It Ain’t by the Numbers
Jay Cost on the Nate Silvers of the world:
But they misinterpret 2008: the Democratic share of the vote that year was right within its historical track of the high-30s. What differed was a drop in Republican identification from the mid-30s to the low-30s.
Does anybody really expect that to persist this year? Of course not.
This means we will probably be back to a slender divide between the two parties, narrowed even more by greater Republican loyalty. In all likelihood, white Democrats from the Ohio River Valley to the Gulf of Mexico will defect from their own party’s ticket in droves. These children and grand children of FDR’s core backers will support Mitt Romney overwhelmingly, so a nominal 3 to 4 point Democratic identification edge over the GOP will shrink to 1 or 2 points, meaning that independents will determine the outcome, just as they have basically for the last 32 years.
Again, this is a different approach than the poll mavens will offer. They are taking data at face value, running simulations off it, and generating probability estimates. That is not what this is, and it should not be interpreted as such. I am not willing to take polls at face value anymore. I am more interested in connecting the polls to history and the long-run structure of American politics, and when I do that I see a Romney victory.
This jibes nicely with the technique I used during the Tea Party wave of 2010 to beat Silver black and blue. He plugged his numbers into his spreadsheet and came up with a 25% chance of the GOP taking 60 seats away from the Democrats. My final call was a bit firmer: 64 seats, no hedging with probable outcomes or any of that BS.
The real result was 67 seats. I missed three out of the 113 I figured might be up for grabs.
So how did a blogger in his pajamas absolutely smear a statistician armed with the best tools and data the New York Times could provide?
Well, as I said, I have a technique. It’s called “judgment.” That’s exactly what Cost is writing about above. Judgment is inherently humble, because it comes from hard experiences of being wrong. And it isn’t hobbled by the vile progressive insistence that what they do is science because they’re just so damn forward thinking and progressive and scientific and so it must be so.
Nate seemed like he had it spades in 2008 — when real life just happened to trend the same way as the presumptions he plugged into Excel and called “a scientific model.” In 2010, he looked a little foolish when he tried to repeat the stunt. We’ll see what he ends up looking like this year, but I trust Cost’s judgment a lot more than I’ve come to trust Silver’s “science.”
Soon enough, we’ll know for sure.
Also read:
It’s judgment, not judgement. Or you can call it Kentucky windage, guaging how the wind blows. It means you are a good shot.
Totally O/T here, but hilarious: http://hotair.com/greenroom/archives/2012/11/03/caption-contest/comment-page-1/#comments
“Judgement” is correct. “Judgment” is also correct. “Guage” is not.
It is ok. He missed the ‘n’ in his last name too… Still funny as all get out. :*
Both “judgement” and “judgment” are correct. Next time one contemplates making a claim (let alone putting it in writing for the world to see), it might be a good idea to conduct a simple Google search beforehand. In this case, one of the many links that will pop up will send you to wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judgement). Cheers!
Wikipedia is to credibility as Bill Maher is to mature, reasoned discourse.
Judgement is not American English. We drop the e. Yeah, I noticed the missing n in my name just as it was posting. No edit feature. :/ I could have tried to post a correction, but I seem to be limited in my umber of posts or the like on PJM. Guage is correct, as is gage. I have looked for definitive answers, and cannot find one. (Wiki is NOT definitive.) Completely interchangeable, like grey and gray. (I was a spelling champ in my youth, FWIW.)
Anyway, tomorrow is the election, and having looked at all these horse-race articles, and various other factors, I have Mitt at 262 solid EV’s, and O at 192. Battlegrounds are still NV, MN, WI, MI, OH, PA, and NH. I just cannot figure out NH. It should be a gimme for Romney. I guess the Senate race is distorting things there.
So, Romney needs just one big State, or the two small ones. My thinking is he’ll get none or all of them. It’s looking like all, even MN, based on the crowd sizes everywhere. Even Bubba cannot draw a big crowd, now. The tribe seems to have decided to go with the idea of a new leader. It’s gonna be a bloodbath, tomorrow. O cannot slow the rising of this Red ocean.
Hope HI enjoys O’s retirement. Hopefully, the long flight and the choom will keep him there, rather than him traipsing about the country and annoying us.
