It’s all statistics. It means that if we ran the 2024 election millions of times in his model, Trump would win more than Biden. But we will only get one shot, so the number is kind of useless.
I was watching the Mets game this weekend on ESPN, and they were ahead of the Cubs by a few runs. ESPN has a tracker that estimates “Win Probability” and their model gave the Mets a 75% chance to win. But have you seen the Mets this year? They’ve blown a bunch of games late. Every Mets fan watching knew that their bullpen wasn’t good enough to merit that rating.
The Mets did end up winning that game. (Thanks, Grimace.) But that doesn’t change the fact that no matter what math is behind their win prediction model, it just doesn’t feel right to apply statistics like that to one-off events.
That’s all the media can do nowadays. It’s a bunch of journalism graduates twiddling their fingers while cranking out endless “Read the Tea Leaves!” type articles. Everything nowadays is “survey says this”, “polls say that”, “model says this”, “odds predict this or that”. It’s literally everywhere from sports to politics to the stock market, it requires zero thought or in-depth analysis, and it’s both a response to and a cause of the decline in mainstream and investigative journalism. It’s team-based tribalism through and through.
It’s all statistics. It means that if we ran the 2024 election millions of times in his model, Trump would win more than Biden. But we will only get one shot, so the number is kind of useless.
I was watching the Mets game this weekend on ESPN, and they were ahead of the Cubs by a few runs. ESPN has a tracker that estimates “Win Probability” and their model gave the Mets a 75% chance to win. But have you seen the Mets this year? They’ve blown a bunch of games late. Every Mets fan watching knew that their bullpen wasn’t good enough to merit that rating.
The Mets did end up winning that game. (Thanks, Grimace.) But that doesn’t change the fact that no matter what math is behind their win prediction model, it just doesn’t feel right to apply statistics like that to one-off events.
That’s all the media can do nowadays. It’s a bunch of journalism graduates twiddling their fingers while cranking out endless “Read the Tea Leaves!” type articles. Everything nowadays is “survey says this”, “polls say that”, “model says this”, “odds predict this or that”. It’s literally everywhere from sports to politics to the stock market, it requires zero thought or in-depth analysis, and it’s both a response to and a cause of the decline in mainstream and investigative journalism. It’s team-based tribalism through and through.
I predict people will get sick of that shit. Especially when they start branding it as AI-driven.
Edit: with the exception of that football-predicting octopus. He’s cool.
Oh absolutely, and that AI part is already happening with local news outlets and some national sports outlets.
Don’t ignore the flawed polling data his model is based on