HOLY SHIT. So the person who is right (Nate) is not really right because the person who is wrong (U of CO) is wrong? Cuz they both use math.

This deserves a big fat LOLWUT?

The truth is that any statistician can build a model. They do it all the time. They make assumptions about the electorate, assign weights to polls and economic indicators, etc., and then they wait for the sausage to come out.

Numbers come out Jonah, not sausages.

“and then they wait for the sausage to come out.”

I think that’s just wishful thinking on Jonah’s part.

He like-em sausage . . .

Oh, and Jonah . . .

why didn’t I hear this thoughtful critique of Nate Silver from you back in 2010, when he was predicting that the TeaTards would retake the House?

Wait – I think I just answered my own question.

Joe Scarborough’s gonna have to kiss Nate’s feet. These wingnuts shouldn’t be able to whisper Silver’s name without getting slapped. Nevada is blue. Florida is called and ayup, he’s run the table. Nate Silver is the only thing that kept me from having a nervous breakdown earlier tonight. I believed and I was rewarded….thank God.

Anyone know what the toe sucker’s excuse is for being so wildly wrong? I refuse to watch Fox News.w

Well, there is that crazy, little witchy thing called math, with or without sausages.

And then there’s….

Skittles!

.

I’m sure it will be Sandy’s fault.

And we have ….
TEH REVENGE OF SEAMUS!!!

Ah yes….and throw in Christy for good measure. Ann’s gonna hire a Jersey guy to ‘have a talk’ with ol’ Chris. She really looked pissed.

Once more, with feeling: Jonah Goldberg, affirmative action college admission.

Nate Silver should just retire after this, although the people who should be retiring are fucknaughts like Pantload who contribute a negative weighting to the discourse.

Thus spoke Zero.

Didn’t she look pissed? Didn’t she? Oh, didn’t she???

Anybody unsure what we’re talking about, go get the video clip at Fox or MSNBC and watch her come on stage for the concession speech.

I am still cracking up over that vicious bitch’s malicious venomous death-ray eyes spiking out at all us people. Gaaawwwd it feels good.

I’ll bet she believed right up to the last minute, and was extra-pissed Mitt decided to give up, no recounts, no lawsuits, nothing.

Shorter Jonah:

Numbers? So what, Republican used numbers too, and they all came out wrong. So it can’t be the numbers. There must be some other factor, but I can’t put my finger on it. Sausages, maybe.

Mittens, you SAID you’d get me a new house….

Data goes in. Predictions come out. You can’t explain it.

+1

What interests me is the way people talk about math . . .

Liar.

Shorter Jonah the Psephologist:

Fucking models, how do they work?

My teevee’s color balance module must be shot cuz that crowd sure looked white….

It is what they called a target-rich environment back in Desert Storm. Rove, Morris, Kristol, Will, Noonan, the list goes on and on. Work enough for a dozen Tboggs.

One of my more relaxed-morals friends had a pile of mail-in ballots, from former housemates and such. He said he wanted to ‘send ‘em in, just to make sure…’ I told him, no, don’t worry, The Prez has got this one, no problem. He conceded, and shredded the ballots.

Higher ground, indeed.

I did hear, faintly, a sound like popcorn, or those ladyfinger firecrackers, last night. The neighborhood was rife with Rmoney/RLyan’ lawn signs. I’ll have to take the baby for a walk around later today, when the sun is high and the air is pleasant, just to see if they’re all gone. Or see a bunch of folks who look like they got force-fed moldy lemons.

Looking at this morning’s map, it’s 50/50.

Man, Jonah Goldberg is just… dumb.

Nate’s “garbage in” isn’t just made up bullshit wishful thinking that will give him some desired outcome. It’s based on real data that he takes pains to see is accurate. Wingtards like Dick Morris and Unskewed Dewd just make up whatever shit they feel like and run it through the sausage grinder. The results speak for themselves but Pantload is too stupid to see it.

“And I’d have won it, too, if not for that meddling storm and that RINO!”

Also, Jonah is the all-purpose GOP friend. Next to him, Katherine Lopez looks slim, Ann Coulter looks beautiful and Bill O’Reilly sounds smart. That’s why they keep him around.

koch brothers and warren blumenfeld spotted paying off bets … tossing Nate Silver’s salad

and some models are simply better for a while and then regress to the mean.

true that … heidi klum is like omffffg

Looks like Silver is the new Gold Standard. Hooray for objective reality!

