A blog about math, philosophy, puzzles, politics, and more.
[Edit: I no longer stand by the conclusions of this post. For more, see "How much do you believe your results?"] In 2012, Nate Silver wrote about elastic and inelastic states. An elastic state is one with lots of swing voters. This means that if the national electorate shifted by one percentage point, you would … Continue reading Should FiveThirtyEight’s elasticity index have a wider spread?
(Also, how to deal with leverage points when doing linear regression) If you closely follow FiveThirtyEight's politics coverage, like I do, there are some mantras you hear repeatedly. One of the most common is: general election polls are meaningless until the election starts getting close. See for instance A Year Out, Ignore General Election Polls; … Continue reading General election polls *are* predictive one year out
In 11th grade I took my high school's statistics class. When we learned about linear regression I raised my hand and asked why we were minimizing the sum of the squares of the residuals rather than, say, the sum of the absolute values. If my memory serves right, my teacher said that minimizing the sum … Continue reading Least squares regression isn’t arbitrary
Perhaps the most famous statistical fallacy is the gambler's fallacy. To quote Wikipedia, the gambler's fallacy is "the mistaken belief that if something happens more frequently than normal during a given period, it will happen less frequently in the future (or vice versa)." The canonical example of the fallacy is gamblers who reason that, since … Continue reading Are we due for another recession? Probably.
Unexpected Values 