Il Douché and His Discontents: The 2016 Primary Voting Thread, Part 4

what's with the left hostility to Nate Silver this time around? a lot of people on twitter and on my fb feed seem really pissed at him lately

i feel like last election when he was saying Romney would lose and the right were screaming that his forecasts were partisan and he's a queer and the left retort was 'you dummies, he's just feeding poll data into a forecast and showing us the results, it's not partisan it's just math.' but now that his forecast is saying hilary will win, seems like it has shifted to 'ok NOW he's a partisan hack'?

bc he is generally giving bad news to bernie supporters and the left, like the right, shoot the messenger.

Rubio may be out before Florida

(Link goes to a tweet w/embedded video from FOX Business Channel. You've been warned.)

One thing I think people forget or don't realize about stats is that one big miss does not automatically call into question your entire methodology. I mean I can't actually speak to whether Silver is legit proven as a better-than-most predictor of elections, I just don't think the fact that he blew Michigan means he's worthless.

technically the polls blew MI. he can only work with the polls that are available.

right

But I would guess that's where the hostility comes from -- calling primaries at 99% likelihood of going to the favored candidate and then being wrong upsets them because the inevitability narrative and the electability narrative are a lot of what drives Clinton campaign. Some read deliberate bias into it, but I don't.

technically the polls blew MI. he can only work with the polls that are available.

― Mordy, Wednesday, March 9, 2016 1:51 PM (1 minute ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Sort of yes, sort of no. 538 makes their own probability calculations based on polls. Giving the eventual winner a <1% chance of winning going into the primary is blowing it.

even 538 has kinda treated this election like '¯\_(ツ)_/¯ who knows anymore, let's post some slack chats and gifs'

all silver does is average a bunch of polls and throw some fairy dust on it, the polls were massively wrong this time

xp right, but he's supposed to be the Poll Whisperer, determining the right poll for us to listen to if there is one.

538 makes their own probability calculations but he can't call an election for Bernie when Bernie has not led in a single poll (and the best poll for him this cycle showed Hillary 10 pts up).

ftr mordy fb messaged me the other day saying he thought bernie was gonna take michigan, maybe mordy should be the new nate silver

even that one that came in right before the election which i don't think 538 worked into their analysis showed hillary up

technically the polls blew MI. he can only work with the polls that are available.

― Mordy, Wednesday, March 9, 2016 1:51 PM (2 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

this is cop out. his job is to predict the election.

his big innovation was to formally and on an ongoing basis asses the likely accuracy of pollsters. if he's dubious about the polls then his prediction should have had big error bars. it didn't, so he clearly thought the polling was fine.

I realize this is kind of splitting hairs, but the whole point of Silver's methodology is that by mixing polls and fairy dust in the right way you can figure out, among other things, the likelihood that they would be wrong.

all silver does is average a bunch of polls and throw some fairy dust on it

eh, they do a bit more than that. this tracker is interesting, for example:

http://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/election-2016/delegate-targets/democrats/

(click the "republican" tab at the top to see the GOP side of things)

it's kind of a nice guide to the upcoming primaries and how well the candidates need to do to stay on track for the nomination. so even in states where bernie lost or will likely lose in the future, you can still see if he made relative gains by gaining more delegates than expected.

if every poll comes in with hillary winning nate silver is limited to them no matter what the secret sauce. i can make up whatever shit i want so if you want someone's gut feeling analysis subscribe to my private messaging chat service :p

xp caek- his forecast updates its prior by itself though, you're making it sound like he reaches in and turns a crank in favour of bernie or hilary

if he says "lol shrug, i can only work with what the polls tell me" then his predictions should be correspondingly uncertain. "it's on them, not me" is bs.

I realize this is kind of splitting hairs, but the whole point of Silver's methodology is that by mixing polls and fairy dust in the right way you can figure out, among other things, the likelihood that they would be wrong.

