All of Nate Silver's State-Level Polling Predictions Proved True 576
kkleiner writes "For the last few months, the political pundit class has been at war with NYT/FiveThirtyEight blogger Nate Silver. Joe Scarborough of MSNBC called him a "joke," while an op-ed in the LA Times accused him of running a "numbers racket." But last night, Silver triumphed: every one of his state-level presidential predictions proved true. "
Re:Just looked at the real world and called it (Score:4, Funny)
I've never seen the unskewedpolls site before, but it is funny. The take a Rasmussen poll which have consistently skewed toward Republicans in the past two elections, accuses it of liberal bias and then insists on changing the Rasmussen result by 3 points in favor of Romney. Only then can it say that Rasmussen has predicted a Romney win. This would be like the KKK having a bias in favor of black men.
Re:Math (Score:5, Funny)
Or as a friend of mine said:
Nate Silver is to talking-head punditry what the National Weather Service is to "Hurricanes are caused by teh gays."
Re:Not how statistics works (Score:5, Funny)
That's only true for dusty old fuddy-duddy classical Newtonian statistics. These days quantum statistics is where it's at. Everyone knows that reading poll results can fundamentally alter data, even data that wasn't tabulated for that specific poll. (Something to do with bell curve entanglement and the spin/charm of pundits - gets kind of technical at that point.) Why just yesterday I glanced at a USA Today that someone had left behind on the subway, saw the usual 57-color pie chart about whether readers thought giraffes tasted great or were less filling, and next thing I knew the first president of the USA was George Washington instead of Herbert Whistlefjord.
Re:Math (Score:5, Funny)
The fantastic, insightful website http://natesilverwrong/ [natesilverwrong] website was very helpful in showing me how Silver would be entirely proven incorrect, with quotes from lots of people about why he would be shown as an idiot, and his methods were skewed.
It seems to be down now. Not really sure why. :-)
Re:Good for him (Score:3, Funny)
Jesus Fucking Christ ran in 2000? How did he not split the evangelical vote?
Re:Good for him (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Math (Score:5, Funny)
This is the price of allowing 10,000 independent journalistic voices to be consolidated into 2 or 4 mega-media-conglomerates who's infotainment is supposed to pass for a free and responsible forth column.
You are badly mixing the "fourth estate" and "fifth column" metaphors, neither of which actually fit your claim. Your post is like watching David and Goliath paint the Sistine Chapel.
Re:Math (Score:5, Funny)
There's also fraud, which isn't exactly polled for either.
I would suggest that the number of positive responses to the polls that ask "are you going to commit vote fraud this year?" is a statistically-accurate sampling of the actual in-person voter fraud.
--Joe
(0 respondants out of N gave a positive response to a question we didn't ask, which is within the poll's margin of error for the vanishingly small fraction of fraud)
Re:Math (Score:5, Funny)
Yeah... but a Hurricane [wikipedia.org] is pink and fruity... A straight drink it ain't....
Re:Math (Score:4, Funny)
The fourth column would be a large group of pissed off Spanish revolutionaries, just like the first, second and third columns.
Re:Math (Score:5, Funny)
Yeah... but a Hurricane [wikipedia.org] is pink and fruity... A straight drink it ain't....
A real man isn't afraid to order a fruity drink because they taste damn good...