Faux News usually provides great examples of poor performance. Remember all the calls from them that McCain was "closing the gap" from 7 points behind Obama in the days preceding the election? The final results left Obama 53%-46%, dead on the 7 points predicted by most reputable sources.
On the other side, two of my favorite sources through the election were Electoral-Vote.com and FiveThirtyEight.com, both of which only missed Indiana and the Omaha district of Nebraska (FiveThirtyEight did not make a prediction for Missouri) in their pre-election predictions.
Maps from Electoral-Vote.com and FiveThirtyEight.com (respectively):
And the final map (from CNN.com):
Regardless of what the naysayers conclude about the illegitimacy of polls, a quality interpretation of the data will yield a correct result, as demonstrated by E-V.com and 538.com.
2 comments:
The thing is, there are two kinds of people in the world: Those who observe the world, test it, and draw logically-based conclusions from the observable data; and those who will always try to bend the data to conform to their pre-existing beliefs.
The first kind of thinking we call "science"; the second, "wishful thinking." Science: It Works, Bitches.
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