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Comment by FandangoRanger | Hacker News Reader

It's impossible to believe any forecast, nobody fessed up after 2016 nor did they explain why their models are wrong or attempt to update them. You're less than 24 hours away from the permanent death of the political polling and forecasting industry in the USA.

Nate's already coping really hard on Twitter.

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I don't believe this is accurate. NYT[0], HuffPo[1], Princeton Election Consortium[2], 538[3,4], and others did analyze their model's failures and update their models and methodologies in response.

0: http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/16/upshot/presidential-foreca...

1: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/pollster-forecast-donald...

2: http://election.princeton.edu/2016/11/09/aftermath/

3: https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/why-fivethirtyeight-gav...

4: https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/how-i-acted-like-a-pund...

Can you elaborate a bit on what you mean by, "nobody fessed up after 2016"?

From my understanding there wasn't the "big miss" that got called out in media, and to the extent that the rust belt/upper midwest had state level polling variance, it was determined to be due to the lack of accounting for education as part of polling.

I guess if it doesn't rain and the weatherperson says it should have rained, do we give up on even trying?

That's not true, there have been countless articles about why polling went wrong last time.

Also, polling wasn't that wrong. Due to sampling bias, several swing states were off by as much as 5-6 percentage points. But national polling bad Hillary winning by something like 4% in the popular vote.

Instead, she won the popular vote by 3%.

> several swing states were off by as much as 5-6 percentage points

Most state polls have margins of error ranging from 3 to 6 points. A 3-point MoE state poll is a really expensive poll.

A properly conducted poll with 1000 respondents has a margin of error of 3.2%. There have been quite a few of these in battleground states this cycle.

Believing that occurrence of an event with a forecasted 30% chance (or 2% chance) of occurring invalidates a model is so fundamentally a misunderstanding of the topic.

My DM: "You're going to try to hit this guy with your bare hands, even though you have +0 strength?"

Me: "Does a 17 hit?"

My DM: "His armor class was 16. It was supposed to be impossible for you to hit him with a d20. I have just witnessed the permanent death of the dungeon mastering industry in Faerûn. I will now cope on Twitter, goodbye."

Well pre-2016 there was the assumption that the American electorate basically is capable of self-governing. This assumption has been invalidated so while the polling industry hasn’t gone away it’s now more like the sports forecasting industry, where people are speculating on an essentially theatrical performance, than something substantively driving good governance.

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