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

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

In April 2015 Rubio had good national name recognition and positive press coverage. It was fair enough to call him a "real contender".

Marco Rubio IS base.

and most of us hadn't yet seen he can only muster the gravitas of a seventh grader

he sure could drink water

Nate Silver can be forgiven for that inasmuch as any pundit could, because it's an entire industry built on acting like you know shit you don't or can't know. There probably were people with more direct experience with Rubio who were more skeptical of him, although there were others who probably weren't. I guess the only thing with Nate/538 is that the stats-geek aspect of it gives stuff on the entire website an air of objectivity and science that it doesn't warrant.

rubio had a ton of endorsements and the support of the party which before this election was a strong indicator

Asked by Bloomberg why they aren’t backing Cruz, senators responded with awkward chuckles, long silences, and evading the reporter by ducking into a restricted elevator. Sen. Richard Shelby (R-AL) responded by saying he was headed to lunch.

sick burn shelby

Asked by Bloomberg why they aren’t backing Cruz, senators responded with awkward chuckles, long silences, and evading the reporter by ducking into a restricted elevator. Sen. Richard Shelby (R-AL) responded by saying "Bazinga".

johnny damon has endorsed donald trump

angry blue collar + dumb millionaire coalition

Marco Rubio, all your possible voting base are belong to us

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!

― Andrew Farrell, Wednesday, March 9, 2016 3:26 PM (37 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

this is what his website says about poll weighting/ranking:

The weights reflect the quality of each survey as determined by FiveThirtyEight’s pollster ratings, which grades polls based on their past accuracy and methodological standards. The poll weights also adjust for a poll’s sample size and how recently it was conducted. All polls are included in the weighted average unless they were internal polls released by a candidate or a candidate’s super PAC or if we have good reason to suspect that the poll faked its data or committed other gross ethical violations.

i guess he could go in and fudge the weights to make the ones that tend pro-bernie (or in the case of MI, relatively less pro-Clinton) have more weight... but i don't think this is a parameter that he has discretion over and can change at a whim

i also don't like the implication that NS the human = his forecast, and the suggestion that he should tinker with his forecast every time it makes a bad call or runs counter to intuition is exactly wrong and misunderstands why it's interesting. saying 99% confidence doesn't mean NS the human was literally feeling the human emotion of confidence, it just means the stand error was small enough, which is exactly what we would expect to happen when all the polls show hillary in the lead. people literally going "that smug neoliberal fuck is 99% confident Bernie's gonna lose! and he hasn't even updates his confidence on Florida" seem to not understand the degree to which it's largely out of his hands at this point--and that that's what makes it interesting

Pierce on the Trump Steak speech:

You will never see another performance like the one he put on last night. It was more than a demonstration of the degradation of democracy. It was also a demonstration of the degradation of capitalism. I mean, Jesus, have some pride, rich folks. At least Andrew Carnegie built libraries and Jay Gould wore stylish diamond stickpins. None of them tossed slabs of dead cow to their supporters from the stage. I'm not entirely sure, but I think that, halfway through the speech, I accidentally may have bought a time-share in Florida.

iirc he also handed out a copy of some magazine (trump magazine?) to someone in the crowd, halfway through.

Rubio, packing in the hometown crowds.

https://twitter.com/ByronYork/status/707684148316610560

yeah but it was a more intimate show

I just got home from the work, in the same building as the town hall. Apart from the MSNBC and NBC vans and a Jose Diaz-Balart spotting, no traffic problems today.

By the way: I'm sorry Miami inflicted Chuck Todd on the rest of you.

pretty sure i have never seen or heard him, but i now think of him as 'my man chuck todd'

Chuck T

Some Clinton supporters chose to vote in the Republican primary. We know 7 percent of voters in the Republican primary identified themselves as Democrats to exit pollsters, compared with just 4 percent of voters in the Democratic primary who said they were Republicans. “Those 7 percent of Dems were likely mostly Hillary voters who thought she had an easy win and they could do their part trying to stop (Donald) Trump,” said ***Bernie Porn*** of pollster EPIC-MRA. The exit-poll samples are too small, though, to check that.

http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/why-the-polls-missed-bernie-sanders-michigan-upset/ 8th paragraph down.

Bernie Porn?

There are fifty states in the US (I should know, I've lived there for a year!) which means 100 primaries every cycle, which means that at least once per cycle a 99% certain outcome could be wrong. This was the biggest upset since 1984 at least. It could be completely correct to say that the probability of this happening was >99%. Silver doesn't think so, though, he said on twitter that they've been tweaking the model. Michigan only went down to 98% Clinton, though.

#actually there are 46 states and four commonwealths

actually there is Texas and 49 lesser states

45 states, 4 commonwealths, and a principality.

Democratic debate tonight. Three days after the last one.

