PPP under fire from Cohn, Silver, etc.

[Alcon]

What exactly is the problem?  Have any of you read the article?  It pretty clearly explains what he perceives the problem to be...

[Alcon]

Dismissing criticism of a political pollster because it's "only important to statisticians" is like eating nothing but cotton candy because it tastes good and kills your hunger, and claiming it's reasonable because nutritional value is "only important to chemists."

You're effectively consuming insubstantial bullsh**t either way.  How satisfying and palatable it is doesn't matter, because it's not composed of anything meaningful.

PPP is a mostly sincere-seeming company, but totally deserves to be called out for fundamental logical errors like these.  If you don't agree, maybe you should stick to getting your "analysis" from people yelling RBI stats at each other on SportsCenter.

[Alcon]

Dismissing criticism of a "political pollster" because it's "only important to statisticians" is like eating nothing like cotton candy because it tastes good and kills your hunger and nutritional value is "only important to chemists."

You're effectively consuming insubstantial bullsh**t either way.  How satisfying and palatable it is doesn't matter, because it's not composed of anything meaningful.

I'll let Taniel through his twitter account respond to that:

https://twitter.com/Taniel/status/378287794956677120

I guess I'm more interested in how Gallup+Mason Dixon ended up with terrible polls, than in the bad ways @ppppolls ended up with right ones.

No, you're evidently only interested in any explanation if it lasts less than 45 seconds and doesn't involve understanding how anything complicated works.

You seem to have treated my analogy the same way you're treating the criticism: "meh, I'd prefer something punchier and 140 characters or less."

[Alcon]

I disagree with your analogy because eating cotton candy will eventually take a toll on your health.
What exactly is the bad thing that will happen to us or to politics if PPP continues to produce exact polls, despite using a "questionable" methodology?

Because what BRTD is saying.

Also, comparing PPP to fraudsters like Strategic Vision shows to me that these people aren't motivated by scientific integrity but rather that they have an axe to grind.

You may see people comparing the two, but do you see any of us equating the two?

[Alcon]

I disagree with your analogy because eating cotton candy will eventually take a toll on your health.
What exactly is the bad thing that will happen to us or to politics if PPP continues to produce exact polls, despite using a "questionable" methodology?

Because what BRTD is saying.

There is a little difference between people like JJ or the unskwedpolls crowd and PPP.
Those people were proven hilariously wrong. PPP is more often than not right, even in races that nobody else polls or where their results are contradicting the other pollsters.
Just ask non-senator Coakley for that.

You may see people comparing the two, but do you see any of us equating the two?

And it's an unfair and  malicious comparison that amounts into little more than a dog-whistle.
It's like defending the people who compare Obama to Hitler because they are just "comparing", not "equating" the two of them.

I don't know what to tell you at this point.  You continue to repeat "it's different because PPP isn't making polls up, and they're getting reasonable results."  My claim is not that they are making polls.  My claim is not that they're getting unreasonable results.  This conversation cannot continue unless you directly address what I'm saying.

Analogies can be dog-whistles, but you can also find false dog-whistles in analogies.  People frequently respond to analogies with "but those two things are different!"  Well, yeah, that's how analogies work.  They involve two different things.  Especially when your point is "who cares?", the analogy is probably going to draw parallels to something obviously worse; that doesn't mean the analogy is meant to show the two things are equally bad.  Here, the parallel is that all of these firms were disingenuous in order to produce the results they wanted.  It's a problem in both cases.  If you can dismiss statistics as extraneous in statistically scientific polling, surely you can ignore extraneous elements of analogies.

I'd just prefer you not ignore the point I'm trying to make.

[Alcon]

It's not "dumb luck" or "making out numbers."  These are smart people with excellent intuitions about what's probably right.  But that's not scientifically sound, and they weren't transparent about it.  You may like the product they supplied, but it wasn't what they claimed to supply.

[Alcon]

Landslide Lyndon, I don't understand why the fact that they did this behavior arbitrarily tempers the critique.

[Alcon]

Some of Silver's methodology is off.  If a pollster gets the last poll right, that is good enough for him.  It's terrible of you are looking at polls in September and trying to determine if that will be the result in November. 

I don't understand what you mean.