by David Strom, Hot Air:
Nate Silver, love him or hate him, is a numbers geek.
We all know him because he rose to prominence as an elections guy, but his passion is numbers. Statistics make him happy. Gambling is his passion.
The odds matter to him because he makes his living calculating them and betting real money based on those odds.
TRUTH LIVES on at https://sgtreport.tv/
🐑🐑🐑🐑🐑🐑🐑🐑https://t.co/pQVIMDjs7L
— Nate Silver (@NateSilver538) November 1, 2024
It’s much easier to call the odds on sports or cards than elections for a lot of reasons. The data you are dealing with are real, for one thing, and there is lots more of it than elections, which occur relatively rarely.
Most of the “election” data we think of comes not from results but from the numerous polls put out. However, polls are only quasi-data, not real statistics you can use with any certainty. Polls are based on a magical combination of actual data collected in non-random ways, testing questions that may or may not skew the results, and then mashed through a black box formula that tries to turn this rather dirty nonrandom “data” into something that more closely resembles the real world.
That doesn’t make polls USELESS. If they were, campaigns wouldn’t waste resources on them. It just means they aren’t what we are told they are.
