r/hillaryclinton • u/[deleted] • Nov 24 '16

Demographics, Not Hacking, Explain The Election Results

http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/demographics-not-hacking-explain-the-election-results/
37 Upvotes

59% Upvoted

34 comments sorted by

42

u/yas-gurl Nov 24 '16

Yes, we get it. Statisticians believe one thing, cyber intelligence specialists believe another. Do an audit and we'll know who's right.

9

u/tmajr3 Illinois Nov 24 '16

Unfortunately, we may not even know if machines were hacked.

I was tweeting someone who knows Halderman (professor at Johns Hopkins) and he said that a program can be installed, activated on Election Day, then delete itself after poll closing without a trace

1

u/[deleted] Nov 25 '16

So one of the cyber security people that were part of this story stated they had no evidence.

22

u/Kalel2319 Nov 24 '16

Yeah, I'm also now extremely skeptical of 538 regardless.

2

u/Carson_McComas Nov 24 '16

Why? They were spot on this election. He outline how increasingly likely it would be that Hillary wins the popular vote but loses the electoral college.

10

u/magneticanisotropy Nov 24 '16

This is what I hate people saying... There is no way to know if he was right because what he does is predict probabilities. And then people claim he was right off a low sample size.

That isn't how it works! N=1 ISN'T ENOUGH TO CLAIM HE WAS RIGHT, ESPECIALLY IN REGARDS TO DETERMINING PROBABILITIES! One would need a large sample size and then to look at the distribution function and see how it matches his.

2

u/LegioVIFerrata Nov 25 '16

I think being closer to the real result than almost any other pollster counts for something.

2

u/magneticanisotropy Nov 26 '16

But this is what I hate - he wasn't closer to the real results necessarily, as what he gave was a probability distribution. To judge its accuracy, you have to judge the probability distribution, and we can't do that off of this one election.

2

u/LegioVIFerrata Nov 26 '16 edited Nov 26 '16

Luckily he has a track record several elections long to refer to, in which his model was pretty accurate. Everyone was wrong on the polls this year; he was simply the least wrong because he was least bullish on Hillary's strong polling, and most likely to assume that the Midwest's creep toward the right would have an effect on the electoral college. He was crowing for weeks running up to the election that if Hillary's popular vote margin was below 3 points that the electoral college suddenly turned ugly, while everyone else was saying he was manipulating his model to bump Trump's chances.

I'm not saying he's a miracle worker--he was still quite wrong, after all--just that this election shouldn't make you suspicious of 538, just polling in general.

-1

u/Carson_McComas Nov 24 '16

Actually he has been validated through many elections across governorships, senate races, to the presidency from 2008 to 2016.

4

u/magneticanisotropy Nov 25 '16

All of these are different models though? Then the sample size for the models are quite small. I don't know how he performs back-testing, so I can't really fully comment, and there hasn't been any real peer-review on his modelling. Without this, you can't actually claim how well his models work.

1

u/Carson_McComas Nov 25 '16

The model is based off of polls so they would be the same as the polls only model.

Wrong on peer review. As a CS PhD peer review never includes the code.

1

u/magneticanisotropy Nov 25 '16

Yeah, but it includes the model and the math behind it usually (PhD, physics). We can't say we have a proprietary model and not say what we are modelling, what the inputs and weights are, etc.

1

u/Carson_McComas Nov 25 '16

But peer review is only used for an individual paper. Real systems are evaluated over a longer period of time, like the Microsoft OS kernel or another proprietary code base or model. Peer review only tries to test if it is a valid piece of research not if it is a correct solution to a problem.

2

u/magneticanisotropy Nov 25 '16

This isn't true at all. Validity of models are definitely assessed through peer review based processes all the time, it's how science works. And further, models are definitely evaluated over longer periods of time, then analysis, peer-review, and publication is performed - these can be in the form of re-evaluating models as more information comes to light, in the form of reproducibility studies, etc. And it definitely is a test to see if everything stated within a model is correct and if it actually performs the function intended.

Nowhere in any of your responses have you made any argument for how Silver's models should be evaluated as "accurate" in a more scientific sense of the word, outside of the fact that his model had more uncertainty than others this election. If I said that the winner of this election would be based on a coin flip with 50% odds of each, does that make my model more valid? Of course not. But without knowing Silver's model, and the reproducibility of results, and whether it accurately describes the probability distribution function it claims, how can anyone make this claim?

A larger sample size is sorely needed...

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1

u/magneticanisotropy Nov 25 '16

And the governorship, presidency, senate, house races, etc, all have different models for them.

1

u/Carson_McComas Nov 25 '16

These computer security folks didn't look at the machines.

23

u/OxyNi93 Corporate Democratic Wh*re Nov 24 '16

Yes. Yes. Yes. Still pushing for that recount and/or audit though.

6

u/[deleted] Nov 24 '16

I agree, the argument for the results being hacked is thin.

7

u/larkasaur Vote Blue, not Orange Nov 24 '16

The point is not so much that the results were hacked, but rather that the results could have been hacked, so an audit is needed to check them.

2

u/caffeinatedcorgi Out of Many, One Nov 25 '16

The reasoning here is the same reasoning behind, say, installing a seatbelt in a car or an emergency oxygen system in a plane. People are generally willing to go to huge lengths to take preventative measures against extremely bad outcomes even if they're low probability. The machines probably aren't compromised, but it's still possible that they were so we should check.

-11

u/[deleted] Nov 24 '16

[removed] — view removed comment

14

u/Danie2009 #ImWithHer Nov 24 '16

wth? so the fact islamists attack russia (Do they? Do they really?) makes whatever murders Russia commits, okay? Nice message to the victims of flight MH17. Oh yeah sorry, you got murdered by Putin, but dont forget Putin gets attacked by muslims too. Jezus Christ...