― on entre O.K. on sort K.O. (man alive), Wednesday, March 9, 2016 1:57 PM (21 seconds ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

this is not splitting hairs. this is a very fundamental and correct point. it is meaningless to predict an outcome without also giving a confidence. he knows this, which is why he gives a confidence interval.

re: 538: my own backlash has little to do with their handling of the michigan thing, though i would looooove a deep stat nerdery post where silver lifts up the hood and tries to figure out what he should have factored in, or what factors he might need to add to the next contests or whatever. because yeah, the premise is exactly that just banging a lot of polls together may NOT be very predictive at all, for reasons he's always been happy to discuss as a stats nerd. i bet he finds this michigan goof fascinating more than anything.

yea, though, i do lash back. i probably sound like a broken record on this but, as i've sorta said before on these threads, the quality/in-depthitude of the analysis has gone down a lot in the ESPN era. but more importantly he's expanded his stable to include much more hackish bro sports-pundit types (especially harry enten) and these other pretending-to-be-neutral-on-a-moving-train characters (particularly the one conservadude that chimes in with the "economic" take in all their chats). these others have generally been a lot more glib and have definitely seemed to have a strong anti-sanders bias in their shifting goalposts in addition to the less objectionable bad news for sanders that just comes out of their math. also they have really really bad headline-to-article matches and the headlines have been very hacky. i think silver's own pieces are still pretty silver-ish, if less robust in their deep digging mathwise and less rich and thoughtful in their graphics.

xp i'm not at all. i'm saying his priors about pollster reliability were demonstrably wrong. this is on him. i'm not implying bias. i'm implying that he's bad.

My exact sentiments: https://twitter.com/bernieorhiliary/status/706697262458507266

"his forecast updates its prior by itself though"

actually i have no idea what this means

if he says "lol shrug, i can only work with what the polls tell me" then his predictions should be correspondingly uncertain.

tbf he said before MI that his gut told him bernie was going to outperform the polls and he has said many times that there's a lot of uncertainty in this election so if ppl look at his figures and assume they are 100% trustworthy that is a little bit on them

i think the biggest problem is that partisans want the polls to show their candidate up bc they think it has a casual affect on things like momentum, enthusiasm, participation - like some republicans during 2012 were delusional but many more knew he was going to lose but thought that admitting that would dampen turnout.

causal*

i'm saying his priors about pollster reliability were demonstrably wrong.?

In what sense? At this point he's been through hundreds and hundreds of elections. If he didn't get several of the 99% predictions wrong, it would mean he was miscalibrating things and expressing too little confidence in his predictions.

"if ppl look at his figures and assume they are 100% trustworthy that is a little bit on them"

if you're saying caveat lector that's fine. but people concluding this from a prediction that claims there is a >99% probability of a hilary win, which is what he said about MI iirc, are interpreting him completely correctly.

that is what the prediction he made _means_. it's the fundamental premise of doing things probabilistically is to do a better job of encoding your own uncertainty.

two polls out in the last day or two, first since super tuesday:

NBC/WSJ

Trump: 30
Cruz: 27
Kasich: 22
Rubio: 20

Clinton: 53
Sanders: 44

ABC/WashPo

Trump: 34
Cruz: 25
Rubio: 18
Kasich: 13

Clinton: 49
Sanders:42

there is a >99% probability of a hilary win, which is what he said about MI iirc, are interpreting him completely correctly.

I mean, based on what we knew Sunday, what do you think is a reasonable estimate for the probability of a Sanders win in Michigan? Anything over 10% seems very, very hard for me to justify.

Pierce:

But, as I talked to more and more people around Flint, I got the sense that the resonance of the exchange was not what HRC and her campaign thought it would be. The UAW members I talked to clearly considered HRC's use of the auto bailout against Sanders to be at best a half-truth, and a cynical attempt to win their support, and they were offended by what they saw as a glib attempt to turn the state's economic devastation into a campaign weapon. These were people who watched the auto industry flee this city and this state, and they knew full well how close the country's remaining auto industry came to falling apart completely in 2008 and 2009. They knew this issue because they'd lived it, and they saw through what the HRC campaign was trying to do with the issue. I have no data to support how decisive this feeling was in Tuesday night's returns, but it seems to me to be one of the more interesting examples of unintended consequences that I'd heard in a while.

