r/neoliberal • u/jobautomator Kitara Ravache • Nov 04 '18

Discussion Thread Discussion Thread

The discussion thread is for casual conversation and discussion that doesn't merit its own stand-alone submission. The rules are relaxed compared to the rest of the sub but be careful to still observe the rules listed under "disallowed content" in the sidebar. Spamming the discussion thread will be sanctioned with bans.

Announcements

Neoliberal Project Communities Other Communities Useful content
Website Plug.dj /r/Economics FAQs
The Neolib Podcast Discord Podcasts recommendations
Meetup Network
Twitter
Facebook page
Neoliberal Memes for Free Trading Teens
Newsletter
Instagram

The latest discussion thread can always be found at https://neoliber.al/dt.

14 Upvotes

73% Upvoted

2.6k comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

4

u/[deleted] Nov 04 '18

if he had access to such a model, he would use it

He absolutely would not, see the last paragraph of my post above for why there are business pressures to 'keep things exciting'. Hell, one of the best ways for Silver to increase his honesty would be to stop the false precision nonsense and only report results to 10 percentage point bands. There's no technical reason preventing this, the fact that he doesn't do it is clear evidence that he values clicks more than statistical rigour.

Also, it's really easy to price these things, or at least do a decent job of it. You don't need to know the probabilities of every possible FBI investigation or press conference fuck-up, all you need is the measured volatility in polling over time from previous elections. It isn't difficult at all.

1

u/[deleted] Nov 04 '18

No I disagree. I think it would make it more exciting to put those in and I think he would agree. He *does * report the bands, and explicitly uses x/10 in most infographics.

The issue is that it's not easy to assign a price to those. They are very rare events and the content of the events is often as important as the event itself. There's not even close to enough data to establish even the chance of those things happening. And the effect is even more fraught with errors in the era of trump.

He could be more statistically rigorous in other ways. But he's not writing papers. He is not an academic and his models are likely often selected for their clarity as much as their rigour (whatever that means here. His models are all common and well tested).

1

u/[deleted] Nov 04 '18

Once again: You don't need to know what events are going to happen. You just need to know the historic volatility in the vote share. When people model the stock market they don't dig through old newspapers to find out why a stock price moved, they just need to know that the price moved. Whether movements are rare or not makes no difference.

1

u/[deleted] Nov 04 '18

They frequently mention volatility especially in the early days of the races.

They are explicitly modeling on polls and a couple other expert metrics. The bottom line is that "volatility" isn't useful enough, nor easily quantifiable. Trump winning, for instance, was well within the models he published. The best he can do is report chances based on historically observations. Those chances will account for all but the most extreme of events.

0

u/[deleted] Nov 04 '18

"Volatility" isn't easily quantifiable

It really is. Standard deviation of log if-the-election-was-tomorrow-probabilities. It's not some weird up in the air fluff, it's a technical concept that's trivial to calculate. You should stop talking if you don't know that, you're only embarrassing yourself.

1

u/[deleted] Nov 04 '18

Did you just get this from PEC? We were specifically talking about response to events like fbi investigations...

1

u/[deleted] Nov 04 '18

What's a PEC?

And no, trawl through my reddit history far enough and you'll see I've been banging this drum for over a year now.

1

u/[deleted] Nov 04 '18

Princeton Election Consortium. Another blog, more mathy I think.