Are you sure on gauge v. guage? I know that gage is fine, but I never knew you could swap the “a” and “u” like that. My American Heritage Dictionary doesn’t say you can do it, either.
You don’t need to be a spelling champ.
Go find “guage” in a dictionary.
Good luck!
Stephen! I could forgive “judgement” if you were using it once, and casually; but you’re doing it over and over and making it a centerpiece.
J U D G M E N T
T’other way is British.
Fixed — and thanks for the heads up. I blame all the Douglas Adams I read in high school, and I’m sticking to that.
I read so many British books between high school and college that I routinely spelled armor ‘armour’ and color ‘colour’ and labor ‘labour’ that I still have to look at those words when I type them to make sure I’m not using the British variant. I think both is okay. But I don’t have an accent to back up ‘ou’.
On topic, good on you and Cost for exercising judgment. I can’t imagine why pollsters stuck with that 7% oversampling when my two dogs both know that Dem turn out won’t mirror 08′s, nor will Republican.
Don’t panic. Always take a towel. VOTE Dammit and encourage other people to VOTE! My judgment, no matter how you spell it, is that we need a bloodless coup on election night. We can’t survive 4 more years of Obama.
Melissa, don’t you mean “always take a vowel”?
A vowel? For $250? No, thanks!
Both “Don’t Panic” and the remark about the towel are from that classic series of books by Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.
A bloodless coup? Do you mean all smotherings?
I did not realize that Dammit was in the running. Dammit!
;P
Might I add the relevant entry from the “Grammarist” on this topic? He is one sharp guy I have to say, and his site is beautifully done. He also, on occasion links to the Ngram graphs which show historical usage (found by actually counting words spelled one way or another in all books that have been scanned such that they are full-text searchable).
I do not know who the the gentleman is, but I strongly recommend his site:
http://grammarist.com/spelling/judgment-judgement/
– FF
“Soon enough” can’t come soon enough for me.
Silver doubled down today on Twitter, claiming there was an 87% probability Obama would win.
and if he’s right? what’s the explanation then….
The explanation? He had a binary choice, said one choice had an 87% chance, and picked the right one. I could do the same with a flipped coin. Lemme know when Silver has a track record on 5000 swing states in Presidential elections, and then it’ll be worth my time to examine the precision of his picks.
Except that he has to make a prediction about each state and its final vote count along with all of the senate races and margins. Doesn’t sound very binary to me…
What no one seems to realize is that Silver’s 49-1 record in 2008 included a 48-0 headstart (there were only two tossups and he got one). So his real record was 1 out of 2. No better than a coin flip.
The question was posed in a binary fashion; what does it mean about Silver’s model if Obama wins? The answer is “not much”. Neither you or I will live long enough to have much insight as to how accurate Silver’s Monte Carlo simulations are.
Just remember: back in 1913 the roulette wheel in Monte Carlo came up black 26 times in a row. How many people lost their fortunes betting on red from, say, roll number ten on?
As a futures trader, I never take a position where my risk > potential profit. In this case, Silver has made a high risk, low return bet. If Obama loses, Silver’s day in the sun is over. One big eff-up will more than cancel any other claims his methodology might have made in the past. That’s what getting “married to your trade” will get you.
This is not I.
Wrong question.
The better question is what excuse Silver is going to come up with if he’s wrong.
Will he ignore it and try to move on as if he hadn’t laid a giant egg in the middle of the room, as he seems to have done with his 2010 formulas?
Or will he revert to being the baseball stathead that he is and attribute it to “luck”?
Egg?
More like a noisy, odoriferous fart in a deathly quiet job interview room.
oh, he has a built-in excuse.
He doesn’t poll or predict himself. He only runs models on what the polls say.
He can’t be any more or less accurate than the polls themselves.
His model is always right (which might be true, since probabilities can be calculated precisely if the assumptions are correctly stated), but if the polls are wrong, his probabilities can unfortunately be misleading.
Nice con, isn’t it?
Someone should ask him how much of his net worth he has wagered on the outcome. He should have bet close to 100% of his net worth, since even if he loses, all he has to do is get some backing next time and bet twice as much. Even if he couldn’t get backing he could quickly recoup everything with a series of 87% bets with a small stake. Any gambler, anybody with any risk tolerance at all, would bet HEAVILY on an 87% probability. 87% is a sure path to princely wealth. But Silver, of course, will tell you he simply isn’t a betting man.
