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The Art of Elections Forecasting
ideonexus writes "Years ago Nate Silver of FiveThirtyEight.com, a blog seeking to educate the public about elections forecasting, established his model as one of the most accurate in existence, rising from a fairly unknown statistician working in baseball to one of the most respected names in election forecasting. In this article he describes all the factors that go into his predictions. A fascinating overview of the process of modeling a chaotic system."
I hope that includes "don't vote according to forecasts". I mean, it'd be nice if more people voted for the candidate they actually want instead of the one they think will win.
If God forks the Universe every time you roll a die, he'd better have a damned good memory.
Ever since the Republican members of the supreme court overturned our campaign finance laws, elections have become an epic bribe-fest where money almost always wins.
You tell me which side is outspending the other 10-1 and I'll tell you who is most likely to win the election.
Let's just save ourselves alot of time and aggravation, and ask the America's 10 most bigoted and bribe-happy billionaires who they would like to win.
The term chaotic has a variety of different meanings, but this seems to be closer to what one would call a noisy system than a chaotic system.
Andrew Tanenbaum (of Minix fame) does a good job of tracking state-by-state polling results and what they predict about the Electorial College outcome at http://electoral-vote.com/
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
turn off the TVA
What!! But then who would power my TV?
Exit polls showed that 88% of Wisconsin voters had already made up their mind before the Democrats had put forward a candidate (in May).
The Governor and friendly PACs had been advertising since before January when they knew the recall was coming.
88% of voters made their call when the spending was completely one-sided. Only after the Democratic primary put forth a candidate did they have targeted supportive advertising.
Perhaps, instead of educating people to understand forecasts, we should be interested in educating people so they can make well informed and educated choices. The great majority of people have little or no education (And I do not mean literacy here). They are unable to analyse, research or investigate in a critical way. They become emotional about things are not possibly capable of understanding and allow those emotions to tell them to whom they should be giving a vote. En educated person, reads between the lines and can see why a candidate is making some promises and can tell which promises will not be fulfilled (Like closing the concentration camp in Guantanamo bay). The only problem, is that politicians that have been elected so far are against the idea of educating people as this will destroy the system as exist today and they will have to get real jobs.
Yes, he is. But he is still the best republican president we have had in a century.
I don't think it was lies with Obama, I think it was something i consider worse: naivete. Obama came in promising everything to everyone and their mother, because that's what populists do. But when he got into office he realized that he couldn't actually do all that he set out to do, and that Bush's policies in many cases were the best choice of a series of bad options. Case in point: he promised on the campaign trail to close Guantanamo Bay prison, and when he came into office he wrote an Executive Order closing it. It hasn't happened. Turns out that those guys over there really were terrorists captured on the battlefield, and that having them in an isolated location with 3 square and free time was a whole lot better than trying them stateside and keeping them in a SuperMax, especially when no state wanted them in their prisons.
My biggest problem is not that Obama is a liar, I really don't think he is. I just think he's a moron who sounds intelligent and is a good speaker. He believes in symbols and high ideals that sound great in a speech, like having no lobbyists in his administration, or trying Khalid Shiek Mohammad in New York, getting justice where the crime was committed. Yet when he tries to implement those ideals and symbols, he always seems surprised by the fact that his lofty ideals and symbolism doesn't work in reality, like the cost of the massive security required to host a civilian trial of KSM in New York, the massive protests and unrest, and potential plots to try and free or martyr KSM would come with that, or the fact despite how people hate lobbyists, they're also the best way to communicate to the interests of large segments of the population. Just about everything associated iwth Obama can be viewed in this context.
The problem is, you can't claim he is naive either, he is a constitutional scholar, how could he not have known how little the president can accomplish on his own?
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?
I miss-read the title, thought it was something about Horowitz and Hill being relevant well into the future
horror vacui
Historically, people have been willing to cross the aisle on important policies, especially if you meet them halfway. Obama's health care proposal, cap and trade, and the DREAM act (i.e. citizenship through military service) were all Republican ideas that they would have loved to support as recently as 2006. No one could have predicted the scorched earth tactic they'd employ to bring the president down.
Obama's greatest fault was how long it took him to realize what was going on. Most people had realized all the Republican "negotiations" were a stalling tactic by the summer of '09, the fall at the latest. Obama didn't seem to get it until after the 2010 elections.
Lieberman is no democrat. He sabotaged the public option for the republicans by joining the threatened filibuster. Thus no majority. Thus your point is moot, coward.