Have yall never played poker/thrown a dice/anything random? When he says libs can relax its because the ODDS of winning are in his favor, but they are still fucking odds. Trump can still roll a 6 and win. If trump wins a) if he predicted that biden would have won, you'd get angry. b) if he predicted trump would have won, thats a shitty prediction that has little basis in the data and even if he was right nobody would listen to a guy who guessed right by chance!!
Think that i win if a coin lands thrice on heads. It's a 12.5% chance i win. Would you bet for me? No. Would you be surprised if i win? Also no, i still had a chance.
The chances lie in the fact that many ppl will vote on a whim based on how they feel one particular day, and you cant know all the data or how reliable it is. He isnt covering his ass, he is acknowledging that he cannot know with utmost precision. Its not a political/emotional thing, its how math works.
I came here to argue with you about the election being a random event so talking about probabilities without breaking it down into what the events/info Nate's uncertain about are and their probabilities/effects are being pure ass covering but I guess if there really is a significant proportion of "whim" voters who could vote either way and might change their mind in the line and after casting that covers everything.
Not really convinced these whim voters do exist, I remember reading somewhere that "undecided voters" were a myth/greatly exaggerated and elections are swung mainly on turnout, but either way good post, thankyou for sharing.
it's not that the election is really that random, most things are deterministic. if i knew about every single person in the country i would be able to predict almost any election, especially now that we are missing only one day till then.
i am not making a statement in politics, but in statistical science and mathemathics.
we do not know all people in the country, and therefore every poll can only rappresent the group of people polled. there are both factors of uncertainty in the people polled (is the population we've asked rappresentative of the whole or is it skewed cos we used skewed methods, such as only phoning landlines; or, have i interviewed enough people? if i ask ten people there coudl be a chance that be coincidence all 10 are trump supporters, if i ask a million it's less likely by the law of large numbers) and in how to interpret the results (the people who say they prefere biden may be less likely to vote/be able to go to a poll). these are the real unknowns that condition the odds of an election, polls come later.
the statement "trump is polling at 55% in, say, texas" doesnt mean that trump will win texas in 55 universes out of 100. it says nothing about that fact. instead, i could be sure that there is only a one in a thousand chance that his polling will be outside 54 and 56% which will make sure he will win, or i could be uncertain and say only in 3 cases out of 10 will trump be outside 50 and 60% of the votes, which leaves a real margin for biden to win.
for example, look at this https://i.imgur.com/g3TEuw8.png
the area under the curve is the chance that that particular result happens. it peaks at 55 for dems and 45 for rep, but all the red combinations are the very possible chances that a rep will win. less likely yes but still possible. in this case we have low certainty
https://i.imgur.com/6Spzlcx.png here instead, the election result is nearer to 50-50, but it’s not as close as the other one, since the blue area is way smaller. this is a situation where we have high certainty in our polling.
Strong agree on uncertainty existing in the analysis Nate's making or even that it's possible for Nate to make, and acknowledging that uncertainty being a good thing.
What I'm trying to say is that putting numbers to that uncertainty without even talking about what the sources of that uncertainty are, how you're putting numbers to those sources, and how you're compiling those numbers into a final percentage, is pure arse covering.
yes, but in the end he runs a business. he probably worries about uncertainties way more than pure result numbers, but the betting market and the news want those and not the mathematically important data.
So, I did a little reading on how 538's numbers work. Apparently their polling aggregation and weighting is actually done to try and make the polls better predict the election? They're done to make the polls better predict future polls? and the uncertainty comes from how "swingy" polls are, or how much they change between polling.
Seems whack.
Have they showed their working on how they came up with their election win chances?
this is still all in the norm for a statistician. if you just have the numbers of the polls, that is often not enough to be certain of what the result will be. for example, you could notice that in 2016, candidates in the primaries who wanted m4a got 10% more voters in a caucus than expected (not a real fact, i made it up). therefore, you could input that observation by counting m4a proposers 10% more in caucuses in 2020. the why doesnt need to be important, and the method doesnt need to be rigorous, but if you repeat this process for hundreds of observations for decades you reach a point where your predictions have to be getting better, cos you are trying to figure out the underlying working of society in a way or the other. it's called making your model better lol
"swinginess" is what i talked about i think? (you'll have to explain yourself better because swinging just means how much they change in my mind, lol.) there is nothing out of the norm here either. he is a normal statistician and if his methods were scientifically flawed, there would be tons of papers about it. but tbh, i think they cant show their methods, otherwise people would just steal those. hm...
Their "swinginess" was calculated state by state and based on how much the polling values changed between each polling, so if a state was polled in January to be 40 Biden 60 Trump, in February to be 50 Biden 50 Trump and in March to be 40 Biden 60 Trump again they'd put it down as having an average swing of 10% and mark swinginess accordingly.
I couldn't find any info on how (if at all) they accounted for length of time between polls, two different polls with alternating biases, etc.
I'm not arguing against the discipline of statistics or anything here. I'm saying that I'm suspicious Nate is doing really bad stats that don't say what he says/implies they do.
Most statistics, especially public facing statistics about/around electoral politics is about torturing data until it says what you need it to, and there aren't enough academic statisticians in the world to write papers refuting it and I've never met anyone who bothers unless there's a specific narrative they need to push back against, it's like fact checking politicians or debating with a gish galloper. I haven't yet seen anything to convince me Nate's doing anything revolutionary.
idk i dont want to be a fangirl, but the guy is doing everything correctly. any secrecy he has is justified since it's his secret formula he wont share. everything seems in order. that swinging is part of the imprecision, if it changes from month to month, it changes day to day, by unpredictable amounts. you can only know by more or less what order of magnitude the swing could be, which is our imprecision i was talking about. a lot of people could change their mind in either diretion, but that's unlikely, which is why the peak remains where it is.
538 isnt particularly revolutionary, it just has a good record and reputation. plus, believe me but criticizing 538's record is really low hanging fruit for anyone wanting to make a paper
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