Goldman Sachs model to predict World Cup game results didn’t come close
&gt; And in any case, the model only generated probabilities of winning a game and advancing, and no team was given more than an 18.5 percent chance of winning the World Cup.<p>&gt; [...]<p>&gt; But Goldman Sach’s misfire is perhaps the most curious.<p>The model said, that there is a lot of uncertainty, and as it happens, it was entirely correct. A World Cup chance of 18.5 percent means, that 4 out of 5 times the team will not win, and that that is the highest chance does not say much about the model.<p>And in general this is one instance of the well practiced journalistic technique to wait for results first and then define a bar afterwards to criticize the results according to standards that did not exist when the performance happened. (I guess in this case it is even worse, we could construct a reasonable test of the model performed, I have the suspicion that that was in the original paper and that the journalist either did not understand it, or, more likely, choose to ignore it in favor of writing a better story.)