This is a public service post of sorts, meant to collect some reasons why getting rid of election forecasts is a non-starter in one place.
First to set context: what are the reasons people argue we should give them up? This is far from an exhaustive list (and some of these reasons overlap) but a few that I’ve heard over the last week are:
• If the polls are right, we don’t need forecasters. If polls are wrong, we don’t need forecasters.
• Forecasts are hard to evaluate, therefore subject to influences of the forecaster’s goals, e.g. to not appear too certain that they can be blamed. Hence we can’t trust them as unbiased aggregations of evidence.
• Forecasters may have implicit knowledge from experience, such as a sense of approximately what the odds should be, but it’s hard to transparently and systematically incorporate that knowledge. …
• There’s too much at stake to take chances on forecasts that may be wrong but influence behavior.I don’t think these questions are unreasonable. But it’s worth considering the implications of a suggestion that forecasts have no clear value, or even do more harm than good, since I suspect some people may jump to this conclusion without recognizing the subtext it entails. Here are some things I think of when I hear people questioning the value of election forecasts: CONT.
Jessica Hullman (Northwestern), Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science
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