Quote:
Originally Posted by Hank Chinaski
The polls were spot on, and they were posted here, IIRC. What was off was bullshit analysts (hi 538!). My wife would quote from the times each morning, "today it's 70% chance Hil is going to win!" And I ask how that could be given the polls. In retrospect those predictions probably are as much to blame as anything, given lefties peace to vote for Stein, or Johnson.
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If you (not you, Hank, but one) accept that the polls are not an attempt to directly predict what the vote will be, but an indirect indicator that will come pretty close, then it's no mystery that the polls will be off by some factor, and that in a close election this can be decisive. If Nate Silver says, there's a 70% chance that HRC is going to win, then he's saying, on the same factual predicate, there's a 30% chance that Trump is going to win. If I say there's a 50% chance that I'll flip this coin and it's heads, and then it's tails, it doesn't mean that I was wrong. It Nate Silver's case, an advantage or disadvantage of his art form is that it's completely untestable. When Trump won, was Silver wrong or was it just the less likely outcome coming to pass? You can't tell.