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> I did too much bragging in the media and didn’t anticipate the extent to which public opinion toward FiveThirtyEight would shift once we became a corporate-ba

• softwaredoug 4mo ago
  We should have a drinking game in Nate Silver thread anyone complains about 2016 prediction. Then everyone piles on to point out how probabilities work.
  • ninth_ant 4mo ago
    It wasn't even a complaint, just a personal anecdote to help share some context as to why the site may have failed to retain consumer interest post-2016. But yes I'll join you with the liver damage and drink 17 shots.
  • MostlyStable 4mo ago
    I long ago stopped commenting on threads (in /r/CFB) about the SP+ college football model because it go so, so, so tiring correcting the exact same misunderstandings about things as fundamental as what the model was even purporting to do let alone, how it worked. It is incredibly disheartening to me to see the staggering level of statistical illiteracy on display in any online conversation about a statistical model. I've come to the conclusion that it's not worth my, or any one else's time. I'm glad these things exist, and the communities who want them will self select. It's not use trying to convert haters.
    • rurp 4mo ago
      I've long resigned myself to the fact that a lay audience will usually struggle to understand basic statistics. On HN though I don't expect to see those same issues much but have been surprised to see how many posters have trouble differentiating between 30%, 50%, and 99% probabilities.
• shawabawa3 4mo ago
  Because they said trump only had a 30% chance to win? What if they had said 49%? Would that have made their prediction worthless?
  • bellowsgulch 4mo ago
    I mean everyone said he had a snowball’s chance in hell and then we ended up with him for two terms because the Democrats can’t stop fighting over the worse possible candidates to back that no one is asking for.
    • palata 4mo ago
      I find it interesting to blame it on the democrats. We ended up with him because enough people voted for him.
      • kjkjadksj 4mo ago
        The blame is put on democrats because when they lose its because they don’t turn out and when they win its because they do. It is quite simple really. Republicans are far more reliable voters. You can look at vote totals and see this pattern. Massive delta for democrats election over election and usually half that delta for republicans.
      • dwoldrich 4mo ago
        And he won the popular vote if you believe that all U.S. elections are secure and sacrosanct. He is diabolical at getting people to talk about him and think about him constantly. Joe Biden on the other hand was a senile wrecker for Build Back Better and the party finally made "the switch" to unelected Harris far too late in the process. Even if she was a great candidate, with her odd laughter and fascination with buses, there was not enough time to shape her candidacy. Her VP candidate choice was hobbled by rising anti-semitism in the party against Shapiro and perhaps concerns of being outshined by him. No, the Democrats did not do themselves any favors in the '24 election. Carter, Clinton and Obama were media creations, vaulting to national prominence out of nowhere. It helped that Clinton and Obama were great, charismatic choices. Now the traditional media is fragmented and weak. You're not seeing furtive vaulting attempts for potential phenoms like Newsome gain any traction. Who is the media going to be stuck with next time? Will it be take-two for Harris? WHEN, not if, Harris loses bigly to Vance, then the Democrats will absolutely be to blame. Where are their all new shiny, beautiful, erudite candidates that would need all four years to gestate and promote? Shouldn't we be getting acquainted with them now? I wager they're not going to appear, and we'll get more flunkies. My theory as to why is that those currently in power in the party do not share; they're aging out and hollowing out the party in the process. We're to the point now of collapse. I'm surprised a third party on the left hasn't yet formed.
• fabian2k 4mo ago
  FiveThirtyEight gave Trump a 30% chance. Their reporting did make clear that with margin was within the range of a normal polling error. And sometimes you get more than a normal polling error. It doesn't help that the US has a terrible election system that often leads to small margins in some states being decisive.
  • kypro 4mo ago
    > FiveThirtyEight gave Trump a 30% chance. I know I'm being super conspiratorial here but why wouldn't all forecasters predict just between 30% - 70%? That way if they're "right" they can take the credit for it and if they're wrong they can say "well, we weren't that wrong". That's probably what I'd do anyway...
    • fabian2k 4mo ago
      Of course there's more than that. Predicting higher uncertainty than warranted would be a different failure in the model. But that didn't really happen in that election.
    • volkl48 4mo ago
      It implies a close race or a strong reason to believe there's some sort of systemic polling miss, and if it's a blowout you still look pretty bad. Especially if you don't have some kind of good explanation for the miss/you keep making those kinds of misses frequently. Also there's more going in those forecasts besides just the "% chance to win". There's expected results in terms of %'s of the vote for the candidates, and that's what people tend to focus on for actually analyzing your performance and credibility after the fact. You getting the outcome correct but being off by 20 points on the margin is a much worse performance than you getting the outcome wrong but being within 0.5 points of the margin. (ex: Results are 49.75/50.25, you predicted 30/70, another outlet predicted 50.25/49.75).
    • coliveira 4mo ago
      You're completely right, although I believe this number was not decided personally. They just happened to pick algorithms that have this "nice" property because it will lead to the same result.
• rurp 4mo ago
  I had complaints about 538, especially the early days, but don't understand this critique at all. A 30% chance hitting is completely unremarkable, and it was a perfectly reasonable reading of the evidence at the time. Nate isn't wrong that conventional wisdom was way off, with even supposedly statistical models giving Hillary a 99% chance of winning. Elections, like many things, have some inherent uncertainty. A several point polling error is normal, so a candidate who is down a couple points on election day has a decent shot of winning.
  • Retric 4mo ago
    Not just that, predictions also impact voter participation.
