What If The Expected Actually Happens?

Luis A. Mendez

Boricua. Floridian. Theist. Writer. Critic. Oscar Predictor. Godzilla Fanboy. Member Of The Critics Association Of Central Florida And The Puerto Rico Critics Association.

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6 Responses

  1. Michael Cain says:

    Are we to the making bets stage yet? The expected will happen, there will be two or fewer states that have significant ballot counting issues — not getting them counted until a week after election day is not a significant issue, it happens routinely in Arizona and California anyway — and the outcome will be settled no matter which way those two end up.Report

  2. Michael Drew says:

    I think you mischaracterize what Silver did.

    He didn’t just decide Mistakes Were Made in 2016 and crank up the error variables to correct for that.

    He thinks his model was pretty close to right on in 2016; the real event turned up one of his 29 out of 100 Trump victories whereas it much more implausibly turned up one of other models’ 5 or 2 Trump victories. His model beat the pack, in his view.

    He cranked up the error if that’s an accurate way to put it because circumstances this year in his genuine view have created a(n even) more uncertain environment this far out compared to 2016. Among other variables I heard him mention on his podcast explaining all of this, the number of full-page or other splash headlines across the The New York Times so far this year (and this being a Nate Silver model, that isn’t something he pulled out of thin air to represent uncertainty but rather is a variable he determined from doing regressions on past elections to be correlated to uncertainty) has already been something like 30 compared to an average of a dozen or so.

    I know what you said about it was brief, but it seemed like you were saying he just had a feeling he went with or felt that some correction from 2016 was necessary and was just picking uncertainty variables at random and cranking them up because that’s what his gut was telling him to do.

    More: https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/our-election-forecast-didnt-say-what-i-thought-it-would/Report

  3. I’m a pessimist at hear, which in this case means I worry about the unexpected. I’ll admit that an inherent component of that pessimism is “wanting” to be proved to have been right, even though I don’t really want to be right.Report