Top all-time · #25917
VOTAMATIC
Personal blog · votamatic.orgpoliticsdata
VOTAMATIC is a personal blog at votamatic.org about politics and data. Since 2012, 3 different Hacker News readers have linked it 8 times. The last post was in 2018, but the archive is still widely read.
Too few sampled comments (2) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link Drew Linzer's VOTAMATIC site on 2012 election forecasting, which predicted the electoral college, and the open-source Stan model and paper behind poll aggregation.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 2 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Polling Analysis and Election Forecasting
Most-linked posts?
- /2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2012-11-09
What Hacker News says?
The accuracy of Nate and other quantitative modelers' forecasts depends on the quality and accuracy of the polls they use. Drew Linzer of votamatic.org has written some really good pieces the past few days examining poll accuracy and the potential for "systemic polling failure": http://votamatic.org/can-we-trust-the-polls/ http://votamatic.org/another-look-at-survey-bias/ http://votamatic.org/pollsters-may-be-herdin…
Comment linking /pollsters-may-be-herding/
on “Nate Silver Is a One-Man Traffic Machine for the Times”>When their accuracy is touted it is usually based on the prediction the day before the election. That's not true in Nate's case at least. One of his biggest wins was debunking some of the BS "narratives" that pundits tried to spring during the election long before election day, the one about "Romney's momentum" in the final weeks of the election being the most memorable one. Linzer also did a postmortem where he lo…
Comment linking /evaluating-the-forecasting-model/
on “Nate Silver Went Against the Grain for Some at The Times”Which mailing list? There seem to be several on this topic. Also, you're probably right, there are at least three other prominent electoral college forecasters who write well, were as accurate as Nate, and who could possibly be contracted to provide the same analysis and commentary: Andrew Tannenbaum [1], Drew Linzer [2], and Sam Wang [3]. Unlike Nate, forecasting is not their primary career, but it's clearly a labo…
Comment linking /
on “Nate Silver Went Against the Grain for Some at The Times”Actually the most accurate 2012 election pundit was Drew Linzer ( http://votamatic.org/ ). Provided Florida goes Obama's way, he correctly predicted the electoral college - Obama 332, Romney 206.
Comment linking /
on “Was Nate Silver the Most Accurate 2012 Election Pundit?”I had some trouble finding the code[1] and the paper[2]. The Stan code itself is [3] I think this is quite a strong model - if I was looking to work on it I'd like to see it incorporate some economic data (and probably previous election poll trends) as a way of attempting to improve the early-election-cycle forecasts. [1] https://github.com/pkremp/polls [2] http://votamatic.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/Linzer-JASA…
Comment linking /wp-content/uploads/2013/07/Linzer-JASA13.pdf
on “The Poll Aggregators of the Future Are Reproducible and Open Source”>Scientists, statisticians, economists, and engineers shouldn't be worshiped as sources of incontrovertible truth - they're just humans trying to do the best objective, accurate job that they can! True, but they're a big step in the direction of progressively less wrong [1] from the traditional alternative punditry and 'gut' analysis [2]. If I were a movie producer I'd buy the rights to Moneyball 2 , script it about…
Comment linking /
on “Statistics, probability, and Nate Silver”