“To put it another way, the easy part of forecasting is fitting a model and the hard part is knowing when the best fit on past data will yield a worse forecast on unknown data,” Silver tweeted. How likely, especially considering all that’s going on right now, are such leads to remain, and how do we think about the impact of things that are fundamentally difficult to anticipate and may not be in the data we look back on in order to project forward? But while this may make it seem as though the difference isn’t that great - they both round to Biden having a nine-out-of-ten shot - the distance they traveled to get there illuminates the defining question of a race in which one candidate has had a sizable, steady lead virtually the whole time. Today the two have gotten significantly closer: FiveThirtyEight has an 87 percent chance of a Biden win, and The Economist has 91 percent. When FiveThirtyEight first published its forecast for the 2020 race, it put Biden’s chances to win at 71 percent, while The Economist set them at 87 percent. Silver, who would later release a model that was far less certain of an eventual Joe Biden victory, was not impressed with the fact that The Economist’s model, published for the first time by this team in 2020, had a good record of predicting elections that had already happened. Elliott Morris and his colleagues as an example of the failures of the modern “data-science curriculum.” Silver had taken issue with Morris’s promotion of The Economist’s 2020 election model’s “record” on how it had worked in forecasting previous U.S. Sometimes it’s a subtweet: “The blindingly obvious lesson of 2016 for election modelers is ‘it’s super easy to build an overconfident model, so think carefully about sources of uncertainty’ but sometimes people are endlessly creative in finding ways to avoid the obvious lessons.”īut for much of the summer and early fall, it was quite direct, to the point of Nate Silver, the forecasting supremo and FiveThirtyEight editor-in-chief, using the work of The Economist’s 24-year-old data journalist G. Photo-Illustration: Megan Paetzhold Photos: Getty Images
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