Running cons is much safer work.
Assigning quantitative values to what are essentially modern-day pig entrails is what modern academics do. I taught in the public schools and was constantly amused at the seriousness with which my administrators took precise quantitative data based on imprecise assessments.
Two things pollsters overlook;
1) the Tea Party
2) Chick-Fil-A day
Hence, they haven’t a clue what will happen on Tuesday.
I look forward to Brian Williams look of perplexidy similar to the Look Jennings had November 1980 when he announced that California, YES California had fallen to Reagan as well.
Oh! To see those days again! Ron: we miss you so much!
The reason they haven’t a clue is because the left assumes that the Romney voters would be “all up innit” Gnome sayn? That is to say that the Romney voters would be as verbal, childish, petulant and full of vitriol as the socialists are about captain nobody. But like the well-polished team that doesn’t trash-talk and just goes out there and wins, the Romney voters will show up in droves at the polls and wipe the floor with Blackjack Barrack.
The quiet tolerance and intolerance of the right is almost unnoticeable but we know when (and how) to act. Screaming and whining and trying to tell brain-dead media types that we’re not going to stand for it anymore only serves to make us tired, which the left then enjoys and makes fun of. Come to think of it what about the right don’t they make fun of?
So you see, we sit there and rock in our chairs on the front porch, watch all the buffoonery going on, smile a little smile when the left figures they’ve done an excellent “gotcha” and then, we get up out of our chair, go to the polls, cast our vote and then go home and sit back down.
That’s what the right does while the left vibrates, cusses, points fingers, cries, ties its own shoelaces together, steps in it again and again and again and we just go about our lives and business, largely ignoring the temptation to intervene but also making note of the phenomenal poor behavior and remind ourselves to not engage any socialists.
And whether they care to admit it or not, the majority of the country considers itself center-right to right. The majority of the nation did not want universal medicine because we saw what it’s done to other nations and we inherently know how bureaucracies work because many of us served in the military. Such an eye-opener the lefties haven’t been exposed to.
So, national socialists, I know that after Tuesday you will riot, loot and burn and most likely, kill. Those who you think are your enemies as well as those who are your friends. Because you never grew up and cannot face realities. Notice that the right-wing bitter bible-clingers and gun-owners didn’t riot and loot and kill and make death threats to the idiot who got elected in 2008.
I doubt that the national socialists will show equal decorum this year on Tuesday night and for the rest of the week. Sure, the media will blame the outrage about not getting gas in NJ, the lack of food in NY, etc etc. But it won’t explain the violence in LA, Chicago, etc.
So, they will also say the election was about race…because they made it about race. It shouldn’t be that way but Holder, Obama and the entire MSM did a bang-up job making sure to keep the sore open so the infection could grow and cripple us. But those of us who are able to think don’t care if you call us racists because we know what real fairness means, and it’s not the stylized, hollywood extravaganza definition that it’s made out to be.
So suck on that, lefties. And by the way, your ass has been showing for several decades now.
What I haven’t seen is how the enthusiasm this year compares to 2010. What were the polls 1 week out showing then. It is clear that we have far more enthusiasm than 2008 and the D’s have less. I cannot imagine we have less pumped than 2004, there were no PGV’s then.
I sense we are off of 2010 but not by much, there is a quiet anger and worry now. We need to finish this off, get the Senate as well as have Romney / Ryan in the White House.
I think there is more enthusiasm. It’s just not as vocal. Mitt and Ryan and drawing big crowds and they are having trouble fitting people in at the local phone bank.
The point has been made, and I tend to agree from a strictly anecdotal, observational POV, that the enthusiasm is there, but the focus has changed. The rallies of ’09 and ’10 are over, and the hard work has started, and continued, for the last two years. The big splash was the overwhelming wipeout in the House in 2010. But the long-term victory was in the state and local elections, where the Tea Party basically took no prisoners.
Winning locally means the landscape has changed for future elections. We’ve laid the framework for significant GOTV efforts, and also monitoring polling sites. All of that is in play, as well as another round of dominating local elections, for Tuesday.
