It's 2016 all over again: resurfacing my post from 2016
This election forecasting business, again
In the aftermath of Hillary's shocking defeat in the 2016 U.S. presidential election, I wrote a blog post titled "This election forecasting business."
In the aftermath of last night's news, I point you back to my 2016 blog post (link), as it is as relevant as ever. Most election forecasters, including the pioneer Nate Silver, had predicted that the election would be extremely close, like a coin flip.
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This is the tldr; from my old post:
tl;dr Citizens shouldn't care about this election forecasting business. It's there for the benefit of the politicians. The forecasters have been over-selling these predictive modeling technologies. This is especially true if they are merely aggregating polls. If you can't validate the accuracy of such models, how much time/money are you willing to spend on them? The prediction markets people are quiet but they too have no clothes. Journalists should spend less time writing code, and get on the road and talk to real voters.
