In 2012, pollster Nate Silver became a media darling when he correctly predicted the Presidential election winner in every single state. The following 2014 midterm elections, however, found the FiveThirtyEight owner on the wrong side of liberals when he correctly predicted that Republicans would retake the Senate.
And now, while Silver is still predicting a Hillary Clinton victory based on the numbers, the fact that he isn’t predicting as certain a Democratic triumph as others (by comparison, the New York Times cites his probability of winning at 14 percent) is landing him in hot water with the liberal media, particularly Ryan Grim, Washington bureau chief of the Huffington Post.
Here’s what Grim, whose publication gives Donald Trump a 2 percent chance of victory, had to say about the fact that Silver is now predicting a 35.2 percent chance of a Trump victory:
“By monkeying around with the numbers like this, Silver is making a mockery of the very forecasting industry that he popularized. I get why Silver wants to hedge. It’s not easy to sit here and tell you that Clinton has a 98 percent chance of winning. Everything inside us screams out that life is too full of uncertainty, that being so sure is just a fantasy. But that’s what the numbers say. What is the point of all the data entry, all the math, all the modeling, if when the moment of truth comes we throw our hands up and say, hey, anything can happen. If that’s how we feel, let’s scrap the entire political forecasting industry.
Silver’s guess that the race is up for grabs might be a completely reasonable assertion ― but it’s the stuff of punditry, not mathematical forecasting.”
Silver wasn’t about to take the criticism lying down, responding to Grim with several scathing tweets:
The reason we adjust polls for the national trend is because **that's what works best emperically**. It's not a subjective assumption.
— Nate Silver (@NateSilver538) November 5, 2016
It's wrong to show Clinton with a 6-point lead (as per HuffPo) when **almost no national poll shows that**. Doesn't reflect the data.
— Nate Silver (@NateSilver538) November 5, 2016
Every model makes assumptions but we actually test ours based on the evidence. Some of the other models are barley even empirical.
— Nate Silver (@NateSilver538) November 5, 2016
There are also a gajillion ways to make a model overconfident, whereas it's pretty hard to make one overconfident.
— Nate Silver (@NateSilver538) November 5, 2016
If you haven't carefully tested how errors are correlated between states, for example, your model will be way overconfident.
— Nate Silver (@NateSilver538) November 5, 2016
Not just an issue in elections models. Failure to understand how risks are correlated is part of what led to the 2007/8 financial crisis.
— Nate Silver (@NateSilver538) November 5, 2016
There's a reasonable range of disagreement. But a model showing Clinton at 98% or 99% is not defensible based on the empirical evidence.
— Nate Silver (@NateSilver538) November 5, 2016
We constantly write about our assumptions and **provide evidence** for why we think they're the right ones. https://t.co/IhLKXdxGGK
— Nate Silver (@NateSilver538) November 5, 2016
That's what makes a model a useful scientific & journalistic tool. It's a way to understand how elections work. Not just about the results.
— Nate Silver (@NateSilver538) November 5, 2016
The problem is that we're doing this in a world where people—like @ryangrim—don't actually give a shit about evidence and proof.
— Nate Silver (@NateSilver538) November 5, 2016
Grim responded:
ur trend line adjustment was certainly theoretically defensible 18 mos. ago, but you can't ignore the wild effect it has had
— Ryan Grim (@ryangrim) November 5, 2016
To which Silver countered:
: Very professional of you not bother asking me for comment ahead of time. So unbelievably lazy.
— Nate Silver (@NateSilver538) November 5, 2016
And finally, parting shots:
the piece links to your public reasoning. Happy to add any further explanation you want in there
— Ryan Grim (@ryangrim) November 5, 2016
: The article made clear you have **no fucking idea** what you're talking about. That's why you contract people **ahead of time**.
— Nate Silver (@NateSilver538) November 5, 2016
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