News
Welcome to the News community!
Rules:
1. Be civil
Attack the argument, not the person. No racism/sexism/bigotry. Good faith argumentation only. This includes accusing another user of being a bot or paid actor. Trolling is uncivil and is grounds for removal and/or a community ban. Do not respond to rule-breaking content; report it and move on.
2. All posts should contain a source (url) that is as reliable and unbiased as possible and must only contain one link.
Obvious right or left wing sources will be removed at the mods discretion. We have an actively updated blocklist, which you can see here: https://lemmy.world/post/2246130 if you feel like any website is missing, contact the mods. Supporting links can be added in comments or posted seperately but not to the post body.
3. No bots, spam or self-promotion.
Only approved bots, which follow the guidelines for bots set by the instance, are allowed.
4. Post titles should be the same as the article used as source.
Posts which titles don’t match the source won’t be removed, but the autoMod will notify you, and if your title misrepresents the original article, the post will be deleted. If the site changed their headline, the bot might still contact you, just ignore it, we won’t delete your post.
5. Only recent news is allowed.
Posts must be news from the most recent 30 days.
6. All posts must be news articles.
No opinion pieces, Listicles, editorials or celebrity gossip is allowed. All posts will be judged on a case-by-case basis.
7. No duplicate posts.
If a source you used was already posted by someone else, the autoMod will leave a message. Please remove your post if the autoMod is correct. If the post that matches your post is very old, we refer you to rule 5.
8. Misinformation is prohibited.
Misinformation / propaganda is strictly prohibited. Any comment or post containing or linking to misinformation will be removed. If you feel that your post has been removed in error, credible sources must be provided.
9. No link shorteners.
The auto mod will contact you if a link shortener is detected, please delete your post if they are right.
10. Don't copy entire article in your post body
For copyright reasons, you are not allowed to copy an entire article into your post body. This is an instance wide rule, that is strictly enforced in this community.
view the rest of the comments
How can you falsify the claim "Clinton has a higher chance of winning"?
Alternately:
Silver said "Clinton has a higher chance of winning in 2016" whereas Michael Moore said "Trump has a higher chance of winning in 2016".
In hindsight, is one of these claims more valid than the other? Because if two contradictory claims are equally valid, then they are both meaningless.
You can't really falsify the claim “Clinton has a higher chance of winning”, at least the way Nate Silver models it. His model is based upon statistics, and he basically runs a bunch of simulations of the election. In more of these simulations, Clinton won, hence his claim. But we had exactly one actual election, and in the election, Trump won. Perhaps his model is just wrong, or perhaps the outcome matched one of the simulations in his model where Trump won. If we could somehow run the election hundreds of times (or observe what happened in hundreds of parallel universes) then maybe we could see if his model matched the outcome of a statistically significant number of election results. But nevertheless, Nate Silver had a model and statistics to back up his claim.
As for Michael Moore, I'm not sure exactly how he came up with his prediction, but I get the impression it was mostly a gut feeling based upon his observations of what was happening. Nevertheless, Michael Moore still could back up his statement by articulating why he was claiming that and the observations he had made.
Though one crucial difference is still the whole prediction thing. Michael Moore actually made a prediction of a Trump win. Whereas Nate Silver just stated that Clinton had a higher chance of winning, and once again that was not a prediction. So you're really comparing two different things here.
Silver claimed that Trump had a 28% chance of winning in 2016.
Suppose I built a model that claimed Trump had a 72% chance of winning in 2016.
Given there is only one 2016 election and Trump won it, is there any reason to believe that Silver's results are better or worse than mine?
Sure, you could present your model and the data it is based upon and everyone could make their judgement.
Ok. But Silver's model is proprietary and the details of its workings have not been presented to the public. So on what basis should we trust it?
I guess it's up to you if want to trust it or not. He doesn't share all the details, but he (at least in the past) shared enough details on his blog that I felt pretty good that he knew what he was talking about it.
I will point out that he was one of the very few aggregators in 2016 that was saying "hey look, Trump has a very real chance of winning this". Which is why I find it so amusing when people say he got it wrong in 2016 when in actuality he was one of the few that was right. After 2008 there were a bunch of copycats out there trying to do similar things as Nate Silver, and many of them were saying things like 99.99% Clinton. If people are going to criticize, that's where I would direct it.
Even if he was the only one saying that, why are we giving him credit for it?
Maybe he was the first, but going forward anyone can follow his example and say things like, "Harris has a very real chance of winning. So does Trump. Also, Cruz and Allred both have very real chances of winning. So do Elizabeth Warren and her opponent, John Deaton".
Silver showed that if you hedge by replacing a testable prediction with a tautology, then you can avoid criticism regardless of the result. I don't think that is useful political analysis.