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Polls/Pollsters...WHICH is the GLITCH?

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Hawkeye10

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What occurred wasn’t a failure of the polls. As with Brexit, it was a failure of punditry. Pundits saw Clinton with a 1.9 percent lead in Pennsylvania and assumed she would win. The correct interpretation was that, if Clinton’s actual vote share were just one point lower and Trump’s just one point higher, Trump would be tied or even a bit ahead.

Instead, people gravitated toward unreliable approaches such as reading the tea leaves on early voting or putting faith in Big Blue Walls, while ignoring things like the high number of undecided voters. They selected these data points rather than other possible indicators, such as the significant late break in the generic ballot that could have led them in a different direction. To be blunt, people saw what they wanted to see, and then found the data to support that view.

So don’t blame the polls. They did what they were supposed to do, and in fact, did their job as well as they did in 2012. Instead, blame the analysts and pundits, and their stubborn resistance to considering the possibility of a Trump presidency.
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It Wasn't the Polls That Missed, It Was the Pundits | RealClearPolitics

See the problem I have with this theory is that if it is true that the pollsters watched their product be lied about all across the Corporate Class Propaganda Machine.... AKA the mouthpiece of the elite....... then the pollsters completely ****ed us. On the other hand if the polls were actually wrong then they made a bad protect. So either way we know that the pollsters were wrong, so is there much point in arguing if the polls were wrong?

Why not declare "THE POLLSTERS WERE WRONG....THAT'S WHY NO ONE KNEW THE TRUTH ABOUT THIS RACE"?

And leave it at that till the historians get to it?







discuss
 
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I have been saying this about POLLS since the day I joined DP.

yet some members swear by them over and over again.

It is already a proven fact you can sway the outcome of any POLL in how you word the questions.

That is why you cannot trust any poll results. They are all complete BS.
 
RetiredNSmilin said:
I have been saying this about POLLS since the day I joined DP.

yet some members swear by them over and over again.

It is already a proven fact you can sway the outcome of any POLL in how you word the questions.

That is why you cannot trust any poll results. They are all complete BS.
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IDK about that but I got into a bit of a scrape with Chomski in SEP for saying after the BREXIT and with the asymmetrical nature of this race I was not going to pay attention to the polls till the end, because I did not trust them, in part because I did not trust the pollsters to understand enough about America to know who would vote. His position that their was no historical reason to doubt the polls, so not taking them seriously was a mistake, and he seemed to think that it was an insult as well.

So far I won that argument, I was right, I made the right call to not waste all that time day after day looking at polls hoping to learn anything about what was going on. But that is so far, we still need to settle that argument, but the first chance to do definitively that will not be for months. Thats when we find out who voted how, then we match up what really happened with what the pollsters thought was going to happen.

This thread is a part of the plan for me to win the argument. I think I can establish right now that the pollsters were wrong, and so I was right to not trust them at least, which was a part of my argument. I am trying to use the pollsters own words to win my case, the quote in the OP.
 
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I listened to the last episode of 538 and it was basically an hour of Nate Silver screaming "I WAS RIGHT, MOTHER****ERS!!!"

The problem is that people don't really understand odds or risk. When somebody like Silver calculates the aggregate of the polls and says "There is a 30% percent chance that Trump will win the election," people who don't understand math hear that and interprets it as "Trump will not win the election." However, what it really means is that "Three out of ten times, Trump will win the election." Which makes a lot more sense when you realize that this election was simply one of those three times out of ten.

The things about math is that sometimes even mathematicians don't really seem to be able to wrap their heads around it. Case in point: one member of 538 said, "70% chance that Clinton will win? I think I feel pretty good about that!" and Nate Silver immediately responded, "Uh, I'm going to have to seriously disagree with you there. If I said there was a 30% chance that you would get served a bad cup of coffee, those are odds you could live with. But if I said there was a 30% chance that a meteor was going to hit the earth you would say, 'Holy ****, that number needs to be a lot lower!!'"
 
Cardinal said:
I listened to the last episode of 538 and it was basically an hour of Nate Silver screaming "I WAS RIGHT, MOTHER****ERS!!!"

The problem is that people don't really understand odds or risk. When somebody like Silver calculates the aggregate of the polls and says "There is a 30% percent chance that Trump will win the election," people who don't understand math hear that and interprets it as "Trump will not win the election." However, what it really means is that "Three out of ten times, Trump will win the election." Which makes a lot more sense when you realize that this election was simply one of those three times out of ten.

The things about math is that sometimes even mathematicians don't really seem to be able to wrap their heads around it. Case in point: one member of 538 said, "70% chance that Clinton will win? I think I feel pretty good about that!" and Nate Silver immediately responded, "Uh, I'm going to have to seriously disagree with you there. If I said there was a 30% chance that you would get served a bad cup of coffee, those are odds you could live with. But if I said there was a 30% chance that a meteor was going to hit the earth you would say, 'Holy ****, that number needs to be a lot lower!!'"
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We as a society seem to understand two things extremely poorly...risk, and power, which sadly often does us in.

Nate Silver was cocky and often wrong in 2015, but I gotta say this.... he can learn, which is better than a lot of people can manage.
 
Cardinal said:
I listened to the last episode of 538 and it was basically an hour of Nate Silver screaming "I WAS RIGHT, MOTHER****ERS!!!"

The problem is that people don't really understand odds or risk. When somebody like Silver calculates the aggregate of the polls and says "There is a 30% percent chance that Trump will win the election," people who don't understand math hear that and interprets it as "Trump will not win the election." However, what it really means is that "Three out of ten times, Trump will win the election." Which makes a lot more sense when you realize that this election was simply one of those three times out of ten.

The things about math is that sometimes even mathematicians don't really seem to be able to wrap their heads around it. Case in point: one member of 538 said, "70% chance that Clinton will win? I think I feel pretty good about that!" and Nate Silver immediately responded, "Uh, I'm going to have to seriously disagree with you there. If I said there was a 30% chance that you would get served a bad cup of coffee, those are odds you could live with. But if I said there was a 30% chance that a meteor was going to hit the earth you would say, 'Holy ****, that number needs to be a lot lower!!'"
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What Silver does is not much different than a bookie. Bookies will calculate the odds of, say, the Panthers winning a football game, and base their odds and lines off of that.

So if some gambling guy goes on TV and says the Panthers have a 30% chance of beating the Cardinals on Sunday, that doesn't mean "the Cardinals are definitely going to win." It means "the Cardinals are probably going to win, but might not, dependent on numerous variables beyond anyone's control."
 
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