“The results speak for themselves but Pantload is too stupid to see it.”

Upton Sinclair must have been thinking of Pantload when he said:

“It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his job depends on not understanding it.”

Maybe JG can move to Florida. Both are now irrelevant.

Hey, JG, when comparing your model to reality, if your model blows chunks, and someone else’s model fits reality better, you don’t get to criticize the other guy’s model. You fix your own first, because guess what? Reality can’t be wrong; it just IS.

Once again, Jonah uses a whole lot of words to say basically nothing.

Jonah’s just pissed that when he “modeled” his Halloween candy purchases, he would be left with loads of Snickers’ and Butterfingers’. Instead, at the end of the night the kids had left him nothing but bags of Goldfish and those crappy Mary Jane hard taffys.

We don’t need no stinkin’ sausages.

Trying to talk sense to a conservative is like trying to get bacon from a calculator.

Once again Doughy Pantload models how his psephological understanding is fulla shit ‘n sausages.

OR

Shorter Doughy:

If I don’t get MY way, I’m gonna whine about how reality is unfair.

The truth is that any statistician can build a model.

Yeah, and just like everything else, some are better than others, right Mr. Jagoff?

Watching wingnut heads explode over the next few days is gonna be epic comedy goodness.

Mmmmmm….Bacon….

unskewed dude is getting shredded in the comments on his “final prediction” post. heh.

http://www.examiner.com/article/mitt-romney-will-win-the-presidency-with-275-electoral-votes

Nate’s “garbage in” isn’t just made up bullshit wishful thinking that will give him some desired outcome. It’s based on real data that he takes pains to see is accurate.

This is the part they always ignore, isn’t it? And more to the point, real data, painstakingly verified, that was derived from asking people who they were going to vote for. Nate and Sam Wang may be geniuses and stuff, but it’s no mystery why they’re able to get the results they do.

Plus yeah, like Fudgie has any idea what “regress to the mean” means.

Christie, like the honey badger, does not care; he gives not a shit.

He knows that there’s no way he’d get nominated for president on the Republican ticket in 2016, not with the crazies firmly cemented in control at the top. He, however, has a much better chance of getting re-elected as governor in 2014 by playing the part of the sort of old-fashioned Sane Republican that used to be common in the Northeast.

Joan has a nice write up.

http://www.salon.com/2012/11/07/the_obama_mandate/

The saying used to be “Righties want the media to be conservative, libs just want it to be accurate”

Seems like now you could just substitute polls for media.

And also: tossing Nate Silver’s salad

Epic.

I follow baseball and I’m one of those nerds from my Mom’s basement (“Mom, MOM! I’m done with my segment!”), so I’ve been familiar with Mr. Silver since long before 2008. I’m not convinced that Nate’s model is the best or the most comprehensive or robust. His PECOTA model was flawed, but it’s been improved and it was groundbreaking at the time.

And his electoral model is shit tons more accurate than just going by a gut feeling. Political reporting right now is like baseball reporting in 1984. It’s all grit and hustle and heart and narrative. The nerds pouring over reams of spreadsheets and churning out the models and are slowing gaining acceptance despite encountering waves of hostile fire from entrenched blowhards that spout opinion with no evidence.

Looks like Silver is the new Gold Standard.

We will never forget the immortal words of William Jennings Pantload: “You shall not crucify the GOP on a cross of Silver!”

Nate was even more accurate than people give him credit for. His estimate of 90% chance of 313 EV was based on a composite monte carlo result. If you look at his graph, you see that the biggest likelihood is a 332-206 split at 20% followed by a 303 – 235 split at 17%. The latter scenario is if Romney takes Florida.

So, even though he was forced to call Florida a tie based on his state poll weightings, his own Monte-Carlo simulation caught on to the fact that FL was more likely (about 3% more likely) to go Obama than Romney.

I am still cracking up over that vicious bitch’s malicious venomous death-ray eyes spiking out at all us people.

Hear dat, I suspect that the folks at the Onion may have had that in mind when they crafted this cheery little video piece, After Obama Victory, shrieking White-Hot Sphere Of Pure Rage Early GOP Front-Runner For 2016.

