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Message: <blockquote data-quote="TheCosmicKid" data-source="post: 7473981" data-attributes="member: 6683613">Why not? Because it's trivial? Nate Silver himself is first and foremost a sports statistician - national elections are a sideline.I'm having a hard time reconciling "knowledge of the game sufficient to make accurate predictions reliably" with "not science".If I'm trying to find the gravitational constant G, I might estimate it at some value, run an experiment, compare the results to what's predicted by my estimate, and then adjust the estimate up or down accordingly and repeat. I am effectively "massaging" the gravitational force in my model. But I'm massaging it in accordance with experimental results, in order to make better predictions.If Nate Silver decides a priori, "My gut tells me Ohio is going to go red", and then weights his data to say that Ohio is going to go red, then you're right, that's not science. But if he does what he says he does, and what we have no reason to suspect he's lying about, then the weights he puts on his data are in response to the results of previous experiments, and will be adjusted in response to future ones, in order to zero in on some value which can make predictions most accurately. That looks like a scientific process to me.I'm going to take a stab in the dark and guess that you don't read many horoscopes? The key element of horoscopes and prophecies, the trick that makes them work, is that they make vague predictions which can can be interpreted after the fact as conforming to whatever happened, and are thus difficult to falsify. Whatever else you may say about political prognosticators, they do not do that. We can say, definitively, what Nate Silver was right about and what he was wrong about. That clarity is in falsification conditions the sine quae non of science. So to compare a prediction which has such clarity with one which doesn't is deeply unfair and, when the whole point of this discussion is "what is science?", actively misleading.With apologies to Francis Fukuyama, history did not end in the year 1990. History is the diachronic study of human behavior and societies - or, if I may be tautological in turn, it's the study of the stuff that makes it into history books. Historians have tons to say about current and future events. They differ from, say, sociologists or political scientists in that their methodology is more focused on finding patterns of cause and effect in the written and archeological record, although naturally the boundary between the disciplines is fuzzy and there's a lot of overlap. But in short, "Those who do not study the past are doomed to repeat it" really is kind of the historian's mission statement.</blockquote>

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