Election Day Thread

[ActivitiesGuy]

@therajraj

Polling from the beginning has been just another weapon of the Democrats to prop up their candidate. Completely bogus.

I fully anticipate a bunch of chest-thumping and “hurr-durr-stats-nerds-don’t-get-real-life” from you if Trump wins, so I would like to repost this here from a couple days ago when asked about 538:

@ActivitiesGuy

I really like 538 in general. It’s a fun website, the writers don’t seem to take themselves all that seriously, and they do a decent job making quantitative stuff accessible-ish to non-quant readers. I might occasionally nitpick the accuracy of their descriptions, but I understand that they’re not writing for stat-geeks, they’re trying to make quantitative stuff accessible to more people, and that’s an admirable pursuit.

As far as polling goes - I think Nate Silver is an incredibly smart guy, but I also think he (slightly) oversells the magic of his models. On the flip side, though, I think he does a pretty reasonable job noting the inherent uncertainty of said models; the problem (and I see this every day in my own specialty as well) is that most people are uncomfortable with uncertainty and probabilities.

Models are designed to project probabilities so we can make informed guesses about what might happen. If Nate Silver’s model projects an 85 percent chance that Hilary will win going into Election Day, sure, he would be projecting a Clinton victory. But if Trump ends up winning, that doesn’t mean Nate Silver’s model was actually wrong. The model still gave Trump about a 1-in-7 chance of winning. And I think Silver always does insert appropriate disclaimers; again, the problem is often readers who race past such disclaimers, discarding any nuanced thought in the rush to come away with one single answer.

This is literally the direct opposite of what you said earlier, by the way, that statisticians see the world in black and white and can’t interpret gray area.

The final model from 538 going into Election Day had given Clinton about a 70% chance to win and Trump a 30% chance to win. If he does indeed go on to win, as it appears he might in this moment, that still doesn’t mean Nate Silver’s model was wrong (although your brain thinks in such binary yes/no terms that I doubt you can understand why this is true). His model gave Trump a 30% chance to win, something roughly in the same ballpark as flipping a coin and getting heads twice in a row. In other words, not that uncommon. Did it give Clinton better odds? Yes. If you had placed a gun to Nate Silver’s head and asked him to guess the next President, would he have guessed Clinton? Yes. But he, as any good statistician would, has explained several times that the models had a lot of uncertainty and that a 30% probability of a Trump win is not a zero probability.