Going 50 for 50 is a pretty good season no matter what sport you play

Are you kidding me? He only improved 2 percentage points from 2008!

As the computer programmers like to say, garbage in, garbage out.

What a coincidence. Those of us familiar with Jonah’s upbringing like to say the same thing.

Who cares about Nate Silver and his numbers? What’s so hot about mathematics? I mean, the climate isn’t changing and evolution is just a theory. So there.

Damn Math Checkers.

Now, I have no idea whether Silver’s model is the psephological Rosetta Stone some hope — or fear — it to be. And no one else does either.

I call it “arithmetic”.

I’m not saying Silver’s just lucky or shoveling garbage. He’s a serious numbers guy. But so are the folks at the University of Colorado’s political-science department, whose own model is based on economic indicators.

They are making assumptions and that means it is not “arithmetic”.

To listen to many of Silver’s defenders, questioning his methodology is akin to rejecting evolution or the laws of thermodynamics, as if only his model is sanctified by the god Reason.

No, questioning his methodology is to question the consistency of “arithmetic”.
Dumbass.

Funny part of Jonah Goldberg’s statement is that Silver’s model is a regression to the mean of a lot of the primary data-gathering polls, adjusted for their long-term house bias.

Here are some more fun numbers. In Rich County UT, 90.8% of folks voted for Romney, but 83 voted for Obama. In Cimmaron County OK, 90.4% voted for Romney but 115 folks voted for Obama. Wouldn’t you like to be a fly on the wall at the general store there today.

Public intellectual

You jest, of course.

He got his gig through his harridan mommy. Otherwise he would still be beating off in her basement.

You gotta admit – Jonah was no less right about this than he is about everything else he touts. He’s hoping Bill Kristol or Charles Karauthammer will step down, so he can move in.

Pardon me, I am new to this wondrous and militarily belligerent country of yours and no speak so good the English. What means the word “psephological” that Mr. Goldberg, who surely must be a man of great learning, uses?

I think this perfectly sums up the right-wing view of science and mathematics. They don’t really think there’s any objective truth to any of it. For them it’s all just big words and confusing symbols that are just as meaningless as the political shibboleths they love to hurl about. They figure that the professional men, the scientists and the statisticians and all the rest of them, are just people who have been trained to juggle those empty words and symbols more convincingly than the common man–and always with an ideological purpose, because the right-wingers see the educational system as just another ideological body with a covert agenda.

After all we’re talking about people who seriously believe that almost all the world’s atmospheric scientists are party to a vast conspiracy to dupe the world, with all their fancy figures and made-up statistics and whatnot, into thinking that the Earth is warming up and that the release of carbon dioxide is what’s causing it. How this cabal supposedly formed and what its motives are go unexplained; nevertheless we’re supposed to believe it exists and that only a few brave Republican politicians and their small number of pet scientists know the real truth. But then maybe I’ve just explained why right-wingers think scientists are all con men; the only scientists they ever do business with have zero ethics.

What interests me is the way people talk about math as if it were divinely prophetic. They seem to subscribe to a religion that simply apes the terminology of science.

Dumbstruck. Was Jonah home-schooled?

Two men say they’re Jesus. One of them must be wrong.

See, this is why I flunked Econ 101 in college. I thought it was supposed to be a science of sorts, but again and again, my mind would sort of lock up when the instructor would toss out one of those gnome underpants = profit “basic concepts,” and I quickly became a bellwether of sorts for the instructor, who would say Okay, I see Vosburg’s eyes have glazed over again, so I’ll explain that again.

Now that’s comedy.

“Neglect of mathematics works injury to all knowledge, since one who is ignorant of it cannot know the other sciences, or the things of this world. And what is worst, those who are thus ignorant are unable to perceive their own ignorance, and so do not seek a remedy.” — Roger Bacon

He also bizarrely trotted this word out in a clumsy attempt to disparage “Obamacare” in 2011:

Despite his deployment of every rhetorical weapon in the progressive arsenal, Obama could never make the thing popular. At town-hall meetings, the bear growled and snorted, in a posture that the experienced psephological woodsman understands to mean, “leave the bear alone.”

Yes, I know, it’s an unintelligible mess. That’s our Jonah!