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Comment by fullshark | Hacker News Reader

He was criticized for giving trump too large a chance to win iirc

Here he spikes the football over it: https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/why-fivethirtyeight-gav...

I think Nate Silver must be some kind of punching bag in right wing media circles, because some variation of this comment is posted basically every time 538 comes up on HackerNews.

This is more of an average person/mainstream media reading complaint. But they weren't paying attention in 2016 or else they would notice /he was the only person saying Hillary might not win/.

He is the face of election prediction in America. All the other guys at NYT, WaPo, etc aren't as famous. Of course he's going to be the face you punch for them not predicting the election remotely right. (And don't give me this shit about 75% or whatever odds he gave being the rightest or whatever weasel nonsense, it was still plenty wrong and he still want to lmao "spike the football" really? Get out of here.).

How is saying "there's a one in three chance that such-and-such an event occurs" classified as "plenty wrong" in your view, if the event occurs?

The whole concept of a unique non repeatable single event being given a percentage chance of happening or not is absurd made up cope.

THIS.

If there is a 2/3 chance of a thing, and you say there's a 2/3 chance of the thing, you're doing your job right even though you "got it wrong" in hindsight 1/3 of the time. If you want to assess how someone is doing at prediction, you need to look at a lot of predictions and if they're giving probability estimates you want to apply a proper scoring rule. If you're going to make grand pronouncements based on a single close race being labeled the wrong side of close, get out of here.

You're so 2016. Nate Silver is now a punching bag in left-liberal media circles.

> We also received a lot of criticism from Democratic partisans in the closing weeks of the campaign — more than we did from Trump supporters — because they thought we didn’t have Clinton as a heavy enough favorite. That’s unusual. We’ve forecasted enough races over the years to have taken criticism from almost every side. But in the past, it’s always been the trailing candidate’s supporters who gave us more grief.

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