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.

  • Melon [she/her,they/them]
    ·
    4 years ago

    Its very hard to communicate odds with people, because for how much hate Nate Silver got in 2016 the outcome was still comfortably within the polling margin of error so you could say that he was "right" in some way

    • Owl [he/him]
      ·
      4 years ago

      People kind of understand probabilities by themselves, but if you let the probability get anywhere near any other percentage, most peoples' brains segfault and fall over. So while people understand a 75% chance of winning a double coin flip, and understand that getting 75% of the votes would be a landslide victory, something funny happens and they can't tell which is which when you tell them there's a 75% chance someone will win an election.

    • AvailableWrongdoer [any]
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      1
      ·
      4 years ago

      Even if Trump only had a 1% chance of winning in 2016, that 1% could still very well happen. Things that have a low probability of happening happen all the time.

      • Melon [she/her,they/them]
        ·
        4 years ago

        yeah the other day I was playing fetch with a young family member and the number of times the ball hit something and bounced right back to me was alarming. In one throw, the ball looped around the bowl of a bird bath, bounced off the top of a grill and hit a corner of a shitty fire pit that sent it over a fence and back at my feet.

        but things like that happen all the time

    • Katieushka [they/them,she/her]
      hexagon
      ·
      4 years ago

      he was. that's how probabilities work. he could have studied the situation better but there is a ceiling to how well you can predict chaotic things.

      • Melon [she/her,they/them]
        ·
        4 years ago

        yeah the only factor that was noticeably butchered or ignored in predicting the 2016 outcome was level of education, which turned out to be a major indicator

        but that 1 thing doesn't make Nate Silver a loser

        • coldbee [he/him,any]
          ·
          4 years ago

          True, what makes him a loser is being a neoliberal pundit pretending to be unbiased

    • domhnall [he/him]
      ·
      4 years ago

      It’s almost as if you can’t actually magically divine the outcome of these things before they happen.

      • a_blanqui_slate [none/use name, any]
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        2
        ·
        4 years ago

        Which Nate Silver knows, which is why he'll never release a prediction for something consequential to be >90% or <10%.

    • Churnthrow123 [none/use name]
      ·
      4 years ago

      Compound odds are what really throws people off. Most people can conceptualize the odds of something happening once. When you have to predict 15-20 different outcomes (basically the number of state races that are anywhere close to being competitive), which are all conditional on each other to a varying extent (correlated demographics), AND you have to apply some sort of "secret sauce" tilt factor to all of your data (because polls are all guesses/models themselves and you have to make a judgement on their accuracy), it gets much more complicated.