Nate Silver And The Smugness Of The Media Narrative

[AB Editor]

It seems that Donald Trump is the price you pay for complacency - no one (in mainstream media) expected him to get this far. And as soon as other appealing moderates dropped out of the race, he became the obvious choice.

And I guess that's fine, but I'm afraid a little of the blame has to be at laid at the feet of people like me who wrote him off as an impossible candidate.

Here's some reading:

Fictional pundit predicted more correct primary results than Nate Silver did: https://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2016/05/09/our-fictional-pundit-predicted-more-correct-primary-results-than-nate-silver-did/

Here's that fictional pundit: http://www.cafe.com/tag/the-dig/ (it's quite entertaining satire)

And here's a fairly articulate (but angry) argument as to why liberal media and commitment to the status quo gave trump his wings.

On the stupidity of Nate Silver: https://samkriss.wordpress.com/2016/05/08/on-the-stupidity-of-nate-silver/

At least he's not Ted Cruz though? Right?

[jno]

Paul the Octopus did a good job predicting World Cup results in 2010, but it's hard to say how much luck and/or skill were involved

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_the_Octopus

For me, the losers are the Republkican party - all the more so if their man wins. They'll have turned from a united party into a church of anti-everythings so broad that they'll have no political principle any more, just individual opportunism.

[woofgang]

is it just me or is that last link (on the stupidity of nate silver) REALLY hard to read?

[retrocop]

Ed

//And I guess that's fine, but I'm afraid a little of the blame has to be at laid at the feet of people like me who wrote him off as an impossible candidate.//

Don't reproach yourself. The AB self acclaimed political pundit said as much himself! :-)

[AB Editor]

The important thing is we're all wrong - eventually :)

The Sam Kriss one is a bit dense and full of run-on lines, I do like his writing though.

The Reply-All podcast covered all this a few weeks ago, and made a similar octopus-based comparison Jno: https://gimletmedia.com/episode/58-earth-pony/

The Virgil Texas article above does a good job explaining how complacency can come from sanitising something with numbers. We're sure numbers, computers, data, can't lie - but it does, all the time.

Remember kids, never trust anything or anyone predicting the future!

[AB Editor]

Oh, also, they've run the joke on a bit here: http://www.cafe.com/sixthirtyeight/

[ToraToraTora]

Nate Silver has been discredited after the election last May.

[AB Editor]

Yes, but the interesting part is the implications of his (and similar crystal ball gazers) effect on the "narrative", and how that then knocks on to the reality of a Trump candidacy.

[woofgang]

There’s an interesting book written by Terry Pratchett, Ian Stewart and Jack Cohen. Its about how humans use stories and what the effect of stories can be. The example I can remember best is about the Millennium Computer Panic which never happened. They suggest that it didn’t happen because people told themselves a story about what would happen and found it so frightening that they took steps to make sure that it didn’t happen....Their point is that stories about the future can affect how we behave which in turn affects what actually happens.....

[jno]

a friend of mine had the millennium bug in NZ. The world's IT experts were watching NZ to see if this thing was really going to happen. Did she tell them? She did not. She got on the phone to one of her IT people in Hamburg who sorted it out over the line.

I suspect there may have been quite a bit of that, people realising they were in a story and not wanting anyone else to know. Stories are what you tell about other people. So they can cut both ways. Trump's happy making up his own narratives and his fans don't much care which of them are invented on the spot. The Republicans are trapped in a narrative where they're not in control of their own candidate.