Edit: had no idea “poll” was such a four letter word, especially when talking about them in the abstract. Anyone want to chime in on the downvotes? Is it just “all polls are bad” or is it Nate Silver? Honestly had no idea talking about poll weighting would be so unpopular.
Since there’s always a lot of interest in the validity of polls, I found this to be interesting. It’s Nate Silver’s explanation of how they do weighting of polls when aggregating based on the pollsters track record. He makes it clear that the bias is often a result of the methodology and not necessarily a “thumb on the scale” and how the pollster executes a poll can introduce bias - and how they account for that.
Many folks have issues with Nate, but he’s at least very transparent in how they account for bias based on previous performance, not just the poll source. So while you may disagree with his decisions, you can at least look at his numbers and know how they got there.
Maybe because the article is behind a paywall?
I mean, you can just close the pop up and still read the full article? Or do you see something different?
Hmm… I could have sworn that the first time I followed the link it went to this page which ends after a few paragraphs with a subscription link. But the page I get now is fine.
(Edit: I see now that I got to that page from a link in your comments, and mistook that tab for the one I’d opened from the main link.)
That was the link I gave in the comments about their current analysis based on aggregated polling. If you’re only getting a few paragraphs, I’m guessing you’re using reader view? (I default to it too) Unfortunately a bunch of news-type websites now essentially break reader view and only show a snippet. If you view outside reader, you should be able to see the polling analysis.
I was wondering that too. Do we hate Nate silver now? Dude always seemed pretty respected
I was actually excited to share as I hadn’t seen this explained as well before. <shrugs> Live and learn I guess.