If a Statistical Model Predicts That Common Events Should Occur Only Once in 10,000 Elections, Maybe it’s the Wrong Model (Danny Ebanks, Cal Tech)
Political scientists forecast elections, not primarily to satisfy public interest, but to validate statistical models used for estimating quantities of scholarly interest. Although scholars have learned a great deal from these models, they can be embarrassingly overconfident: Events that should occur once in 10,000 elections occur almost every year, and even those that should occur […]