As a warning, there's been an increase in fake polls this year. Random people throwing up a website & citing their "polls" to get attention.— Nate Silver (@NateSilver538) August 21, 2016
I'm not throwing shade at any pollsters you've ever heard of. We're talking really obscure cases. But be careful what you retweet / link to.— Nate Silver (@NateSilver538) August 21, 2016
Of course those of us who pay close attention to politics have seen this before.We're VERY inclusive at 538 and will include crappy polls so long as we're confident they're real. But sometimes things don't check out.— Nate Silver (@NateSilver538) August 21, 2016
Courtesy of Salon:
The biggest laughing stock of the 2012 presidential election wasn’t Mitt Romney or Paul Ryan. In fact, compared with the current GOP nominee, the Romney-Ryan team ran a well-oiled, disciplined, respectable campaign. Though that’s not saying much, given how the bar’s been lowered to subterranean depths. Nevertheless, the biggest laughing stock of the previous go-around might’ve been a guy named Dean Chambers.
Chambers was a self-styled, self-funded poll denier. His entire mission was to literally “unskew” the polls, believing that every polling outfit, minus, perhaps, Rasmussen, was skewed in favor of President Obama. Chambers served as a convenient security blanket for Republicans who insisted that pollsters were biased in favor of the Democrats and that Mitt Romney was actually winning. Regarding the “security blanket” aspect of Chambers’ feverishly misleading public service, his “unskewed polls” provided much needed confirmation bias for inside-the-bubble Republicans who were too terrified to contemplate a second Obama term. It was comfort food, though entirely cosmetic and inaccurate. Contrarily, anyone who followed Nate Silver, the Anti-Chambers, retained a strong grasp on forecasting the outcome. At the end of the day, Nate Silver was nearly 100 percent accurate and Chambers, Silver’s completely unworthy nemesis, was all but laughed off the stage.
What is Einstein's definition of insanity again?
Doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results?
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