
Why FiveThirtyEight Gave Trump a Better Chance Than Almost Anyone Else - mbgaxyz
http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/why-fivethirtyeight-gave-trump-a-better-chance-than-almost-anyone-else/
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mshenfield
They were pretty clear about the level of uncertainty leading up to the
election. They said the data they were seeing and Donald Trump winning could
both occur in a random universe slightly more than flipping a fair coin twice
and both times getting tails (29%).

Probability exists to quantify uncertainty, not to predict the future (though
this can help). One thing is clear - we don't live in a random universe, and
there are concrete biases present in the way we collect election data.
FiveThirtyEight carefully avoids and accounts for many of these sources of
uncertainty. For example, herding of polls at the end of an election and the
unusually high percentage of undecided voters at the end of the election.

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Hydraulix989
Should be titled: "How FiveThirtyEight Desperately Tries to Regain its
Credibility"

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godzillabrennus
This!

I was tracking their polling aggregator in "real time" daily and all it did
was give me a false sense of security. Now we have Trump.

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detaro
If someone gives you a 1/3 to 1/4 chance of something bad happening, relying
on that as "secure" seems ... risky. Criticism of specific mistakes they made
are good and well, but just saying they predicted the wrong percentage (when
we have no good idea what the real one was) seems to me like faulting somebody
because they lost a coinflip.

The bigger issue IMHO is how much attention is given to polls and predictions,
when they try to amplify useful data from tiny differences in key states.
Results that indicate "we can't really know" seem likely, but make for really
bad headlines. And worst case, some people actually think 70:30 means they can
stay at home and not go vote or something...

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DefaultUserHN
This whole election, every time Nate Silver made a prediction about Trump, it
turned out to be wrong.

That's a 100% failure rate.

Now, they're trying to claim that they were the least wrong? LOL.

