> the election were to happen today, what is the probability of each candidate winning?
He's explicitly not doing this.
Here's how I think about it. Silver is answering the question: "how much would the polls (as an aggregate) need to differ from the final result in order for Candidate X to win/lose, conditioned on some reasonable priors?"
Taleb is pointing out that the polls could be really wrong in all sorts of ways that are impossible to predict a priori.
The whole argument is sort of pointless from an intellectual/academic perspective. It's a war of public personalities more than anything else.
It's both the case that Silver designed a good piece of software that does what it's supposed to do and also the case that Taleb's skepticism is valid. But then, that sort of skepticism of statistical models is always valid, and yet we use these models to great effect in all sorts of settings.
He's explicitly not doing this.
Here's how I think about it. Silver is answering the question: "how much would the polls (as an aggregate) need to differ from the final result in order for Candidate X to win/lose, conditioned on some reasonable priors?"
Taleb is pointing out that the polls could be really wrong in all sorts of ways that are impossible to predict a priori.
The whole argument is sort of pointless from an intellectual/academic perspective. It's a war of public personalities more than anything else.
It's both the case that Silver designed a good piece of software that does what it's supposed to do and also the case that Taleb's skepticism is valid. But then, that sort of skepticism of statistical models is always valid, and yet we use these models to great effect in all sorts of settings.