TITLE: What is Nassim Taleb's criticism of 538's election model?
QUESTION [14 upvotes]: Nassim Taleb has tweeted criticism about 538's political predictions that I don't follow. He seems to be making a theoretical argument. I am very weak on stochastic modeling (though I know basic PDEs). Can someone help me understand at least the gist of what he is saying?

REPLY [2 votes]: I think it's fair to say 538 is much more answering the question: "what would happen if the election were tomorrow?" and that is a pretty good interpretation of what polls do. That's not the same as the question, "who is going to win on the actual election day?" which is, to be sure, less certain. 538 does present these as forecasts, and there's a fair point that this isn't what it is.
However I think humans intuitively understand polls to be a measure of 'now', and I suspect its actual meaning is what readers expect. That is, most don't seem so very surprised in changes in the 'forecast'. Or: if the answer to "who is going to eventually win?" really is "about 50/50" the whole time, then that's not a very interesting question to answer. Maybe if you're betting on the outcome, but that's not the purpose of 538.
I think this is a long long way to go to dress up essentially an argument about semantics an assumptions in a lot of math. He seems alone in this interpretation of what 538 is doing. I think it's a bad-faith argument from a professor that is attempting to make this look both very difficult and only a math question, when it just isn't so.