Things are getting a little heated...
Nate Silver unloaded Saturday on the Huffington Post’s Ryan Grim, who accused the polling guru and founder of the prediction website fivethirtyeight.com of “changing the results of polls to fit where he thinks the polls truly are, rather than simply entering the poll numbers into his model and crunching them.”
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According to Grim, however, Silver is “just guessing” and his “trend line adjustment” technique is “merely political punditry dressed up as sophisticated mathematical modeling.” Grim also noted that FiveThirtyEight’s model -- due to his adjustments -- shows Trump more likely than not to win Florida, while the Huffington Post’s calculates her victory there as more likely.
And that, apparently, enraged Silver, whose track record of correctly predicting elections -- and explaining how he does it in painstaking, but accessible detail -- has made him a celebrity whose very name is synonymous with the art of data-driven prognostication, and whose model is widely considered the gold standard in election forecasting.
After dropping his initial f-bomb, Silver went on to argue why his model -- which, in its polls-only version, puts the odds of Hillary Clinton winning the presidential race at 64.7 percent -- is superior to those like the Huffington Post, which rates her election a near-certainty, at 98.3 percent.
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