Election Update: When To Freak Out About Shocking New Polls -FiveThirtyEight.Com

I get tired of the breathless reportage of each newly released poll. Today was a big such day. The reality is that, almost definitively, the poll is wrong. That is one of the reasons I like FiveThirtyEight. They weight the polls by reliability, sample size, etc., THEN aggregate them. That eliminates most of the outliers and gives a better feel for trends. Nate Silver recommends mostly ignoring them until August.

A well reasoned argument is like a diamond: impervious to corruption and crystal clear - and infinitely rarer.

Here, as elsewhere, people are outraged at what feels like a rigged game -- an economy that won't respond, a democracy that won't listen, and a financial sector that holds all the cards. - Robert Reich