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[SirQuiamus]

With Donald Trump as the nominee, Republicans are highly certain to win the presidential election on November 8, 2016. Trump will defeat Hillary Clinton with 87 percent certainty, and Bernie Sanders with 99 percent. Huffington Post. Wait, what the fuck? HUFFPO?

Maybe shitposts are warping reality as we know it

Reminder to not put steel beams in your Murrica wall

hahaha, clickbaiting huffposters are trolling the shit out of their libtard audience

http://skepchick.org/2016/03/stop-panicking-there-isnt-a-98-chance-of-a-president-trump-future/

So how does this “scary accurate” model work exactly? Way back in the pre-Trumpocalypse year 2008 Kevin Drum at Mother Jones gave an explanation of how Norpoth’s model works:

    Unlike every other forecaster on the planet, they don’t include any economic variables at all. Maybe the economy is great, maybe it sucks.
    They don’t care. Their model has two inputs: (1) how well you did in the New Hampshire primary, and (2) whether you’re an incumbent
    running for reelection.

Since this year has no incumbent, the only input is how well candidates do in the New Hampshire primary. I checked the website for the Primary Model to make sure they haven’t changed it since 2008. They do say that they’ve created another version of the model that also uses the South Carolina primary, but the news reports about the 98% Trump prediction were from before the South Carolina primary took place, so they got to that number using the old version of the model whose only input is the New Hampshire primary.

A model built only on the New Hampshire primary sounds like it probably wouldn’t work, but it does predict every election except one since 1912, so laugh all you want but it’s still “scary accurate” and still predicts a 98% chance that Trump will soon be President Trump.

2 scary accurate 4 me

[mainiac]

Very frightening.

It's a less effective but more legal variation.  You make just one prediction but then rationalize it to be right now matter what the result.

[Loud Whispers]

hahaha, clickbaiting huffposters are trolling the shit out of their libtard audience

Good Lord we've come to this, the unholy alliance between eye cancer and Buzzfeed

Basically Buzzfeed

http://skepchick.org/2016/03/stop-panicking-there-isnt-a-98-chance-of-a-president-trump-future/

So how does this “scary accurate” model work exactly? Way back in the pre-Trumpocalypse year 2008 Kevin Drum at Mother Jones gave an explanation of how Norpoth’s model works:
    Unlike every other forecaster on the planet, they don’t include any economic variables at all. Maybe the economy is great, maybe it sucks.
    They don’t care. Their model has two inputs: (1) how well you did in the New Hampshire primary, and (2) whether you’re an incumbent
    running for reelection.
Since this year has no incumbent, the only input is how well candidates do in the New Hampshire primary. I checked the website for the Primary Model to make sure they haven’t changed it since 2008. They do say that they’ve created another version of the model that also uses the South Carolina primary, but the news reports about the 98% Trump prediction were from before the South Carolina primary took place, so they got to that number using the old version of the model whose only input is the New Hampshire primary.
A model built only on the New Hampshire primary sounds like it probably wouldn’t work, but it does predict every election except one since 1912, so laugh all you want but it’s still “scary accurate” and still predicts a 98% chance that Trump will soon be President Trump.

2 scary accurate 4 me

Ah I see, that is indeed less clickb8y. Huffpo pulled a Daily Mail on me there

oh w8, is that more spooky? Oh shit, looks more spooky

I AM SPOOKED

[RedKing]

Apparently 538 pointed out as a counter-example that candidates whose name rhymes with "Linton" have a 100% win rate. Game, set, match.

inb4 Trump legally changes his name to "Trumplinton"


EDIT: And I just found three counter-counter-examples.

Geroge Clinton lost in 1789 and 1808, and Dewitt Clinton in 1812.


By this model, Presidential *nominees* named Clinton only have a 40% win rate, while it's even less than that as candidates.

[Reelya]

Very frightening.

It's a less effective but more legal variation.  You make just one prediction but then rationalize it to be right now matter what the result.

Yeah, just saying "the incumbent wins a second term, but then other party wins the next election" gets you correct 87% of the time.

So there are only a couple of times this ultra-crude model gets it wrong. To "adjust" the model for the one or two times it gets the wrong value, you can look around for one of the 50 primary results (or really any unrelated variable that happens to fit by chance), and add one of them to your metric in a way that just happens to flip a couple of wrongs to a right. In other words, the New Hampshire primary isn't an important part of the prediction: it's just some more or less random data that just happened to flip a couple of wrong results to right results in the needed years, and has zero predictive power in itself.

[Mephansteras]

Is it just me or has the Huffington post gone from 'left-biased news source' to 'complete garbage' in the last few years?

[Loud Whispers]

Is it just me or has the Huffington post gone from 'left-biased news source' to 'complete garbage' in the last few years?

I'm sure they fill some ecological niche, like if they were gone something worse would just take their place

[RedKing]

Is it just me or has the Huffington post gone from 'left-biased news source' to 'complete garbage' in the last few years?

It's not just you. Especially considering half of any given page is sponsored content like "You Won't Believe This One Weird Trick" and "11 Awkward Child Stars Who Turned Out Total Hotties!"

[MoonyTheHuman]

I have made a random phrase gen that knows the diffrence between a noun and a verb

[Wolfhunter107]

I have made a random phrase gen that knows the diffrence between a noun and a verb

I think you may have posted this on the wrong thread. Pretty neat, though.

[Reelya]

Idk about Huffpost, but Media Matters is a great source for following kooky right-wing journalism. Mainly because the guy who started it (David Brock) used to work as a kooky right-wing journalist, but started to realize he was a shill for some really nasty people. Media Matters is a good site deconstructing right-wing news, for the very reason that it's main editors came from conservative journalism and know how the entire thing ticks.

I have David Brock's autobiography here, it's a real eye-opener, he describes how they recruit impressionable college-age Ayn Rand readers, turn them into "journalists" at Koch-funded far-right-wing "student newspapers", then it's straight into this parallel fascist news machine. And they feed you all the facts you need to know, he writes how he used to consider himself a "journalist" but later realized he was just fed "need to know" facts that all turned out to be lies. I kinda think Hannity is like this guy: true believer shills make the best shills.

Basically he's describing Cult Brainwashing, they surround you with people who all think alike and if you start to question the group beliefs, well you're out on your ass straight away so you don't infect the rest of them with logic or critical thinking. Ann Coulter was also one of his circle. This is why they need to hammer home the "libtard" thing so heavily: it's for internal consumption. If these core of brainwashed corporate shills actually started actually treating people who disagree with them as human and engaging in honest debate, then the right-wing news system falls apart.

[origamiscienceguy]

I don't actually look at it, but I heard that Drudge report is one of the only good right-wing news site.

[Loud Whispers]

>Huffpo
>Right wing

[Reelya]

Misconstruing what I said. I saying Idk whether Huffpost is a good liberal site or not, but that Media Matters is, and then talking about what Media Matters does which is very different to Huff.

[Loud Whispers]

>Huffpo
>good

Judging it by its value as a site could do it more good than as a news site, since it doesn't do much reporting, just telling what others have reported whilst putting spin on it. Basically TyT but with more polish and more sidelinks