In Defense of Nate Silver, Election Pollsters, and Statistical Predictions
In Defense of Nate Silver, Election Pollsters, and Statistical Predictions
Nate Silver analyzes poll data on the influential FiveThiryEight blog at the New York Times. He crunches polls and other data in an electoral statistical model, and he claims that his work is guided by math, not left or right politics. Yet he’s become a whipping boy as election day approaches. His crime? Publishing the results of statistical models that predict President Obama has a 73.6 percent chance of defeating the Republican challenger, Mitt Romney.
The Pride and Prejudice of Pundits“If there’s one thing we know, it’s that even experts with fancy computer models are terrible at predicting human behavior.” So said David Brooks in his recent New York Times column, sharing examples of stock market predictions by corporate financial officers. He has certain points I agree with; for example, CFOs are not very good at predictions.
And yes, there’s no point in checking individual polls every few hours. But experts with fancy computer models are good at predicting many thing in the aggregate. This includes the results of elections, which are not about predicting a single person’s behavior (yes, great variance there) but lend themselves well to statistical analysis (the same methods by which we predicted the hurricane coming).
While pollsters can’t project, statistical models can, and do.
This isn’t wizardry, this is the sound science of complex systems. Uncertainty is an integral part of it. But that uncertainty shouldn’t suggest that we don’t know anything, that we’re completely in the dark, that everything’s a toss-up.