Top
Best
New

Posted by cmsparks 3 hours ago

ABC News has taken all FiveThirtyEight articles offline(twitter.com)
137 points | 63 commentspage 2
deanebarker 3 hours ago|
But why?
markoman 3 hours ago||
Nate Silver has some pretty good commentary on it all on his X account (https://x.com/NateSilver538).
hightrix 3 hours ago||
A link for those of us without twitter accounts.

https://xcancel.com/NateSilver538

cmsparks 3 hours ago|||
No idea. ABC bought it and slowly has been shutting down the parts of it. They got rid of the projects page, then laid off all the folks working on it after the election, and now have gotten rid of all of the articles.

Fortunately the Github is still up: https://github.com/fivethirtyeight

fn-mote 3 hours ago|||
> Fortunately the Github is still up

I need to mirror everything to keep it accessible when they decide to shut this down, too?

I loved that site, and referred people to it frequently.

BeetleB 2 hours ago||
I'm surprised this is news - or perhaps just surprised that there was still some of 538 around ...?

ABC officially sunset 538 over a year ago (and laid off most/all of the staff).

Shalomboy 3 hours ago||
ABC has opted to step on Thucydides Trap.
woodydesign 3 hours ago||
Oh NO, that's probably the best infographic news sites I was keep visiting and learn
BeetleB 3 hours ago|
538 was sunset over a year ago.
booleandilemma 1 hour ago||
Nate Silver - the guy who pushed so, so hard for Hillary during the 2016 election.
jimbob45 2 hours ago||
538 had a really accessible portal that evaluated the quality of pollsters. It made it very easy to know which polls were low-quality and therefore ignorable. It being an election year, it’s possible someone didn’t like their pollster rating. Thankfully, we still have Internet Archive.

Edit: nm it was definitely the burrito battle royale bracket. Big burrito couldn’t handle the truth being revealed about their restaurants.

jmclnx 2 hours ago||
The old school press people before the 80s would be horrified at this.

All this proves is when the press was deregulated to allow one person to own all the media they can afford brought us were we are now.

flomo 2 hours ago||
No. The 'old school' hated 538 and polling wonks in general. Back in the 2000s there was a huge push back because this blog guy had numbers going against whatever narrative they were trying spin.
lotsofpulp 2 hours ago||
I feel like it proves the opposite. A small entity was able to become a valued source of information, a big entity bought it, but then was unable to do anything with it, since being a “big” media seller does not matter due to the accessibility of the internet.
nyc_data_geek1 2 hours ago||
[flagged]
sparrish 3 hours ago|
This makes no sense. Sure, he got nearly every prediction wrong but so have their meteorologists. Why just pick on poor ol' Nate?
MostlyStable 2 hours ago||
Yeah they sure were bad at predictions. If only they had aggregated all their predictions and compared them to how things actually turned out in one easy assess location. That sure would have been useful..... [0]

[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20250306183754/https://projects....

cmsparks 3 hours ago|||
538 was actually pretty accurate!

They had a good article about how their predictions were much better than you'd expect, but obviously I can't link it anymore because ABC removed it.

fabian2k 2 hours ago|||
The 70:30 prediction against Trump was far better than most. I did see models back then that considered the state polls mostly or entirely uncorrelated, and those produced obviously garbage with 90% or even 99% in favor of Clinton.

But in the end people pick on Nate because he really enjoys being an asshole on the internet. It's far more about when he acts as a pundit, not as an expert on statistics.

softwaredoug 2 hours ago|||
People consistently have a hard time understanding that 30% probabilities happen all the time.
triceratops 2 hours ago|||
Surely not all the time.
BobaFloutist 1 hour ago|||
I think given the number of things that can happen with ~30% probability, there's probably something significant happening with ~30% probability at basically all times.
Lerc 1 hour ago||||
30% of the time it is all of the time.
AnimalMuppet 40 minutes ago|||
Well, we're talking about elections. You have an election where there's a president, 30 or so governors, 33-34 senators, and 438 representatives. Say a total of 64 major offices, or 500 if you count the representatives. You'd expect a 30% chance to happen in 19 major races, or 150 races if you count the representatives.

So in an election, that happens all the time. It just doesn't always happen in the race for president.

Yossarrian22 2 hours ago||||
Some say 30% of the time.
krapp 2 hours ago|||
Where Presidential politics is concerned, I think it's less a case of misunderstanding probabilities and more the success of party propaganda. Every victory is a landslide with a resounding mandate from the populace, every defeat a crushing humiliation and repudiation of your opponent's Unamerican ideals.
bigfishrunning 1 hour ago||||
I kind of fell off the Nate Silver train toward the end of Trump's first term (so deep in the COVID-19 era...). It feels like around that time 538 shifted heavily away from raw statistics and into punditry, and they seemed less unique among the various political blogs.
add-sub-mul-div 2 hours ago|||
Those predictions all became worthless anyway when Comey reopened the "emails" issue right before the election and threw fresh meat to all the stupid people who ate that up.
darkarmani 48 minutes ago|||
Did he predict odds? How are you so sure his odds were wrong?
BeetleB 3 hours ago|||
This isn't about Nate's articles (although perhaps those are gone as well).
redsocksfan45 2 hours ago||
[dead]