I agree with your sentiment here, but one way that you could check is by looking at the entire history of probabilities given by someone like Nate Silver. e.g:
and comparing them to simple baseline predictors, e.g.
1/2 * 1/2 * 1/2.
I couldn't find what probability 538 assigned in 2008 but looking at 2012 and 2016, Nate Silver gave the outcomes 80% and 28% probability respectively.... which is a bit worse than the uniformly random baseline 😆
Doing this kind of modelling on a presidential election is just braindead. He starts with all these priors that don't mean anything anymore, things like the incumbency advantage, and then bakes in dumb lib analysis of the electorate and the result is pretty much the same thing that every other pundet tells you.
https://hexbear.net/post/32883/comment/255304
I agree with your sentiment here, but one way that you could check is by looking at the entire history of probabilities given by someone like Nate Silver. e.g:
[content warning: math]
P(obama wins in 2008) * P(obama wins 2012) * P(trump wins 2016)
and comparing them to simple baseline predictors, e.g.
1/2 * 1/2 * 1/2.
I couldn't find what probability 538 assigned in 2008 but looking at 2012 and 2016, Nate Silver gave the outcomes 80% and 28% probability respectively.... which is a bit worse than the uniformly random baseline 😆
Doing this kind of modelling on a presidential election is just braindead. He starts with all these priors that don't mean anything anymore, things like the incumbency advantage, and then bakes in dumb lib analysis of the electorate and the result is pretty much the same thing that every other pundet tells you. https://hexbear.net/post/32883/comment/255304
oh yeah agreed 100%, my point is just that it's not non-falsifiable :)