I'm burnt out- no more debates for me.

i also don't like the implication that NS the human = his forecast, and the suggestion that he should tinker with his forecast every time it makes a bad call or runs counter to intuition is exactly wrong and misunderstands why it's interesting. saying 99% confidence doesn't mean NS the human was literally feeling the human emotion of confidence, it just means the stand error was small enough, which is exactly what we would expect to happen when all the polls show hillary in the lead.

ok you can replace every time i said "nate silver was wrong" with "nate silver's model was wrong" if it makes you feel better about the implications. or passive voice?

anyway, his priors about pollsters are of course data-driven but the decision to apply priors at all is subjective (even if they are uninformative or flat priors), and the priors and the other uncertainties he folds into the model were obviously too confident here, to the extent that they lead him to rule out the final result with extreme confidence.

why am i saying "obviously" too confident? why is this not just "if you make 100 predictions with 99% confidence, you're going to be wrong about once"? the answer is the same reason that far more than 1 in 20 psychology papers that claim p<0.05 are wrong. the defense is true as far as it goes, but that's how you explain away random noise, i.e. statistical fluctuations. but the problems are systematic, not random. i don't think anyone is arguing unlucky random samples is what went wrong with the polls. i mean it could be what went wrong (there is a non-zero probability that 5 polls with 3 percent uncertainties could all be wrong in the same direction by 20% or so), but i think everyone is right in assuming there were _systematic_ problems. and it's concern about those systematic errors that should be in silver's priors and in the resulting confidence of the model.

people literally going "that smug neoliberal fuck is 99% confident Bernie's gonna lose! and he hasn't even updates his confidence on Florida" seem to not understand the degree to which it's largely out of his hands at this point--and that that's what makes it interesting

not trying to pull rank here, but i do know what i'm talking about re: statistics, and i can't vote in this election, so i'm not coming at this from a "neoliberal fuck" angle.

i wouldn't harp on about this, but silver's alleged innovations are to do a good job of handicapping the pollsters and to a lesser extent to deliver the subsequent predictions with meaningful confidence intervals. failure to do a good job of one or both of those (my money is on the first) is obviously what has gone wrong here.

i ike 2 party

The GOP field last April was Cruz, Carson, Fiorina, Santorum, Paul, Huckabee & Pataki, let's remember.

I hope that this cycle has finally put an end to huckabee, santorum, and rand paul for good

Btw nate silver currently charges $60k for a 1 hour talk about how to build statistical models (more outside the nyc area) so "I dunno man, I just go where the statistical model tells me" seems a little generous.

I hope that this cycle has finally put an end to huckabee, santorum, and rand paul for good

These dorks always get out of their races before they run out of money, so they'll be back.

guys is trump president yet

No Nate silver is :-(

good post caek

Caek, you're obviously sorta right, since they've changed the model. But I think you're wrong about the problem lying with the handicapping of the polling firms. There wasn't a single poll that gave Sanders a shot, so how would ranging them differently change the outcome? Yeah, there were structural problems, most likely mainly that Michigan haven't had a contested primary for a long time, so it was a lot harder than other states.

The guys whose careers are over thx to trump = jebra, rubio, christie (sorta)

Rand paul's still in the senate and chuckles can still play bass. Santorum idk what he does.

http://img.wonkette.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/santorum_immigration_lady.jpg

ILEagels

"Go" home

Related to the topic of listening to minorities: http://www.freep.com/story/news/politics/2016/03/08/spotlight-arab-american-muslim-voters-engage-issues/81486692/

xps caek- i agree that his specification of the models (there are two) and any prior is subjective. but it's not clear to me that he fed in any priors to make the model extra certain of a hillary win, and the suspicion is obviously politically motivated and imo makes some people look partisan and dumb. i don't know how much tinkering goes on on a day-to-day basis but i always assumed little to none and he just kind of sets it up and lets it rip

why am i saying "obviously" too confident? why is this not just "if you make 100 predictions with 99% confidence, you're going to be wrong about once"? the answer is the same reason that far more than 1 in 20 psychology papers that claim p<0.05 are wrong. the defense is true as far as it goes, but that's how you explain away random noise, i.e. statistical fluctuations. but the problems are systematic, not random. i don't think anyone is arguing unlucky random samples is what went wrong with the polls. i mean it could be what went wrong (there is a non-zero probability that 5 polls with 3 percent uncertainties could all be wrong in the same direction by 20% or so), but i think everyone is right in assuming there were _systematic_ problems. and it's concern about those systematic errors that should be in silver's priors and in the resulting confidence of the model.

but not all systematic errors can be accounted for with the data at hand, that's the #1 problem everyone who uses non-experimental data faces. i think it's quite obvious his model is wildly underspecified with lots of omitted variables bias (they basically admit this on the first paragraph of the 538 site explaining how they set up the primary forecast) and so the interpretation of a p-value is kind of out of the window either way. i don't think other specifications with the same data would have given drastically results. like, what weighting scheme do you use to not have a confident bet that clinton would win using this data?

http://i.imgur.com/2LQVIQt.png

christ you guys

^^^