Alex Trembath at the Breakthrough Institute:
It’s election season, which means a return to the quadrennial tradition of yelling at Nate Silver on the Internet. While I think most people at this point have made their peace with his probabilistic forecasts, many progressives, demonstrably confused by basic statistics, regularly accuse Silver of deliberately underestimating Democrats’ electoral fortunes. And it occurred to me that their confusion mirrors a similar mistake progressives make in evaluating climate impacts. In each case, many observers fail to understand the ways in which relatively modest changes in statistical averages are associated with larger relative shifts in the tails of the probability distribution. The funny thing is, the misunderstanding runs in opposite directions in the case of climate versus the case of election forecasting.
Start with the politics. Silver has been publishing his election forecasting model for the better part of twenty years, over five different presidential races and thousands of Congressional races. Progressives with less training in statistics have had that entire time to learn the basics of probabilistic forecasting. And many of them have steadfastly refused to do so.
More here.
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