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.
Punditry is trying to explain what the last minute deciders are going to do, which is fundamentally about predicting the thoughts and behaviors absolute psychopaths (undecided voters), and is therefore pointless.
you cant predict what a single undecided is gonna do, but a swarm of them are easily predictable.
If that were true all of 538’s predictions would say 100% chance, not 60% chance. My post was agreeing with your premise btw. I’ve been downbeard on chapo dot chat for defending Nate’s statistics (while mocking his punditry).
yes, the reason it’s not 100% is cos you only know about a group of psychopaths, and only days before they cast their ballots. the way the rest of the mass is positioned and shifts is pretty chaotic and difficult to predict, the only thing not difficult to predict are the chances.
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
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.
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.
again, that’s a gamblers fallacy, jsut cos something improbable happened, it doesnt mean other improbable things wont happen. you dont “recharge your luck” basically
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
It’s almost as if you can’t actually magically divine the outcome of these things before they happen.
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.
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
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.
@NateSilver this you?
