This is one of my pet peeves, people who boast about stumbling upon the correct solution and/or being first to something, but can't justify or backup their claim. Even worse is when they do the research afterwards to attempt to retrofit an answer. A derivative of this is when you have/know only one thing, but can't justify it in the absence of knowledge of the alternatives, but you still rally for it as if you were knowledgeable.
In math, if you only write the correct answer, you'll get a zero for not showing your work. In debate and discussions, there can zero, one, or more than one correct solution to a topic, and "showing your work" is often more valuable than having an answer, and answers can be right or wrong explicitly depending on your work.
Totally! I was one of these people in high school math! I remember clearly thinking "but i got the right answer >:(" and now as a professional engineer i reminisce about people who want to know why you are right.
Disclosure: I am a Nate Silver fan. Nate's expert opinion is only valuable if you accept the premise, which is that prediction science involves a range of possible outcomes. If you accept that premise, which I do, his opinion on the 2016 election, in which he stated several times that the odds of a Trump presidency were actually higher than most of the polls suggested, was arguably a more valuable opinion than either a coin toss, or most of the individual polls.
Yeah this seems to be the disconnect. A lot of people will intuitively think (myself included) something like this. "You said Hillary had 90% chance to win, but Trump won. Therefore your prediction was WRONG". It actually takes a little more thought to understand that a Trump victory was a possibility in the model all along. And that you cannot say whether or not a prediction model is accurate based on a SINGLE result.
Moreover, if someone makes a lot of predictions of people having "90% chance to win" and all of them win, that is a less accurate prediction than if roughly 10% of them lose.
You got lucky. If you can consistently beat his methodology then you'd be just as famous and wealthy and well regarded as he is instead of an internet nobody.
This is like saying "college is for the birds, I just plan to win the lottery."
>Is Nate Silver's expert opinion still more valuable than mine?
Absolutely. Missing the boat on what turned out to be something of a freak-show election where 77,000 votes out of than 136 million ballots cast is tough for anyone to get right. And most of who, did so by dumb luck, not some wonderful new methodology that is useful against past election data or current election data. The very same people beating their chests over Trump's win predicted Moore would win Alabama or Saccone would beat Lamb.
In other words its just dumb partisanship, not some new polling or statistical technique at work here. Patting yourself on the back because you 'called it' for Trump is a meaningless statement unless you have the math to prove your methods are better than Nate Silvers.
Silver predicted a fairly high probability of a very close election, including a 10.8% chance Clinton would win the popular vote and lose the electoral vote.
> All he said was that it would be closer than a landslide.
No, Silver's model provided a lot more detail than that.
Me = not an expert on elections
Yet, at almost every turn along the path of the 2016 election, I was far more accurate than Nate Silver.
Is Nate Silver's expert opinion still more valuable than mine? Is expert opinion valuable even if it is right no more often than coin flipping?