It’s not perfect, and the race between O and R is way too close, if the polls are to be believed. My hope is that the fact that the response rate to the polls has been so horrible (see Charlie for a great discussion on this) indicates a very poor relationship to reality in that arena. And that Romney’s victory is beyond the “margin of fraud” as other wits have put it.
I think a lot will come into focus by Wednesday morning. I’ve opined for several years now that it may be too little, too late. I still believe that to be the case. But if the red tide is overwhelming enough (meaning a majority in the Senate, too), and the FiCons have a powerful enough caucus, then we just might turn the Titanic before the economic iceberg takes us completely down.
I am not confident. But I am hopeful.
In the “crawling over broken glass” vein: I am suffering from horrible back problems right now. I can hardly drive. Standing in an hour long line to vote on Tuesday is, quite literally, the last thing I want to do. But I’ll be damned if I’m going to let my voice be muted in this oh-so-critical, national-identity-determining election. It may not be literally crawling over broken glass for me to vote. But it’ll probably feel close to it….
So be it.
Their problem is that they are unaware of their biases. they believe their BS.
I’ve said this several times in several different places. There is simply too much noise in the system this time around for any model to be predictive. Moreover, Silver is a sabremetrics guy. Now sabremetrics is a useful tool for baseball teams to be sure, but it’s just a tool. If you went by a sabremetrics model Derek Jeter is a triple-A player _at best_ rather than the shoe-in for a unanimous first-round hall of fame trip his actually _is_.
It’s called human factors, and no model can take them into account. As Jeter makes his team better and more successful simply by being there, so to do things like Tea Party and Chick-Fil-A day not fit into a mathmatical model.
The models are tools, but only tools — as anyone who relies on them is also a tool.
Patrick, there are no sabremetrics that say Jeter is a AAA player at best. Don’t be silly.
Well, Nate Silver still hasn’t learned about that “judgment” thing, Steve. He recently bet Joe Scarborough that Barack Obama would win reelection with 80% certainty. He better hope Obama wins; I’d hate to see his stock drop by 80% and go back to be a boring old baseball statistician.
Another case of the fundamental dishonesty of the left. If Silver were truly confident of his 80% certainty, he would have offered 4-1 odds.
Exactly. I understand Worm Silver now sitting at 87% Obama winning odds?
I’ve got a $1,000 to bet on Romney when Mr. Statistician antes up 6-1 odds.
Maybe Silver can give us the odds on why Obama could only draw 4000 to his event in Cleveland today, given that Obama drew 80,000 four years ago.
And while Silver is at it, maybe he could be asked what sort of odds are at play that had McCain drawing 200 more people to the same gym in Mentor at a similar time during the last campaign as Obama did today, too.
My issue with Nate is he will never publicly admit he was wrong. He will always gives himself a way out with the percentages. Romney wins? “Oh I was right, see I had him with a 20% chance and it came up that way, the model works!” He is no better than a glorified weatherman.
We have this presumption that vote manipulation cannot overcome a large GOP turnout. That rigging the Diebold machines a certain way simply can’t be that large of a factor.
What if that’s wrong? What if votes of 135 percent of registered voters occur throughout the swing states? Yeah, we would know that the election was fraudulent. Big whoop. I’m sure the Department of Justice will get right on it.
Guess who’s inaugurated in January?
A guy with a bullet-proof vest and steel helmet?
All the more reason to cast an informed vote for your state legislators too.
“The real result was 67 seats.”
I seem to remember it being 63.
Never argue with a man who buys vodka by the distillery.
67 seats flipped to the GOP, but four others flipped the other way – including Castle’s seat in Delaware. So the net gain was 63, but 67 Democratic seats flipped.
Nate Silver is just Pauline Kael wrapped in statistics. All models require assumptions, and he assumes a massive Dem turnout because he simply cannot imagine anything else.