she definitely could've made that critique better. the way she made it was sleazy but she could've said something like "the first bailout bill was opposed by senator sanders despite containing respite for the auto industry because he didn't like the rest of it - we need someone willing to compromise" - i don't know if it would've been effective but it a. would've been honest and b. would've hit sanders in a somewhat weak spot - the idea that he isn't a pragmatist who can get important things done bc of his ideology.

the fact that Silver blew Michigan left baseball analysis means he's worthless.

i enjoy gawker's various descriptions of trump, i'd poll them except they're too numerous to track down

― nomar, Tuesday, March 1, 2016 2:01 PM (1 week ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

half-empty bag of rancid tapioca

A half-truth, and a cynical attempt: Hillary 2016

"his forecast updates its prior by itself though"

actually i have no idea what this means

― 𝔠𝔞𝔢𝔨 (caek), Wednesday, March 9, 2016 2:01 PM (14 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

some ppl are mad that his model still has HRC with 99% chance of winning FL, the implication being that it should have become more uncertain and more in favour of Bernie after last night's results. if the forecast i work on severely over- or under-forecasts something, once we feed in the new data and update it, it updates its belief about subsequent outcomes downwards or upwards accordingly (holding all else constant). for Silver in this case it would update the prob of bernie winning upwards and discount poll data relative to other inputs. (i actually haven't looked at his methodology since last year, but i'm assuming he doesn't forecast each primary independently and estimates like the joint distribution of primary votes across states?) but the updating is done completely internally within model, you just feed in the data and it calculates the new prior distribution according to bayes' rule. aside from changing the specification of his model there isn't some crank he can reach in and pull to give it a desired result, and the whole point of his enterprise is to have a hands-off forecast unmuddied by the dirty misled intuition of pundits.

Oh hai guys Marquito's on campus today. What should I ask?

are you a wide receiver?

http://www.tampabay.com/resources/images/dti/rendered/2015/09/0610102014__1__15902438_8col.jpg

also tbc i don't think there's anything wrong with giving NS a good ribbing or saying he has a bad forecast (although idk if there are others that did better, is that princeton guy running his again?), just that reading political bias into it because we don't like the outcome is silly because that's exactly what we mocked the right for doing 4 years ago. saying well it's different because he made some bloopers this time isn't convincing to me. i get that the narrative has become much more critical of self-consciously data-driven analysis since 2012, but idk it still just seems like a dumb reaction to have. one of the best NS moments last election was after the first Romney Obama debate, when the poll swung in Romney's favour and all the right pundits were pissed at Silver because his forecast barely budged. like, are we going to do that every time now?

Come back Fred all's forgiven

Ask Rubio about climate change. Floridians love sea level rising.

got u flopson. no disagreements there.

i guess my point is "the polls were bad" does not at all absolve his or any other extremely confident prediction. it is a strength of his predictions that one of the outputs is a confidence. that confidence was very high. when that happens that's due no only to the polls having a 20 percent gap, but also him having high confidence in the polls. he was wrong in this case.

Let us take a break from our quibbling to focus on the real threat:

http://www.sexycongress.net/
"Who would you rather have sex with?"

some of these are very very difficult to choose between

they're just all so sexy!!!

nsfw i'm sure

btw the daily CNN Trump speech semed to be preempted today by Nancy's burial

Bobby Jindal coulda carried that coffin by himself

It isn't just "he feeds in the data" though, he ranks which polls to consider and that's his magic touch - if he thought that Bernie would beat the 20% polls then there's ways to express that - it's the 99% confidence that's the problem not that he called it for Clinton. I don't know what I would have done differently, but I'm not paid to be Nate Silver!

my mistake, she's lying in state at the liberry, plenty of time for the candidates to show up and genuflect if they can't make the Friday funeral

xp

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CdIhsJxW8AQ13Vz.jpg

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CdIhsJ_XEAEB4u8.jpg