Maybe it would help if you substituted “right” with “worth paying attention to” – and, that you compare a modeling team to others, rather than just looking at any one approach in a vacuum.
538/Silver’s 2016 model asserted that the probability of Trump winning was much higher than what other major models were asserting. Trump went on to win that year. Therefore (especially after considering other, similar examples, like the 2022 midterms), as a first pass at least, the two “children” of that modeling team – Silver and 538 – are worth paying attention to.
I had a really amazing D&D character awhile back, a Hill Giant/Air Genasi cross. My PC was up against a Dragon/Yuan Ti cross. It was time for the final attack. I knew that if I rolled a 9 or higher on my attack, I’d win the fight. I said, “I’m probably gonna win,” and then I rolled a 3, and my Hill/Airy lost to the Duan Ti.
Why me? It was Thing.Fish who claimed the Silves predictions were “right”. Then he denied that they could be wrong, as he only gave a %. I was pointing out you can have it one way or the other.
Apropos of not much: 538 is eating Nate Silver’s dust right now. Seems really weird that Silver has put daily percentages on the general election since last week, while 538 is still silent since Biden’s step-down.
The bit I cited had taken the position that 538, representing ABC, was being conservative and less willing to commit. This is consistent with that. Wanting more data before running the model.
I’ve found that these threads really point out who is and isn’t a gambler, any sort of tabletop gamer (RPGs, war games, whatever), XCOM player, sports fan, or similar. All of the above know that low probability events can and do happen with regularity. Especially when you only get one trial for the effect to resolve, trying to make some larger point on that one event is folly.
It’s fairly common. I recall seeing people struggle to understand the difference between “fortune telling” and “modeling” in climate change discussions. You could point them to pages in research where they modeled three different scenarios - here’s the case when CO2 increases at current rates, here’s if it lowers, here’s if there are a lot of volcanic eruptions, etc. - to try and help them understand that no one is trying to predict the future, that’s not what we’re looking at.