I’m a small business owner. My economic survival instincts force me to pay attention to what is happening on the ground today, not last year or even last quarter. Therein lies the fault of most pollsters, not the least of which includes Mr. Silver. Too much emphasis has been placed on election day modeling based on 2008, our last presidential election. Which in and of itself, was an anomaly in the universe of voter turn out. I see that as fatally flawed. I’m often accused by those around me of wishful thinking which manifests itself in an anti-Obama bias. While I truly do have an anti-Obama bias, my conclusion that Mr. Ronmey will sweep nearly, if not all swing states, is grounded in the understanding that what is happening on the ground today will determine 2012 election results. Clearly, its not 2008. So next Wednesday when all the Nate Silvers and his ilk will be grasping for hollow excuses as to how they got it all wrong, or most likely how all of America got it wrong, this joker will be gloating quietly from his easy chair somewhere from Nowhere,FL.
I will be glad when Tuesday gets here
I have to work, so I Voted Early
I will have the popcorn ready to pop when I get home to watch the news
Can you imagine Obama’s concession speech? Or Michelle’s remarks to reporters, delivered with a bitter smile? “I guess the world wasn’t ready for us.” I’m going to make a wallpaper and a screensaver out of them.
Romney will be lucky if he finds anything left in the whitehouse when he gets there. In all likelyhood he’ll have to live in one of his other houses for the first few months while the white house is fixed up. If slick willie vandalized the place on his way out after 2 terms, imagine what Barak and Michelle and all their toadies will do? I’m expecting nothing but bitterness and sarcasm from the other side, i.e. all that they’ve shown in this race. God willing may it happen. It would be delicious.
Math. Too hard for GOP voters.
Which is why they are GOP voters.
Math is too hard for the GOP, hey?
Well, we know enough to understand $16,200,000,000,000.00. We know enough to understand one in six in poverty. We know enough to understand one in two at or near poverty. We know enough to understand a drop of 8.1% in middle class income under the toy messiah’s tutelage. We know enough to understand 17,000,000 new Obama food stamp recipients. We know enough to know there’s at least $26,000,000,000 in Government Motors investment we’ll never see. We know enough $862,000,000,000 of stimulus ought to get you something better than nothing. We know enough to understand $90,000,000,000 of green investment and little or nothing. We know enough to understand four dead people hidden to hide a failed narrative.
Want me to go on?
So if we don’t understand math, we are we considered the party of the rich?
Rube. See you around Wednesday. Make sure you show up.
I’m willing to bet most of us understand math better than your messiah, who proudly proclaims to grasp it at roughly a 7th grade level.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=igqChKbB-t8
Really? I have a PhD in Nuclear PRA (which means I understand the engineering and the probabilities). I’ve done a *lot* of Monte Carlo simulations, but would be laughed out of my profession if I used the priors (i.e., loaded polls where the Demonrat share exceeds 2008) that Nate Silver uses.
Nate also doesn’t think 2010 should be used as a prior. Too bad. That’s a big prior – and a lot more useful than all the biased polls. Sadly for Obama, I’ve looked carefully at the yearly Gallup Presidential favorability polls – which use a much larger sample size. You can see a reduction in the 2010 “fever” – but not enough to save Obambi.
FWIW, the only poll that matters at this point is Tuesday. Vote for your lives and country!
You would think that pollsters and pundit/predictors would be sifted for skill over time so that only the truly skillful ones would stay in business. But alas quacks and claimants continue to abound. Same with stock pickers.
What will Nate Silver (“Bubble Boy”) be doing Wednesday morning and beyond? My guess is that we are probably underestimating the GOP tsunami about to hit. 2010/House races are a different type of proposition; more tangible, more contained. The danger, the stakes in a POTUS election are more open-ended, and really scarier to average people, who see the Presidency as the “real deal” and don’t think much about Congress.
So I have this feeling that something historic will be happening on Tuesday. Massive turnout, and massive defeat for the Democrats.
Massive fail for the MSM, and Nate Silver, too? We can hope…
Don’t forget (not original with me):
Good judgment comes from experience
Experience comes from bad judgment
Bad judgment comes from tequila
Your mileage (and alcoholic beverage) may vary.
Good work, Mr. Vodka. What dopid you say when the NYT offered you a job?
Good work, Mr. Vodka. What did you say when the NYT offered you a job?
I think that a lot of people on the left are underestimating, or outright ignoring, the extent to which the “Bradley Effect” will operate this time. I think the polls are overestimating support for Obama for the simple reason that some of the people being polled are lying, saying they’ll vote for Obama when they really don’t intend to.
