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Humans are volatile. Politics even more so.

Our options aren’t “high confidence converging predictions, or 538”.

The options in the current era for understanding of the electorate’s mood are “overly confident individual polls, poorly analyzed with completely inadequate models”, vs “538-style epistemically humble models accompanied by discussions of their confidence, which can be scored in aggregate after each election”.

I’ll take 538 any day.



> The options in the current era for understanding of the electorate’s mood are “overly confident individual polls, poorly analyzed with completely inadequate models”, vs “538-style epistemically humble models accompanied by discussions of their confidence, which can be scored in aggregate after each election”.

Also, “politically motivated actors selling narratives that reinforce their preferred outcome largely without data or with cherry-picked data.” Don't forget that option


But it's not about you. Just being on this forum puts you in the critical thinking 1%.

538 fails in that most people think that the daily stats are Silver's betting positions. He "predicted the 2008 election."

We understand the difference, but the crying campaign staffers last November did not.


> We understand the difference, but the crying campaign staffers last November did not.

Campaigns aren't relying on Silver’s model.




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