Quote:
Originally Posted by Tyrone Slothrop
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.
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The guy who taught me to do litigation, when asked by a client to predict a % chance of winning, would say: "I won't, I'll tell you you have a good case, but I'm not going to guess a percent. Besides, if I say there's only a 10% Chance you'll lose, if you lose you still lose 100%."
Predictions are dangerous and stupid. I know one person who voted third party and he pointed to the prediction to justify the vote.