One of the things I respected Obama for was running a (mostly) post-racial campaign in 2008. Enough of one, that he killed the Bradley Effect. That is, his actual support on Election Day was in line with the public opinion polls.
But since then, he has run such a racial administration, that I’m afraid he has breathed new life into the Bradley Effect.
What a shame. What a waste.
Let’s hope you’re right, and the Bradley Effect is in full force, so that The One goes down in flames, dramatically. A landslide second only to Reagan’s crushing of Mondale would be very nice.
As for the waste, that was 2008, when he was elected. A waste, a disgrace, and a disaster for America.
Not to splash too much rain on Silver’s 2008 genius parade, but by election day, about 80% of the states are already more-or-less nailed down. In 2012, we’ve got 11 “toss-ups”, with Romney more-than-likely winning VA, NC, FL, CO, and OH. Obama probably has PA, MI, and NV. This leaves IA, WI, and NH.
Any casual observer should be able to get 45-48 states right. This ain’t March Madness.
I think part of this is Upper West Side – DC Metro conventional wisdom. Which Rush frequently points out is always wrong.
It is quite possible that Nate Silver might go down as the Milli Vanilli of political analysts. Has a the equivalent of a major hit in 2008 by calling nearly every state right. Stardom and fanhood and the Left gives him the political prognostication equivalent of a Grammy.
But in 2010, Silver is not so perfect and a bit tarnished. Yet, the Left’s nutroots continue to bestow magical powers on his mystical analysis.
Now in 2012, and Obama re-election makes Silver look like a genius at the expense of vast numbers of pollsters. Or, Morris, Rush, Beck and others are going to enjoy the realization of their Romney landslide and Slver will be treated like the days old warm milk sitting in thousands of unpowered refrigerators across the Northeast.
But what of Silver’s legacy if Romney not only wins, but wins big? Could it be that Silver was only right in 2008 because it was a wave year and Silver was privy to Axerlrod’s analysis? Could it be that Silver’s genius was actually his channeling of the Axe?
I mean, it that is true, isn’t Nate Silver the political analysis equivalent of Milli Vanilli?
Long time fan and lurker.
A couple of my thoughts: Obama had nearly advantage in 2008 there is: relatively unknown (therefore few negative) state senator/senator who had very few positions, a resume that seemed wonderful to many, “clean and articulate” (in my mind one of the most rascist comments ever uttered “in code”), a populace tired of war and many angered with Bush, an economy that seemed to melt down before our eyes, an aging candidate who waged a horrible campaign and never fought back, and a totally compliant media that literally (journolist) coordinated their covering fire and practically willed him to victory (thrill up my leg)And he had a populace that many felt good to vote for a guy that seemed magical and incredibly well spoken (er, um, teleprompter read)
and Obama got 52 to 48 of popular vote.
Hmmm. He now has a record, is angry and petulant on the stump and in debate, an economy that is stuck, an unraveling Benhazi narrative, waning enthusiasm and a populace clearly not excited. We’ve had a resurgent conservative/libertarian/tea party voting bloc, a Romney candidacy that despite what the MSM says, has run a pretty good campaign and has dismissed the previous mantra that he’s not ready for prime time.
I’ve recently spent time in Youngstown Ohio and Arlington VA and both areas are fairly staunch liberal Democratic hotbeds and I’ve seen more enthusiasm and signs for Romney than I’ve ever seen for McCain or any other Republican candidate.
It is judgement, however the heck you spell it.
Romney 54, Obama 46, unknown on Electoral College but a Romney Presidency.
The other thing I’ve noticed across the interwebs (on the nonpolitical sites I visit), is that quite a few people are receiving their benefits packages for 2013, and the health care part isn’t very pretty. In particular that loss of FLEX benefits is pissing some people off.
Very crisp article.
Reminds me of the comparison between Fundamental v. Technical stock analysis.
Technical analysis is sweeping and elegant. Look at the flowing lines, the trends, past as prologue…
Fundamental analysis is so…boring. Do they have earnings that can be sustained by revenues? What are their competitors doing? What is management doing? Are the dividends sustainable? Is it fairly valued? Undervalued?
