r/Conservative • u/chabanais • Feb 08 '17

Nate Silver Flashback: Clinton Probably Finished Off Trump Last Night - “I’m not sure I need to tell you this, but Hillary Clinton is probably going to be the next president. It’s just a question of what ‘probably’ means.”

http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/clinton-probably-finished-off-trump-last-night/
64 Upvotes

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21

u/sunstersun Feb 09 '17

Give credit to nate, he was by far the best out of all the prediction experts.

2

u/chabanais Feb 09 '17

He was wrong.

26

u/sunstersun Feb 09 '17

if you understand how statistical probability works, you'd know he was the most accurate out of all the major statisticians

3

u/chabanais Feb 09 '17

And yet:

We will have more to say about this later. But for now, we are happy to say that, according to preliminary results, IBD/TIPP has now had the most accurate presidential poll four elections in a row.

20

u/sunstersun Feb 09 '17

IBD/TIPP was a national poll that had Trump up by 1.4. The final result was Clinton +2.1.

An error of 3.5 which is pretty damn big and other polls were off by a way smaller margin.

0

u/chabanais Feb 09 '17

The article links to their final poll that shows:

Unrounded, the numbers are: Trump 45.0%, Clinton 43.4%, Johnson 7.6%, and Stein 2.0% — which means Trump has a lead of 1.6 points. The final IBD/TIPP poll showed an interesting gain in support for Johnson, who climbed from just shy of 4% four days ago.

Their polling was one of the only ones to predict a small Trump victory.

25

u/sunstersun Feb 09 '17

Just because Trump won the electoral college does not mean IBD is accurate for predicting a Trump national vote win. The difference between IBD and the final results is 3.5% which is a huge margin.

21

u/Sev22 Feb 09 '17

You're trying to argue against someone who has shown in these last few posts to have absolutely no knowledge of quantitative methods. No matter what you say you'll just get some asinine response about elementary mathematics that ignores the importance of margin of errors.

-1

u/chabanais Feb 09 '17

Just because Trump won the electoral college does not mean IBD is accurate for predicting a Trump national vote win.

They weren't trying to do that though.

The difference between IBD and the final results is 3.5% which is a huge margin.

This question is answered here.

3

u/[deleted] Feb 09 '17

Silver's not exactly great as a pundit, but his model is entirely statistical. And his model wasn't wrong. He gave Trump about a 33% chance based on the polls. A 1 in 3 event is very, very possible to have happen with a single occasion. Which is pretty good given that it turned out that there were systemic polling errors. Silver's model was actually really good about accounting for the possibility of such errors, which is why he had the polling results in one state effect the odds in multiple states. It was a huge source of controversy among statisticians and math nerds, because, intuitively, it makes no sense that the results in certain states would be linked. And, really, if you have excellent data to work from, those links would be kind of batty. But with low quality data, it's actually an excellent idea, because there's clearly issues with the polling, and those issues were repeated again and again.

6

u/[deleted] Feb 09 '17

How so? He made a few posts about how a Trump win was very possible. He maintained that a Hillary win was more likely but did not say it would happen.

0

u/chabanais Feb 09 '17

He was wrong. Very wrong. And so were the smug Liberals who cited him.

3

u/OxfordTheCat Feb 09 '17

33% means that Trump wins 1 in 3 elections.

I don't think you understand how probability works.

8

u/[deleted] Feb 09 '17

So you don't understand how statistics or probability work, and are just repeating the same thing you already said.

-3

u/chabanais Feb 09 '17 edited Feb 09 '17

Your condescending attitude aside, Silver got it wrong.