Nate Silver goes off on Huffington Post in tweetstorm

Nate Silver railed against The Huffington Post in a tweetstorm Saturday night after the online news site ran an article accusing the pollster of “changing the results of polls.”

“This article is so f—ing idiotic and irresponsible,” Silver, founder of FiveThirtyEight, wrote.

This article is so fucking idiotic and irresponsible. https://t.co/VNp02CvxlI

— Nate Silver (@NateSilver538) November 5, 2016

{mosads}The article, written by Huffington Post bureau chief Ryan Grimm, also said “punditry has been Silver’s go-to-move this election cycle.”

“The short version is that Silver is changing the results of polls to fit where he thinks the polls truly are, rather than simply entering the poll numbers into his model and crunching them,” Grim wrote.

Silver shot back in multiple posts on Twitter, arguing that FiveThirtyEight’s method for adjusting polls is based off of empirical evidence.

Silver ended his critique with a nod to first lady Michelle Obama’s now-famous line about Republicans this election cycle.

“When you go low, I go high 80% of the time, and knee you in the balls the other 20% of the time,” Silver wrote.

The reason we adjust polls for the national trend is because **that’s what works best emperically**. It’s not a subjective assumption.

— Nate Silver (@NateSilver538) November 5, 2016

It’s wrong to show Clinton with a 6-point lead (as per HuffPo) when **almost no national poll shows that**. Doesn’t reflect the data.

— Nate Silver (@NateSilver538) November 5, 2016

Every model makes assumptions but we actually test ours based on the evidence. Some of the other models are barley even empirical.

— Nate Silver (@NateSilver538) November 5, 2016

There are also a gajillion ways to make a model overconfident, whereas it’s pretty hard to make one overconfident.

— Nate Silver (@NateSilver538) November 5, 2016

If you haven’t carefully tested how errors are correlated between states, for example, your model will be way overconfident.

— Nate Silver (@NateSilver538) November 5, 2016

Not just an issue in elections models. Failure to understand how risks are correlated is part of what led to the 2007/8 financial crisis.

— Nate Silver (@NateSilver538) November 5, 2016

There’s a reasonable range of disagreement. But a model showing Clinton at 98% or 99% is not defensible based on the empirical evidence.

— Nate Silver (@NateSilver538) November 5, 2016

We constantly write about our assumptions and **provide evidence** for why we think they’re the right ones. https://t.co/IhLKXdxGGK

— Nate Silver (@NateSilver538) November 5, 2016

That’s what makes a model a useful scientific & journalistic tool. It’s a way to understand how elections work. Not just about the results.

— Nate Silver (@NateSilver538) November 5, 2016

The problem is that we’re doing this in a world where people—like @ryangrim—don’t actually give a shit about evidence and proof.

— Nate Silver (@NateSilver538) November 5, 2016

The philosophy behind 538 is: Prove it. Doesn’t mean we can’t be wrong (we’re wrong all the time). But prove it. Don’t be lazy.

— Nate Silver (@NateSilver538) November 5, 2016

And especially don’t be lazy when your untested assumptions happen to validate your partisan beliefs.

— Nate Silver (@NateSilver538) November 5, 2016

When you go low, I go high 80% of the time, and knee you in the balls the other 20% of the time.

— Nate Silver (@NateSilver538) November 5, 2016