We can look back at Silver's prediction page on the morning of the election[1], where it's predicting Hillary winning by only 3.5% of the vote.

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20161108000845/http://projects.f...

Yea, cherry picking is an excellent way to claim you’re right when reality doesn’t agree

Go back and get an aggregate sense of everything he said. Look at 90%+ if the articles he wrote saying what I said compared to the one or two that y’all want to keep referring to

For people discussing stats there’s a very strong inability to grok averages here…

I only linked that one because it's the main page where they posted their data.

Its easy to check what he was saying too, we can just look at the archive from the same day of Nate Silver's posts : https://web.archive.org/web/20161108082405/https://fivethirt...

They're all about how it's a very close, uncertain race. You might point out that the top one is "Clinton Gains...", but even that one is just talking about "Clinton’s projected margin of victory in the popular vote has increased to 3.5 percent from 2.9 percent."

I did try looking up your quote - "greatest margin in presidential history" - but the only Google result was your comment.

I was there watching. Maybe Silver doesn’t understand how to communicate verbally, only through numbers designed for consumption by statisticians. The impression he gave in his comments, if not these exact words — Hillary in a landslide.

Communication is a skill. Like the skill of a great sportscaster like Scully. Election reporting is, I’m sure, a similar unique skill set. Silver doesn’t have it, and I never want to listen to him again.

> Maybe Silver doesn’t understand how to communicate verbally, only through numbers designed for consumption by statisticians.

Nate Silver the pundit and TV personality and Nate Silver the constructor of statistical models are, oddly, like completely different beasts.

What? I'm struggling to find an analogy to help you understand what the projections actually mean, but also I'm asking "Do I care if this person is wrong on the internet?".

Maybe you need to compare it to a weather prediction. If you hear "30% chance of snow" where you're about to vacation, would you pack a winter jacket? What if it's 85%? If it's 0.5%? And if it's at 25-30% for months on end, that doesn't mean that "No chance it'll snow!".

It's not like a sports league where one person is behind for months and then suddenly wins it. Indeed what is the point of following the polls? For one thing people were probably addicted to the rollercoaster of "Oh shit my side's losing! " and then "Oh yeah my side's gaining!". At least for the campaigns themselves they should've been able to adjust their work in hopes of moving the needle (e.g. leaking stuff about the other side).

No, I understand what the probabilistic prediction means. The problem is that there is no way to tell if 538's prediction was any more accurate than if they'd said 50-50 (or any numbers whatsoever) because the presidential election is only every 4 years. We can't measure the predictive ability of his model at all. If Hillary won, we'd say "Yup, the model gave her 70%". When Trump won, we said "Yup, the model gave him 30%".

Correct. It's a forecast based on polling sentiment.

Who does it help? People who face regulatory uncertainty between the regimes. Mostly businesses, nonprofits, etc.

I get where you're coming from, but it's not strictly true. For instance if their model had given Hillary a 99.5% chance and Trump only 0.5%, then we could be pretty sure it wasn't a good model when Trump won.

You might say even then, how do we know the result didn't just fall into that 0.5% remaining chance? But polls can and do still give some useful idea of what the result might be.

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