| Polling aggregators also have a miserable record. You get closer because by aggregating you partly eliminate individual biases, methodological errors, sampling issues, and ulterior motives, but you also have problems with the pool of polls itself and aggregators are ineffective in adjusting for these issues by weighting or eliminating pollsters accordingly. Another comment even mentioned the notorious Nate Silver (bronze perhaps), the most famous of these types who lost 100k by being completely wrong about Florida by a huge margin. (Did he actually commit and payout? Not sure.) |
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| ▲ | Amezarak 29 minutes ago | parent [-] | | > Holding a forecaster to a standard of "Silver must get 100% of predictions correct or else he's a fucking moron" is, in itself, a sign of low critical thinking skills. The forecaster in question was fully aware of everything you're saying and yet he blew 100k on what he thought was a sure thing that turned out to not be. Maybe if he was as statistically-aware as you claim, he would not have made the bet, since he should have known there was a reasonable statistical probability he was wrong. I don't demand Nate get "100% of predictions correct", I'm mocking him because he's overrated and he made an outrageously confident prediction that blew up in his face when almost anyone who wasn't high on their own supply could see he was wrong, or at least could clearly see there was no basis for such a confident prediction. "There is an 80% chance Trump wins Florida by < 8pts" is very different from "I'll put down 100k that Trump wins Florida by < 8 pts." Of course the real problem is "statistical probabilities" don't actually factor into it and 538's model is actually not that well calibrated, and anyway we're talking about real-world forecasting, for which "well, 80% of the time I'm right" is useless in terms of actionable information unless the only reason you care about election forecasts is to gamble on prediction markets. | | |
| ▲ | anonymous908213 10 minutes ago | parent [-] | | Strictly speaking, you only need to think there's a 51% chance that Trump wins FL by <8% to make that bet +EV, assuming you have the bankroll to tolerate being a degenerate gambler. Silver didn't need to be 100% confident to make that bet. Obviously it backfired, but he literally is a gambler, he played poker for a living before online gambling regulation got him involved in politics, it's not surprising he would take what he had reason to believe, based on his past track record, was a +EV bet. Sometimes you go all-in with a full house and get beaten by a royal flush, but it doesn't mean your play was incorrect, statistically speaking. > for which "well, 80% of the time I'm right" is useless in terms of actionable information I mean, this is basically how weather forecasts work too. Would you say that weather forecasts are useless? I don't think they are. I think the existence of weather forecasts results in people being prepared for rain more than they otherwise would be, even if sometimes they neglect to bring an umbrella because the forecast predicted a low chance of rain. In the same way, political forecasting is actionable in terms of how politicians and their parties conduct their campaigns, focusing on areas where spending their time, energy, and campaign funds will get the most reward for their investment. I suspect a political party that makes use of forecasting will outperform one that doesn't if all else could be equalized. As for benefits to the general public, one of the big reasons Silver got into forecasting was to counteract the exact thing you were talking about earlier - he hated pundits crafting a narrative and trying to influence public opinion on elections baselessly, so his goal was to establish a more objective, numbers-based approach that was less susceptible to people just making shit up about elections. |
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