For those who now think Nate Silver is god, here’s a question: Can Nate Silver make a prediction so accurate that Nate Silver himself doesn’t believe it?
Yes, he can–and he did. Silver famously predicted the results of Election 2012 correctly in every state. Yet while his per-state predictions added up to the 332 electoral votes that Obama won, Silver himself predicted that Obama’s expected electoral vote total was only 313. Why? Because Silver predicted that Silver would get some states wrong. Unpacking this (pseudo-)paradox can help us understand what we can and can’t learn from the performance of poll aggregators like Nate Silver and Princeton’s Sam Wang in this election.
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