… Since the election was called, there were 16 polls that published two-party preferred results ahead of Saturday’s vote. Every single one of them predicted the LNP winning 48% or 49% of the two-party preferred vote, with Labor winning 51% or 52%. These polls were central to the public’s perception […] Read more »
Is More Knowledge Making Us Less Reasonable?
… “Calling Bullshit: Data Reasoning in a Digital World,” designed and co-taught by University of Washington professors Jevin West and Carl Bergstrom, begins with a premise so obvious we barely lend it the attention it deserves: “Our world is saturated with bullshit.” And so, every week for 12 weeks, the […] Read more »
Statisticians’ Call To Arms: Reject Significance And Embrace Uncertainty!
… Scientists and statisticians are putting forth a bold idea: Ban the very concept of “statistical significance.” We hear that phrase all the time in relation to scientific studies. Critics, who are numerous, say that declaring a result to be statistically significant or not essentially forces complicated questions to be […] Read more »
What Nate Silver’s learned about forecasting elections
This close to an election, who do I want to hear from? Nate Silver, of course. I sat down with the FiveThirtyEight founder and math wizard to talk about how he builds his forecasting models, what they’re saying about 2018, how big the Democrats’ structural disadvantage in the House and […] Read more »
How the polls could have caught ‘surprise’ victories like Trump’s
Many pollsters have been asked to explain why they didn’t better predict the 2016 election. 3dfoto/shutterstock.com Fred Wright, North Carolina State University The election of Donald Trump to the U.S. presidency surprised almost everyone, including apparently Trump himself. On the morning after the 2016 election, my teenage son made snarky […] Read more »
Nate Silver will make one firm prediction about the midterms. Most journalists won’t want to hear it.
After the roller-coaster ride of 2016’s election night, have journalists and political junkies learned not to let conventional wisdom substitute for hard knowledge? Nate Silver — the closest thing there is to a celebrity in the arcane field of statistical journalism — is not wildly optimistic about that. CONT. Margaret […] Read more »