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Comment by khazhoux | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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