Nate Silver
speaker
23 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Oct 2012
last heard Oct 2012
Nate Silver’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
What Bayes' theorem is, and it's become very fashionable nowadays if you read mathematics or statistics journals, it's just a very simple mathematical formula that tells you what do you do when you encounter new information.
And it gives it a way for you to weigh new information against your previous conception of a race.
How much should that poll change your view of the odds?
And that's literally what Bayes' theorem is trying to do.
And it says, among other things, that you're always going to look at prediction as a work in progress.
These polls are reported and people tend to treat each of them as being a highly newsworthy event unto itself.
My view is that first of all you use all the information but tend to use it more sceptically.
And I also use it in a way that's systematic.
So you design a set of rules ahead of time for how you process these polls, and it spits out essentially a set of odds that updates each day as new polls come in.
But it does ensure that you're looking at the data in the whole and looking for kind of what the consensus will tell you and not becoming overly fixated with anyone's survey because they will bounce up and down quite a bit.
Yeah, that's probably the most challenging part.
As you can see that Obama's ahead by, say, four or five points.
But what's that translate to in terms of odds?
What odds would you have to have to place a bet on Mitt Romney?
And we give you that number every day.
Interestingly, I guess, the numbers we have are often very, very similar to the ones that if you go and want to make a bet at a bookie in the U.K.
or in Vegas are the ones on offer there, where right now Romney's about a five to one bet.
underdog it looks like.
And so, you know, you couldn't really make money using our predictions right now because the consensus is where we happen to be as well.
Well, you know, I think, frankly, people probably should consult bookies more often when they're looking at the risk of political events.
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