Quote:
Originally Posted by extrashaky
Scott Adams (creator of Dilbert) says that one tactic for persuading people to accept your point of view is to just make up a statistic and state it outright as if it's fully supported, even if it isn't. During the presidential primary campaign in 2015, an influential pundit named Nate Silver declared that Donald Trump had a mere 2% chance of winning the Republican nomination. Several news outlets reported Silver's "expert" estimate as fact and touted it as proof that the Trump campaign was just a sideshow that didn't matter.
Adams (who actually teaches corporate seminars on persuasion) recognized it as a bullshit number pulled out of the guy's ass to campaign against Trump's nomination in the hope that people would hear it, accept that Trump had no chance and refuse to take him seriously. So Adams posted on his blog that Trump had a 98% chance of winning. That bogus estimate dovetailed perfectly with Silver's bogus estimate and got a lot of attention, resulting in Adams making the rounds on the television networks persuading viewers Trump had a 98% chance of winning.
Even though the number was bogus, in hindsight Adams was right.
That's all David Phillips at Automotive News is doing. It's a bogus number he just pulled out of his ass to try to persuade you his expert predictions have value.
He has a 50% chance of being correct. |
Nate Silver uses statistics to build his models. He had given Trump a 3 in 10 chance of winning. It turned out that the polling saying that Hillary would win swing states was close and a large number of undecided voters in that election opened the door for abnormally large variance.
Also, Adams is a deranged person these days.
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