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.
ok, but honestly some of his stuff is pretty poorly thought out. he has an algorithm do a lot of the work and i dont know i know he tweaks it but its still very presumptuous to claim some sort of objective statistics on these things. i think he pulls a lot of stuff out of his ass honestly and this is from someone who actually used to respect him.
honestly what really made me realize that hes somewhat of a bullshit artist is his basketball algorithms. long after i stopped giving a shit about elections i still wanted to see who he thought would win and honestly its completely unjustifiable bullshit how he makes it work. yeah its technically impossible to prove hes not correct, but i dont think those basketball models were vigorous, it still has lebron listed as a “borderline all star” lmao, it thinks paul george is a better pkayer. yes perhaps he puts more effort into this but i think its also too much too actually model by yourself and an algorithm is dumb and not to be trusted. i dont think his numbers on whose going to win are particularly accurate at all. in a vague sense sure but the percentage points are random algorithm bullshit thats completely unjustifiable
Nate’s biggest issue is that he tries to apply the methodology of sports predictictions to elections. The performance of athletes and sports teams is something with a lot of observable events to get data from. It’s also something where the outcome is only dependent on a handful of people, all of whom will be acting with fairly predictable motivations (i.e. they want to win the game, do the best, etc).
Elections are the exact opposite. Every election is unique. The candidates are unique. The material circumstances and environment are unique. The voting pool is unique (people turn 18, people die, people become citizens, decide to vote for the first time). There’s no hard, sure data you can use to predict an election ahead of time. There’s only previous factors and polling. Polls themselves have a massive element of uncertainty simply because the pollster has to make an effort to build a sample that will accurately reflect the actual voting pool. That’s really hard when society is increasingly fractured, and people’s political beliefs and motivations become increasingly arcane.
There’s also the fact that elections are decided by millions of people with a wide range of often contradictory or completley incomprehenisble motivations. You can break them down into rough demographic groups, but you’re never going to be able to suss out the motivations of every random grouping out there.
Elections are fucking hard to predict compared to sports (which is still not that easy to predict), and arbitrary house effects in the model can make probabilites swing wildly. Simply changing which polls you rate as more trustworthy can wildly swing the model in a close race.
Imagine trying to predict the outcome of a football game, but you have to guess:
-
How many players are going to show up on each team? You know that X number of players will wear team X jerseys, Y number of players will wear team Y, and Z number will just show up ready to play, for the love of the game, and pick which team they think is best that day. Players usually play for their jersey’s team, but not always.
-
Which position of players are going to show up? Team Y might have 50 players, but if they’re all offensive lineman and cornerbacks, you’re probably in trouble.
-
Are all the players there to win, or are some just killing time?
i mean, the only way to see how this stuff work is to open the box and look into the algorythm they crafted. but a) you cant, it’s his intellectual property. otherwise eveyrone would steal it. and b) you cant. it’s probably machine learning to some degree, and machine learning code is basically undeciphrable to humans without very intense study of one. still, the method he cites are usually good practice in statistical science, but i’ve had users tell me that most of it isnt actually polling data.