Concerning the former approach we are dealing mostly with interpretation and, in the latter, facts.
At its best, Technical analysis can be confirmatory in much the same way a medical test can be used to confirm a diagnosis. Using medical tests to ARRIVE at a diagnosis is simply flailing.
The willingness to ignore the performance of this (Democrat) administration over the course of 4 years is an exercise in elegant wishfulness. The facts are preeminent and will not be assuaged.
Technical stock analysis: The fundamental analysis suggests what you should buy, and the technical analysis (is that stock price dropping rapidly, is it rising rapidly, etc. etc.) tells you when to buy.
To torture my iffy analogies further, the Fundamentals are telling me to buy Romney and the Technicals are telling me to do it… lessee… ON TUESDAY.
I’ve never sold short in my life. But, this one time…oh man.
nate compiled a list of 16 congressional toss up races in 2010. the gop won 15.
tend to think he failed to grasp the concept of a ‘toss-up’.
he has started hedging-
his most recent post title:
“For Romney to Win, State Polls Must Be Statistically Biased”
ya think? actually, not all state polls, just the ones who have crazy outliers like his host paper.
Yeah, we know your ‘judgment’ comes out of a fifth labeled ‘hydraulic wisdom’, but we love you anyway.
Silver is resting on his laurels because in in 2008 he guessed correctly the outcomes of 49 of the 50 states. The thing is, Rasmussen was the most accurate pollster in 2008, but he used an entirely different model. Flash forward to 2010, and we see that while Rasmussen and Gallup overstated the GOP performance somewhat, Silver gave the GOP a low ball and said that he expected them to get only 30 new House seats. Most people with their pulse on what was going in with national sentiment felt that a figure of at least 60 would be more accurate. However, it was Silver’s figures that were pushed by the MSM, and he completely blew it. It looks like history may be about to repeat itself.
Yes, I’m not sure quite why the 2010 election hasn’t been incorporated into the polling models. It’s like 2010 never existed. If I could put my own thoughts to paper, it would read exactly like this piece by Salena Zito: http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2012/11/04/main_street_in_revolt_116051.html
She has nailed it.
An interesting article about a woman (a Republican, according to the story) trying to vote twice on the same day in Nevada:
http://hotair.com/archives/2012/11/03/of-course-theres-no-voter-fraud-to-worry-about/
Now, what im really surprising is that in the comments section of the article, no one made the point that the only reason, maybe, she was caught and reported is BECAUSE she is a Republican. I wonder how many democRATS have already done so, or will do so on election day and will go unreported (let alone prosecuted).
I think Nate Silver is finding out that fame has its negatives. From being a hot-shot baseball fortune teller (where he probably made money) to becoming a political player of sorts in a polarised election cycle is fraught business. For one thing, a heckuva lot more pundits outside baseball turn their microscopes on you.
Silver, firstly, is not a pollster. He doesn’t design and/or conduct polls which seek to extrapolate from a sample the voting activity of millions.
Instead, he takes polls conducted by others and crunches these numbers through a system he devised to predict baseball seasons.
And, not only that. He only takes top-line numbers – Obama X%, Romney Y%. Silver doesn’t do poll internals, he doesn’t do history.
Lastly, Silver cuts it cute and clever. He won’t tell what the final X or Y % is gonna be. He only gives you probabities. Though probabilty was never meant for any branch of physics except quantum mechanics, it is extensively used in social science.
In probability theory, even if something has a 99% chance of happening, it would never happen. That tiny 1% chance would win the day.
So, even if Nate Silver is wrong about who is the next president, he is right.
Nate Silver = Baghdad Bob
This election has now entered the full spectrum propaganda phase. The New York City media monkeys are now doubling down on all their lying. They are also getting some overseas help from Intrade, who have decided to declare Obama the winner and are now paying out these bets. They are no doubt being paid for performing this stunt.
But like I said, it’s all Full Spectrum Propaganda from now on. Ant it isn’t going to stop after the election either. It’s the new abnormal.
I should of said that the New York City media monkeys “have” to do double down on their lying because everything they have tried so far has not worked.
