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Nate Silver made a rather good analysis of his own failings with respect to the primary: http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/how-i-acted-like-a-pundi....

I agree substantially more with his own analysis than I do with this blog post. He even mentions that the introspection may have gone too far. Why is it that Trump's victory has been seen as a "another failure of the pollsters"? Fivethiryeight had him at 35% chance. Betting markets were at around 4.1 the day before IIRC. In my view it's just another narrative to sell to people - laughing at other "stupid" people, here, read our newspaper instead.



The day before the election, Nate Silver took a lot of heat from the left because he rated Trump's chance of success as being much higher than most other prognosticators. The day after the election, he took a lot of heat from the same people because he didn't rate Trump's odds highly enough.


This has been fascinating to watch.

Conjecture: before the election, liberals wanted reassurance, so he took heat for not being reassuring enough, afterwards they wanted someone to blame for their shock.

Also relevant: people (other than gamblers) have no sense of what 70% means, so they round up to "Hillary".




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