Can we give Nate Silver his due?

Sklz711

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Tuesday November 06, 2012 · 7:03 PM PST

2012/11/06 · 19:03

It isn't asking a whole lot to not be dismissive of an intelligent person who is giving a healthy dose of reality to the world at large on a regular basis, and who recently came under active attack by a plethora of reality denying Republicans. To dismiss his model and give the credit solely to the pollsters not only isn't entirely factually correct, but beyond that seems to go against the whole reality based community that we try to foster here.

Nate Silver's model not only averages the polls that are done by the pollsters, but gives different weighting based upon their likelihood of being correct. That means correcting for obvious bias in polls from places like the House of Ras, and rewarding polls that are consistently correct over multiple elections with higher weighting. We may understand the bias that many polling firms have, but the public at large does not. Silver's model goes a long way towards correcting that on a national stage, and often with people the Mothership doesn't as easily reach.

Nate Silver's model is a perfect example of a reality based polling website, and shouldn't be casually dismissed on the main page. It will be a big win for the Nate's model, as well as the polling firms that actually did their jobs properly.

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