The central problem with Silver is that ultimately, he's producing horse-race stuff. He doesn't actually care about politics very much in terms of its human stakes. In fact, according to journalist Doug Henwood...
Nate Silver once said he doesn't give a shit about politics.
[Silver is] producing entertainment. People refresh FiveThirtyEight for the same reason that they watch actual horse races. But for anyone interested in the actual human lives affected by political questions, Silver's analyses are of almost no help. They can tell us today that Silver thinks Trump has a 5% chance of winning. But then we might wake up tomorrow and find that Silver now thinks Trump has a 30% chance of winning. And the important question for anyone trying to affect the world, as opposed to just watching the events in it unfold, is how those chances can be made to change.
That doesn't mean there's anything wrong with Nate Silver, just that nobody should ever pay any attention to him. Nate Silver will probably always be the best poll data analyst. The problem is that poll data analysts are completely fucking useless in a crisis. They don't understand anything that's going on around them, and they're powerless to predict what's about to happen next. Listening to anything they have to say is very, very dangerous. If you want to change anything, you've got to forget Nate Silver forever. That's because he tells you entirely about the world as it looks to him right now, rather than the world as it could suddenly be tomorrow. He has no idea what the outer boundaries of the possible are. Nobody does.
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Like a television psychic, Silver is able to carefully draw your attention to that which he gets right and ignore that which he gets wrong. If the probability percentages look good, but he screws up a large number of races, we should look at percentages. If those look terrible, as they did in Michigan, we should forget them and think about numbers of states.
Similarly, Silver will make predictions that have multiple components, so that if one part fails, the overall prediction will seem to have come true, even if its coming true had no relation to the reasons Silver originally offered. See, e.g., "It's a tight race. Clinton's the favorite but close enough that Trump would probably pull ahead if he 'wins' debate." Silver can look back and say "I saw that Trump could pull ahead." But what he actually predicted was that Trump could pull ahead based on debate performance. If he pulls ahead for some other reason, Silver is completely wrong (because he had excluded that other possibility), yet he seems right.
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Silver makes sure to hedge every statement carefully so that he can never actually be wrong. And when things don't go his way, he lectures the public on their ignorance of statistics. After all, probability isn't certainty, he didn't say it would definitely happen. And of course, that's completely true. But recognize what it means: even when Silver isn't wrong, because he's hedged everything carefully, he's still not offering any information of value. Sophisticated mathematical modeling, just like punditry, can't tell us much about the things we most need to know. It can't predict the unpredictable, and the unpredictable is what matters most of all.
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Silver actually knows all of the limitations of his work, and states them openly:
Statistical models work well when you have a lot of data, and when the system you're studying has a relatively low level of structural complexity. The presidential nomination process fails on both counts.
Thus the sneaky thing Silver does is this: he fills his work with caveats, but then turns around and writes articles like "The Six Stages of Donald Trump's Doom," in which he lays out very vivid, totally fantastical and unfounded, sets of forecasts about the future.
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None of this has any grounding beyond Silver's gut. This is why Silver is irresponsible and untrustworthy. It's not, as the Huffington Post stupidly alleged, that he's a bad or biased statistician. It's that he mingles solid statistical observations (of highly limited usefulness) with wild prophecy and the same old know-nothing horse-race punditry. He acts as if statistics and polls can tell us to some useful degree whether Trump's highly unorthodox political strategy will work. He offers totally worthless speculative scenarios, such as Bernie Sanders losing all but two states, even though the dynamics that would lead to such scenarios are not accessible to human observation or prediction. And over the course of the election, he used his authority and credibility as a numbers genius to tell people not to worry about Donald Trump, and to treat those who were "freaking out" as if they had were idiots.
I made that to share at r/politics. I get so fucking tired of libs rationalizing shitty people by saying stuff like "Nate Silver is just a numbers guy and he writes about data."
Silver doesn't give a fuck. For him - politics is sports.
GET HIS ASS
I made that to share at r/politics. I get so fucking tired of libs rationalizing shitty people by saying stuff like "Nate Silver is just a numbers guy and he writes about data."