[verylittlemeat]

You're being downvoted but you're right.

I'm starting to believe that sites like 538 feed off of the general public not understanding that a 20% chance to win is 1 in 5. Endless ink has been spilled about how the public does not understand statistics but very little effort has been made to communicate effectively.

The whole thing seems like a navelgazing sideshow where the pollsters want to have it both ways. They want to claim their predictions are infallible but then when the public says they failed they want to backpedal with holier than thou "well, actually..." excuses.

[aw1621107]

> Endless ink has been spilled about how the public does not understand statistics but very little effort has been made to communicate effectively.

How, then, should statistics be appropriately communicated?

> They want to claim their predictions are infallible but then when the public says they failed they want to backpedal with holier than thou "well, actually..." excuses.

Do pollsters generally try to claim their numbers are infallible? If anything, the fact that margins of error are included in the results would seem to imply the opposite.

[verylittlemeat]

I don't buy that they're trying to communicate in good faith. I remember very clearly sources like this* in 2016. There was so much hubris and minimizing of Trump that him having a 30% chance to win was like an irrelevant footnote to Hillary's coming coronation.

*https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Cwc-j6YXUAEIMaM.jpg

The pollsters take too much credit when they're right and deflect too much blame when they're wrong. They need to do a better job of being humble and stop trying to pass themselves off as apolitical number crunchers just giving us the facts.

[kelnos]

I disagree; I think that 538's presentation this time around is specifically geared toward avoiding these sorts of misconceptions. And I think that's really hard to do, so I imagine there will still be quite a few people who don't get it and think that a 20% chance means something that will never happen.

[nl]

538 isn't a pollster. It tries to aggregate polls to make overall predictions.

It does a pretty good job - it gave Trump nearly 30% chance of winning in 2016 and given his small margin that seems reasonable.

Sites like Huffington Post which gave Clinton 99%+ chance are the ones which should be criticized.