On the other hand, when someone says "60-40" they get fucking dragged when the 40 happens, like it's not an extremely likely outcome.
20% is not even a very unlikely outcome. It's about the same as the odds of flipping a coin twice and getting the same side both times.
that's actually still 50/50. you'd have to specify getting "heads" both times for it to be 25%
Theres also only 1 election, you cant run it multiple times to collect data and see how close your prediction matched up with 100 elections.
On top of that, theres only been like 80 presidential elections, right? And there hasn't been that many that are similar to the system of today. So you have, maybe, 8 or 10 actual historical elections to base your predictions on? And how many of those have the fine grain data available that we have now to determine likely voters?
All they're doing is guessing and putting a patina of statistic aesthetic - thats why Diggler could do as well or better as Nate Silver.
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
The way stochastic works if they are repeadedly wrong it's a claer sign they should not be trusted.
There are ways to measure how accurate a system of probability prediction is across multiple samples. If the dem-rep predictions are 90-10, 80-20, 70-30, and 60-40, then that's a total of 300-100 across 4 elections, so there should've been three dem wins and one rep win during that period. If it was 4-0 or 2-2, those would both be equally wrong, despite the prediction always showing dems favored.
538's methodology is constantly being "refined," so the prediction system you'd be measuring would really be Nate Silver's ass. But you could still measure it.
Just note well that IF Trump wins, then this and other predictions aren’t “wrong”. In 20% of cases, Trump IS predicted to win.
Fuck me. If the prediction tells you that Trump will win 20% of the time, and he wins two elections, then the prediction is useless. We aren't running 100 elections. You have two fucking shots. Just stating arbitrary probability stats isn't productive or useful. Arguing over whether or not it's right/wrong only serves to help the brand of a bitch ass nerd who makes money off convincing people that going "durr Trump will win 20/100 elections" is useful.
If the wonky fucks are going to jerk off to stats at least learn how to interpret and apply them.
That's where I got this lol, I was browsing to see their hot takes on Trump having covid and stumbled onto it, they are such clowns
https://redd.it/j3uidn
Just absolutely no self awareness or critical thinking skills. It's also really funny how they don't remove troll posts because of their civility fetish.
Florida has ticked up 0.1% more for Biden, and another day has passed, reducing uncertainty.
Lol these people jerk themselves over their superior understanding of statistics then upvote a 0.1% uptick as if it has any meaning.
They put in a fucking cartoon mascot explaining things this year because they think, possibly correctly, that their audience is too dumb to understand the concept of probability.
tbf our big bronze boy shits out blogs all the time hedging that this doesn't mean that anything is a sure thing
p u r e n u m b e r s
If Trumps wins they can claim to be the best predictors because they gave him 20% instead of the 2% chance everyone else said, like last time
The ones on the line are the most likely outcomes. Trump needs 2 of Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Arizona.
READ THIS, AND WEEP, 538 https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/why-donald-trump-isnt-a-real-candidate-in-one-chart/
Seems like a reasonable difference. Clinton went from 90% chance of winning to 70% once the Comey letter hit
This election is not 2016, and you'd thing people on this sub-in-exile would notice that
first sub-in-exile is a really funny way to call it and second it is not 2016 but the point about these type of probability is more complicated i find these to be kinda dumb in politics, give me a poll and i will take it because like this means nothing like it is like if i said it is a 50/50 it doesn't mean shit it makes you no more aware of how the situation is just really dislike these type of thing exactly because of what happened in 2016 because sometimes you will hit that 20% right it is dice roll
like i don't know it just feels like it is 2016 but everyone has gone even more insane like the trump brain thing got us all
2016 was a bunch of bourgeois lib arguing niceties over brunch. Did you get shot by impact munitions or get gassed in 2016? I didn't. Did your grandfather die of a preventable plague in 2016? Did the global economy enter a recession that will be even worse than 2008 in 2016?
It's different, In a material way