Funny you should mention that. I was ready to go, a one shot deal, to bet for Romney at about 2-1 against. I was not going to have time to wire cash to open the account. They don’t take C-cards, damn it. Easiest money I’ll never make.
On the bright side, Romney wins, we begin to crawl out of the debt hole, we reassert our sovereignty, Obamacare circles the bowl,the business of America takes off, and a generally Life-Affirming phase takes hold after 4 disastrous years…I guess that’s something.
I used to bet on football once in a while. Got all sorts of mail and other forms of contacts from some guy who claimed to have picked 10 in a row and was offering a free pick…just giving away his genius; and then if that one worked, eureka, here came another free one the next week. Some even went further than that before petering out.
Well, 1 out of 4 on the mailing list would have 2 in a row after the “10 in a row”, and maybe a few suckers would bite on that, no?
Now I get it from stock pickers. In a month they call back and ask if I had seen how great their pick did. I didn’t and I couln’t care less. It’s too obvious.
That junior high marketing technique explains why Nate Silver is currently the most famous poll interpreter in the universe. In 2008, there were only 3 or 4 state races with margins of less then 2.5% in the polls. He only missed 1 of them, hardly evidence of any genius. The RCP average missed 2. Then the alwasy conniving leftists started a publicity campaign for Silver along the lines of the publicity campaign they ran against Dubya for 6 years. A short way of decribing it would be to call it beating you over the head with a club. Not surprisingly, by 2012, Nate Silver had become the foolproof prognosticator (since his failures in 2012 were swept under the rug), and indeed, he has probably had a significant impact on the election, and certainly on Intrade (which is manipulated anyway).
You have to give the Leftists credit for never missing a trick. There are probably hundreds of other tricks that you never think about because nobody points them out.
And btw, common sense should tell you that there is no mathematical legedemain that can turn a 1% poll into a 67% chance of victory. There simply cannot be that level of certainty about complex human behavior that has built-in feedback mechanisms that nobody is even close to understanding. I call that a Harvard or New York Slimes level of stupidity.
Life is not a mathematical equation. Never was, never will be, no matter how much the leftists scream that it is and that they know the formula.
I was going to make a big bet on Romney via Intrade just based on the 2 to 1 odds, but then I felt the odds were actually greater than Intrade would welsh on that bet. Apparently they have clauses that make it easy to do. So I just haunt the comments instead. Amazing those who take these quirky polls as gospel, and many are not even Americans.
I was going to major in statistics, when I realized the average person is half male and half female. Much of the worlds problems can be traced to the mis-use of statistics. For example the Federal Reserve missed the Housing callapse (according to Alan Greenspan himself) because it only had 20 years of housing data in its statistical model instead of 30. Banks missed on its risk assessment of the crises because its models assumed that house appraisals actually represented the value of the house. Global Warming models use a data that is untraceable and fudge factors that are subjective to arrive at results the bias prefers.
What is missing in these models is human expertise. Realtors that have been through downturns knew the housing markets in California were going to collapse. Meteorologists knew the climate models were wrong. And common sense tells me there is no average person.
Cogent.
Statistics are a remarkably useful tool, but that’s all they are. If you know how to work with the data sets and their numbers, you can get them to reveal all sorts of useful and interesting things. But, you have to understand that in the hands of someone who really knows what they’re doing, you can make those numbers and that data say, or seem to say, whatever you want it to. My husband does stats for a living now, and he’s be the first to say that. I took a media stats class in college and that was lesson one: if you know how to construct your numbers, you can make them say whatever you want them to.
Ouch. Poor choice of words. I know you meant it as a synonym for “annihilate”, but in the context of journalism, I think the other meaning is more likely to come to mind.
BTW, you are absolutely right about it being a matter of judgment. (No ‘e’.)
Not just the left, but the entire world seems to have forgotten the value of experience and the judgment that can only come from that experience. The B Schools have done this to us, always trying to find formulae to make decisions for them, instead of understanding that all the numbers can be useful grist for the mill, but in the end, we need people who have good judgment.
Thus the all-to-common sight these days of a 24 year old Chief Editor or Vice President, sometimes of major companies. It’s worse than ridiculous.
By the way, I hope you smear him again.
As for who is going to win….
Do a search on “Jim March Diebold”, and get scared.