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perhaps he thinks he made someone else look foolish -- an understandable wish on his part
did my view change or did I say it was still wrong? LOL you thought you were going to catch me be inconsistent and you didn't. How's that for a gotcha! moment?
perhaps he thinks he made someone else look foolish -- an understandable wish on his part
Polling is a difficult enterprise nowadays. Some estimate that only about 10 percent of voters respond even to the best surveys, and the polls that take shortcuts pay for it with lower-still response rates, perhaps no better than 2 to 5 percent. The pollsters are making a leap of faith that the 10 percent of voters they can get on the phone and get to agree to participate are representative of the entire population. The polling was largely quite accurate in 2004, 2008 and 2010, but there is no guarantee that this streak will continue. Most of the “house effects” that you see introduced in the polls — the tendency of certain polling firms to show results that are consistently more favorable for either the Democrat or the Republican — reflect the different assumptions that pollsters make about how to get a truly representative sample and how to separate out the people who will really vote from ones who say they will, but won’t.But many of the pollsters are likely to make similar assumptions about how to measure the voter universe accurately. This introduces the possibility that most of the pollsters could err on one or another side — whether in Mr. Obama’s direction, or Mr. Romney’s. In a statistical sense, we would call this bias: that the polls are not taking an accurate sample of the voter population. If there is such a bias, furthermore, it is likely to be correlated across different states, especially if they are demographically similar. If either of the candidates beats his polls in Wisconsin, he is also likely to do so in Minnesota.
The FiveThirtyEight forecast accounts for this possibility. Its estimates of the uncertainty in the race are based on how accurate the polls have been under real-world conditions since 1968, and not the idealized assumption that random sampling error alone accounts for entire reason for doubt.
To be exceptionally clear: I do not mean to imply that the polls are biased in Mr. Obama’s favor. But there is the chance that they could be biased in either direction. If they are biased in Mr. Obama’s favor, then Mr. Romney could still win; the race is close enough. If they are biased in Mr. Romney’s favor, then Mr. Obama will win by a wider-than-expected margin, but since Mr. Obama is the favorite anyway, this will not change who sleeps in the White House on Jan. 20.
My argument, rather, is this: we’ve about reached the point where if Mr. Romney wins, it can only be because the polls have been biased against him. Almost all of the chance that Mr. Romney has in the FiveThirtyEight forecast, about 16 percent to win the Electoral College, reflects this possibility.
Yes, of course: most of the arguments that the polls are necessarily biased against Mr. Romney reflect little more than wishful thinking.
Nevertheless, these arguments are potentially more intellectually coherent than the ones that propose that the leader in the race is “too close to call.” It isn’t. If the state polls are right, then Mr. Obama will win the Electoral College. If you can’t acknowledge that after a day when Mr. Obama leads 19 out of 20 swing-state polls, then you should abandon the pretense that your goal is to inform rather than entertain the public.
But the state polls may not be right. They could be biased. Based on the historical reliability of polls, we put the chance that they will be biased enough to elect Mr. Romney at 16 percent.
Nate Silver uses the words "leap of faith" which when taken out of context make it look like a really bad comment. I think its a really poor choice of words to use becasue faith implies there is no proof. However, in the rest of the blog post Silver points to the historical accuracy of the polls and makes the comments that the model does account for a chance the pollsters are wrong. But the very fact that he also states that there is strong reason to believe the polls are correct is completely counter to any idea that believing they are correct is a "leap of faith".
Distribution functions? No. Distribution functions involve calculus, which 95+% of all undergrads are terrified of.
Keep trying Darrin but you're not likely to succeed. I don't base my judgements on what people say based on who people are or what I want to believe. I leave that to people like you. Instead, I attempt to make rational judgements based on the best data available. You might indeed catch me making a poor judgement at some point, however. If and when you do, I will concede where I was incorrect and proceed to reevaluate what I've said or what conclusions I've come to and I'll be better off for being shown where I was wrong.
Being proven wrong isn't a bad thing. Its one more step into finding out whats correct.
You can take calculus in HS.
Last edited by MannyIsGod; 11-08-2012 at 01:36 PM.
I'm well aware of that. It doesn't change the fact that 95+% of all undergrads are terrified of calculus.
I'm saying this as an undergrad who sees example of this phobia on a daily basis.
Most undergrads can't do algebra well much less calculus. But yeah, any undergrad can be Nate Silver!!!!
TBH election prediction models were all the rage on facebook among undergrads. Everyone was making theirs and posting them. All amazingly accurate.
And yet, Darrin was still wrong.
yet again, Darrin hangs his case on a weak semantic peg. as usual, the peg broke.
He did find a place where Nate Silver was wrong. He just sadly projected his methods of judgement onto me. Darrin should not make the mistake of thinking that the rest of us are as lazy and intellectually dishonest as he.
rofl exactly. I used to tutor college algebra and the experience made me lose a little faith in mankind.
Nevertheless, they understood Nate Silver's model very well.
The classes I have to take are split between the geography department and the earth and planetary sciences dept at my school. When you get a class that is cross listed its easy as to find out who is from EPS and who is from Geography. The Geography people are the ones who get scared about having to use scientific notation or whenever a greek letter is used in an equation. Its pretty damn sad.
When zoo monkeys throw feces against the wall, it's kinda like the same thing Silver is doing, tbh
I'll bet all of them understood the central limit theorem, density functions, and confidence intervals though.
This is exactly what I was arguing.
Continue with your self-congratulatory circle jerk.
I still have no criticism of Nate Silver or any of his methods. I don't even disagree with the Silver quote I posted earlier. I just tried to find something that sounded similar to something I would say, just to see if Manny would criticize it. Manny didn't disappoint.
chill out... it was blue, as in sarcasm...
Except that in order to get me to criticize it you had to pull it completely out of context and change the meaning. When you read that isolated section you removed from the article you make it seem as though pollsters are acting on really poor information and there is large reason to be skeptical of what they are saying. Yet, the point of the blog post Silver wrote wasn't to cast doubt on the polls but to point out that their chance of error was small.
Nate Silver goes on to say that if you're expecting the polls to be wrong you're engaging in wishful thinking!!!! Was your argument that you yourself were engaging in wishful thinking, Darrin?
No, of course it wasn't. So how the are you going to argue that you were simply making the same point as Silver?
There is some extreme fantasizing going on with that map.
A lot of concepts are easy to grasp and hard to implement.
There is, of course, an element of faith in polltaking. Just turns out that with a lot of work, that faith is fulfilled and therefore justified.
Then why are you trying so damn hard to discredit and minimize him?
Uh, oh. I know I'm in trouble when Manny busts out the big, bold fonts.
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