I or Silver might point out there’s a 75% chance anything besides two heads in a row happening (which is accurate.)
Is it?
Suppose I gave you two coins, which may or may not be weighted. You think they aren’t, and I think they are weighted 2:1 towards heads. Your model predicts one head, and mine predicts two heads.
We toss and get two heads. Does that mean the odds I gave are right? Does it mean the odds you gave are wrong?
In the real world, your odds will depends on your priors, which you can never prove or disprove. If we were working with coins, then we could repeat the experiment and possibly update our priors.
But suppose we only have one chance to toss them, and after which they shatter. In that case, the model we use for the coins, weighted vs unweighted, is just a means to arrive at a prediction. The prediction can be right or wrong, but the internal workings of a one-shot model - including odds - are unfalsifiable. Same with Silver and the 2016 election.
The thing is, Nate Silver did not make a prediction about the 2016 race.
He said that Hilary had a higher chance of winning. He didn’t say Hilary was going to win.
How can you falsify the claim “Clinton has a higher chance of winning”?
Alternately:
Silver said “Clinton has a higher chance of winning in 2016” whereas Michael Moore said “Trump has a higher chance of winning in 2016”.
In hindsight, is one of these claims more valid than the other? Because if two contradictory claims are equally valid, then they are both meaningless.
You can’t really falsify the claim “Clinton has a higher chance of winning”, at least the way Nate Silver models it. His model is based upon statistics, and he basically runs a bunch of simulations of the election. In more of these simulations, Clinton won, hence his claim. But we had exactly one actual election, and in the election, Trump won. Perhaps his model is just wrong, or perhaps the outcome matched one of the simulations in his model where Trump won. If we could somehow run the election hundreds of times (or observe what happened in hundreds of parallel universes) then maybe we could see if his model matched the outcome of a statistically significant number of election results. But nevertheless, Nate Silver had a model and statistics to back up his claim.
As for Michael Moore, I’m not sure exactly how he came up with his prediction, but I get the impression it was mostly a gut feeling based upon his observations of what was happening. Nevertheless, Michael Moore still could back up his statement by articulating why he was claiming that and the observations he had made.
Though one crucial difference is still the whole prediction thing. Michael Moore actually made a prediction of a Trump win. Whereas Nate Silver just stated that Clinton had a higher chance of winning, and once again that was not a prediction. So you’re really comparing two different things here.