  • munchler 4mo ago
    I think this is all true, but it dodges the bigger issue. A presidential election has a binary outcome: yes/no, win/lose. If your statistical model doesn’t contain this single bit in its output, then it doesn’t meet the minimum requirement for being a prediction. Now you might say that it was on me as a consumer to understand this in 2016, but I remember the look of total shock on Nate Silver’s face when he called the winner on live TV that night, so clearly he didn’t really understand it either. Lesson learned for all of us, I guess.
    • causalmodels 4mo ago
      > If your statistical model doesn’t contain this single bit in its output, then it doesn’t meet the minimum requirement for being a prediction. I would be fascinated to know how you model a coin flip.
      • munchler 4mo ago
        Well, that’s my point. You can model a coin flip, but you can’t predict it. A model and a prediction are two different things.
  • lacewing 4mo ago
• legitster 4mo ago
  If I say you have a 50% chance to win a coin flip and you lose it, that doesn't mean I'm wrong. A key thing though is 538 did regularly test the calibration their models: https://web.archive.org/web/20190410030104/https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/when-we-say-70-percent-it-really-means-70-percent/ https://web.archive.org/web/20190410030104/https://fivethirt... > "What you’ll find, though, is that our calibration has generally been very, very good. For instance, out of the 5,589 events (between sports and politics combined) that we said had a 70 chance of happening (rounded to the nearest 5 percent), they in fact occurred 71 percent of the time. Or of the 55,853 events that we said had about a 5 percent chance of occurring, they happened 4 percent of the time."
• tekla 4mo ago
  > Call it emotional, naive, unfair or whatever you want Yep definitely all those. Why is it so hard to admit 30% is not 0%?
• jackmott42 4mo ago
  Nate was a huge outlier in that prediction, he gave trump a better chance than almost anyone else that I can recall, so why are you mad at him about that? What made me mad is Nate seemed to turn into a MAGA troll himself after that election.
• jp57 4mo ago
  I really think a majority of NYTimes and ABCnews consumers don't know the difference between a 2/3 chance (super close) of winning and 2/3 of the vote (a landslide).
  • Traster 4mo ago
    Apparently neither do a big chunk of HN readers.
• tombert 4mo ago
  A dice roll has a 16.6% chance of landing on any given side, meaning an 83% chance of not landing on that side. If you guessed a "two", and it landed on "two, I wouldn't really be that impressed, even though there was an 83% probability going against you.
• bryanlarsen 4mo ago
  538 used the example of Trump having approximately the same chance of winning the 2016 presidential election as the Cavaliers had of winning the NBA championship round vs the Warriors. Both Trump and the Cavaliers won with a ~25% predicted chance. 538 made very clear with this analogy that both Trump and the Cavs were underdogs, and that both had a solid chance of winning.
• afavour 4mo ago
  I think this gets to the core of why a lot of this election prediction stuff doesn't work. People just don't parse the numbers the way the authors intend. FiveThirtyEight had Trump at a 30% chance of winning, and he won. The model wasn't wrong. The less likely of two outcomes occurred. Even if they'd had him at 1% they still wouldn't technically have been wrong though I think complaints might be more warranted. If they had Trump at 49% would you have still been angry? What about at 51%? Would it have been okay then?
  • coliveira 4mo ago
    Technically this is right. But if that is the case (and it seems to be), then a coin flip is better than their models. Because we only care about the current election, not a sequence of 1000 elections (which will not happen, by the way).
    • afavour 4mo ago
      I don’t disagree, I think the tea leaf reading is ultimately pretty futile. But at the same time I do think it’s valid to say it’s more than a coin flip. The polling data over the election cycle showed that Trump had a smaller but still legitimate chance of winning. The data was different in 2020, when he lost.
    • dogleash 4mo ago
      > But if that is the case (and it seems to be), then a coin flip is better than their models. If a coin flip is the necessary mental model to remind you both things can happen, then sure. People just love horse race coverage. Silver gave us the most accurate horse race coverage. Maybe the lesson is stop following horse race coverage. But most people went back to the tea leave readers. That way when the election was over, it can justifiably be the charlatan's fault that viewers got over-invested in their predictive capabilities.
    • reed1234 4mo ago
      So use a coin flip to predict the weather then
• reed1234 4mo ago
  That’s like saying “there was only a 30 percent chance of rain today and it rained, so I will never look at the weather forecast again.”
• topaz0 4mo ago
  As a younger man I would have been with the commenters mansplaining probability, but I've aged into realizing that thinking of the election like a marble pulled from an urn whose contents we have probed with polling is just as bad as thinking of it as deterministic. The reason people read fivethirtyeight, probability-savvy or not, was almost entirely to be told what was going to happen, which is sort of incompatible with feeling you can do anything about it. In that way it's probably worse than old-fashioned pundit-driven horse race coverage because it has an air of scientific authority.
• baubino 4mo ago
  Huh. I first started listening to 538 in the run-up to the 2016 election and started really paying attention to them precisely because their 30% figure was so much higher than all the other polls. It was shocking to me then (and still is now reading your comment) that people didn’t seem to understand that 30% in the context of that particular election and that particular candidate suggested a remarkably high chance of winning, not a really low chance of winning. It’s a strange thing where people seem to think that less than 50% = not happening.
• albedoa 4mo ago
  > Call it emotional, naive, unfair or whatever you want We would need a pass from the mods lol.
• cm2012 4mo ago
  If you use 538 data, on average you make money betting. Its more correct than not
• NeutralCrane 4mo ago
  Hard to believe that even 10 years later, people who don’t understand probability are still hung up on an event with a 30% chance of happening, happening.