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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ovinomancer" data-source="post: 7474085" data-attributes="member: 16814">Sorry, I'm uncertain -- are you claiming sports betting is also science?  If so, we have little more to discuss on this line, as your definition of science is so broad as to be meaningless.Yes, I see that.  Walk this back a moment -- where is knowledge 'sufficient'?  At what point does it switch to uneducated guess?  If you can't point to that line (fuzzy or not), then your operational definition of science becomes 'makes a guess'.  If science is to have meaning, it has to me more than makes a guess, educated or not.  This is exactly why my definition of science is the method.  If it's not the method, it's not science.  And you cannot do science on statistics (because it's not data from the real world).No, because G isn't the data you're obtaining in your experiment.  If you, instead of measuring the experiment, take a poll of the people that were present and use their opinions of the outcome as your data, you're in the ballpark of what I'm talking about.  If you then discount Bob because he's blind and favor Paul because he's been pretty okay lately (your opinion) and use that as the data for G, you aren't finding G anymore, you're finding people's opinions on G.  And you've massaged your data.No, I don't think he does that, but he does observe the polls and note which have been successful in the past and weight those more heavily.  He tries to "correct" for things he thinks are deficient in the polling executions (bias, sample, date, etc.) and weights the data he has accordingly.  But that's subjective as well.  It's subject to expertise -- Silver clearly isn't stupid and is actually very good at what he does.  But, it's still subjectively altered data as an input.  He's using stats on his opinions.Are you unaware of error bars?  Silver gave central guesses, but his model quite often encompassed both results inside the error margin.  Again, his calls on individual states were his opinion on the model outcome, because the actual outcome of his statistical model on his choices of data had error bars that weren't as precise.  You can choose to ignore that because his headline guess was often right (he's had a few bombs, as well), but the model you're claiming is the science is not at all as confident.  This is available for looking at (one other thing I credit Silver for, he's discloses pretty well).I don't dislike Silver.  I think he is a good pundit.  He's got some great observations.  It's not science.Just like when a scientist opines on philosophy they're doing philosophy and not science, when a historian opines on current events, he's not doing history.  I have a lot to say on music, but that doesn't make me a musician (no truer benefit to the world).</blockquote>

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