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tim comments on Quote on Nate Silver, and how to think about probabilities - Less Wrong Discussion
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On the other end of the spectrum we have Elspeth Reeve coming to Nate Silver's defense while giving too much evidential weight to a Romney victory.
It's a little jarring, if not surprising, to see such a defense punctuated with such an off-base statement.
On a lighter note, Silver has publicly offered to bet Joe "It's A Tossup" Scarborough on the outcome of the election. I wish this sort of thing occurred more often.
The quote isn't talking about a Romney victory at all. If Silver's pollster weights are correct, then they will be negatively correlated with the pollsters' state-level absolute errors -- that is, more weight will correspond to smaller absolute errors. And since each swing state that a pollster surveys provides a datum, there will be quite a bit of data with which to estimate the correctness of Silver's weight scheme. In other words, if Silver's weighting is wrong, we'll know by next week.
(The partisan tilt thing is a distraction -- it's easy to correct so-called "house effects", leaving only whatever systematic bias affects the polls as a group.)