Nate Silver: prediction

Transcript context

…But I wasn’t allowed to blame you, so I put it on myself. I’m still not sure you were wrong, but there’s something we didn’t see. That is important, I think. I got a little frustrated, because a lot of people were saying, “Trump’s instantly going to evaporate in the polls. ” If you go back and look at what we wrote, we said, “That could happen, but there are also a lot of candidates — Pat Buchanan, and so forth, Ron Paul, Rick Santorum — who will get 20, 25, 30-something percent of the electorate, and we have a high-floor, low-ceiling type of candidate.” That could still wind up being true. With that said, for one thing, we’re dealing with a fairly small sample of relevant elections. People look at, in the primaries, going back to 1972. One very basic lesson is that when you have a sample size, let’s say it’s roughly 15, there’s nothing you can do to make it not a sample size of 15. No matter how compelling you can make your rationalization to say, “Well but, you know, we have theory as well as empirics here,” still, 15 cases is 15 cases. I think maybe making people more cautious about saying “Unlikely” versus “Never.” Now, the record will show we said “Unlikely” and not “Never,” but still it’s a lot of things to think about. You talked about what superforecasters are supposed to do — That’s you, yes?…

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