Posts by Bart Janssen
Last ←Newer Page 1 2 3 4 5 Older→ First
-
Hard News kept us in touch with New Zealand when we were lost in Texas.
Public Address showed me voices and opinions and ideas I hadn't realised I needed.
PAS gave me a place to speak and listen and be told I was a twatcock at times.
Great Blend showed me the real people who were until then only images in my head.
For all that I thank you very much Russell, I so very much appreciate what you have created here.
-
Have I ever told you that you’re good-looking, smart and generous?
Oh now you say nice things :P.
And no not that I remember so say it again ... needy moi?
-
you appalling shower of middle-class technocrats
aw shucks
-
The problem is and always has been extremists. Extremist muslims, extremist catholics, extreme unionists, extreme republicans, extreme libitarians, extreme atheists …
The difficulty is separating the first part from the second part. It isn’t muslims that are a problem it’s extremists, it isn’t unions that are a problem it’s the extremists.
For a newspaper it is just a bit more complex to make that distinction. So when you get lazy op-ed writers they bundle all muslims up with the extremists. My brother-not-in-law was born in Iran and raised a muslim, he’s a hell of a nice guy whose been contributing to New Zealand for nearly two decades.
It’s just lazy to conflate my brother-not-in-law with some madman who shot a little girl in the head.
Actually it’s not just lazy it’s offensive.
And that’s where the Times needs to get it’s shit together. By publishing this drivel they have offended a huge number of people … not just muslim New Zealanders but the their friends and families and workmates.
The media has responsibilities. Do the editors of the Times really want to push for a society where my brother-not-in-law is harrased because of the actions of some extremists.? Does anyone want to actually live in a country like that?
-
Ok I'll try and explain what I think is going on again with the caveat that I am not a professional statistician and I don't know exactly what the 538 group is doing.
What I think 538 are doing is using a mathmatical model that takes data from polls and from economic data and from other data. Some of that data is hard, meaning average income is a hard number, the number of new cars sold in a county is a hard number, and some is soft meaning a poll result has probability of being wrong. The data is weighted, with some data being assumed to be more important to the outcome. And for numbers with variability (like the poll results) that variability will be carried through into the model.
They then run the model and it spits out a number eg 303 votes for Obama. Then they run the algorithm again instead using the poll result plus 5% and it spits our another number, or the same number.
They run that model thousands or millions of times with slightly different input numbers and slightly different weightings, sometime with more importance placed on economic data sometimes with more importance on one poll versus another. The reason they change the weightyings etc is because some of those weightings are guesses so they try the model with different guesses to see what happens.
Then they add up the number of times they see a given result, in this case 92% of the times they ran the model it said Obama won.
It is a LOT more complicated than that because they have spent ages verifying assumptions in their models.
But inherently they will have been conservative in the sense that data they are haven't tested as much will be weighted differently. Using an analysis like that if they get over 90% of the runs showing an event will occur then out in the real world it is a forgone conclusion. If I were a betting man I would put money on it.
I don't really have a problem with the MSM reporting it as Obama 92% to win because this is seriously complex maths and stats. But you simply can't treat it like a dice roll or coin toss and say they'll be wrong once every 8 or 9 elections. It just isn't that kind of stats.
-
Hard News: The Big 2012 US Election PAS Thread, in reply to Graeme Edgeler,
And the polling are random (at least in theory)
But it isn't. When you poll people they don't answer randomly - that's the point. Each poll is influenced by the type of question asked, who is asking (male female) the economics of the area, the method used (cellphones/landlines/people on the street).
Statisticians know all this and hence don't use the same models as you would use for a dice roll.
One of the problems we have is that polls are reported as if they are simple dice rlls and that is one of the many flaws in the reporting of polls.
The best example is in New Zealand the margin of error that is quoted is complete bollocks.
That's why statisticians are impressed by the 538 group, the work they do to combine non-normal datasets and generate a number that experimentally matches reality is pretty amazing.
I'm not saying that they can't be wrong just that it isn't a simple stats case where if you repeat the dice roll they will be wrong sooner or later. Using their kind of analysis it is entirely plausible that they would (almost) never be wrong.
-
Hard News: The Big 2012 US Election PAS Thread, in reply to Russell Brown,
I mentioned the election in passing; what a mistake. This person went into a vitriolic denunciation of Obama very like the Perigo piece.
I talked to an American tonight who expounded at length on Obama’s failings in a way that didn’t seem to me to bear much relation to observable reality.
I also have a very good friend whos political views I find ... disturbing.
-
Hard News: The Big 2012 US Election PAS Thread, in reply to John Armstrong,
With so much media content focusing on poll results
But it's so much easier to report on a poll than to do a proper analysis of policy and the effects it has on people, by for example, studying the impacts in other countries where similar policies have been put in place and highlighting the differences between the countries that might lead to a different outcome from the policy.
That would require research and skill to communicate ... much easier to say 43% of this survey said red shirts are gay.
-
Hard News: The Big 2012 US Election PAS Thread, in reply to Graeme Edgeler,
Just like me and those dice.
Except that Nate Silverman is not rolling dice. I am not a statistician. But I know enough to know that the statistical analysis of as many polls as he is using is quite different from the analysis you use for a simple dice rolling ecxperiment. What you are describing is true for datasets that have a normal distribution and are independent. Polls are neither of those things hence the statistical methods being used are quite different.
The output from the meta analysis of the polls and economic data will be a range of probabilities depending on the method used to combine the data and the statistical models used. Because of the political importance of what he is publishing he will almost certainly have used the most conservative set of probabilities. My guess is that using different models he will have had much more extreme answers.
But whatever method he used you can't simply take the 92% and treat it like a dice roll. It is not necessarily true that in 8 elections where he predicts a 92% chance he will have a 50% chance of being wrong.
So no I stand by my first statment, it was a forgone conclusion.
-
Hard News: The Big 2012 US Election PAS Thread, in reply to David Hood,
I’ve never seen any actual evidence on this
There are a whole bunch of psych studies that show most people will change their position on any issue if told that the majority believe something different. Particularly if they are told what the majority believe before they are asked their opinion. The studies range from hilarious to scary.