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Comment by ianai | Hacker News Reader

You just criticized somebody for specialising in what they're talking about. Next you're going to tell me Hawking's biased about physics theories because he knows them and that's somehow a bad thing.

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No, but if Hawking tells me that there are two theories, "a" and "b," that compete to explain a given phenomenon, and "a" is right and "b" is wrong, and "a" is a theory that Hawking himself came up with, then I'll note that.

Even if, as in this case, I think that despite the bias, Silver is right.

I think this can lead to the Wikipedia fallacy. If you reduce the credibility of information when you can perceive a means whereby the information could be compromised, you end up placing undue weight upon non-transparent information sources.

People don't trust Wikipedia because anyone could have written it yet place more trust in books that may just have a veneer of authenticity.

And the fix for either is peer review. Obviously, a forefront-expert in a given field may not have the luxury of peers, making peer review more difficult, but as sub-peers attempt to dissect the work, they learn, and the more that attempt to dissect, the more sub-peers are elevated to an extent that they can either debunk or give approval.

Isn't that just a perception problem? If a source isn't transparent about their methods and biases then the standard should be even higher for demonstrating truth because we have no choice but to assume the worst forms of bias.

Let's keep it simple; it wasn't Silver and 538 who did the piece on USC/Dornsife and why it was an outlier, it was Nate Cohn and the NYT. I think Silver and his org know more than 95% of the others about polling, but you'd think that this would be an obvious one for them to break since it is ostensibly their specialty.

Not that there's anything wrong with getting scooped. But it is an indication that his nose is too far in the meta-model and not in the real world. That's a class of mistake that can lead you to drive off a cliff.

> but you'd think that this would be an obvious one for them to break since it is ostensibly their specialty.

Silver's already touched on this poll and its unusual methodology:

http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/election-update-leave-th...

He didn't get scooped; explaining the technical details isn't his ostensible specialty, adjusting for them is.

Good point. Although I think Cohn's speciality is more valuable to me here. I came away from the Silver piece when I first read it with the problem merely being a fixed population of voters; the Cohn piece was much more illuminating since it showed the specifics of how that pre-condition has been affecting all kinds of aggregation methods. So Silver was the early warning, but Cohn had the nitty-gritty.

I'm just used to Silver providing that--they seem spread pretty thin. As you point out, you have to specialize in something, though...

And so what if he were to be scooped? No ones all knowing.

Cohn is the Times's data journalist geek. He's, frankly, just as good at this stuff as Silver is. They seem to like each other, even.

It's a good article. And yeah, 538 got scooped on this one. But it's not because they weren't paying attention, they just had other stories to write.

Well technically yeah. The old saying goes "an old theory isn't thrown over by convincing people, but because their proponents die of old age" for a reason.

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