Goldman Sachs model to predict World Cup game results didn’t come close
> 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.> [...]> But Goldman Sach’s misfire is perhaps the most curious.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.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.)