And actually, I think you can make the case that Silver was too conservative.
Based on what I know about methodology of polls, Silver's approach is better. If your possible errors are all independent, then Wang's approach is correct. But when you introduce methodology dependencies between polls, it is going to be much more confident than it should be.
Ironically if Silver is right, then he'd also predict that with some high probability, at a guess somewhere in the 70-80% range, Wang's numbers are likely to look better than his. But in those outliers there are some shocking results.
For the record, a fundamentally similar methodological error to Wang's helped Wall Street think that bonds backed by subprime mortgages were safe.
Exactly, there's some epistomolgy at work here. There are no first-principle models of polling bias that fit the data. Silver took a history of poll-vs-election skew as a proxy, while Wang ignored the issue and looked only at sampling error (I think -- honestly I don't know for sure).
As it happens, in this election (and across hundreds of polls) there was no poll bias. The polls were right.
Now, is that because we're lucky or because polls have gotten better, or both? I don't know that this is answerable. My intuition (but that's all it is) agrees with you: I wouldn't have put down a bet for Obama given Wang's 100:1 odds, though I might have at Silver's 10:1. Arbitrage vs. Intrade's 2:1 looks a lot like a sure thing in hindsight...
Based on what I know about methodology of polls, Silver's approach is better. If your possible errors are all independent, then Wang's approach is correct. But when you introduce methodology dependencies between polls, it is going to be much more confident than it should be.
Ironically if Silver is right, then he'd also predict that with some high probability, at a guess somewhere in the 70-80% range, Wang's numbers are likely to look better than his. But in those outliers there are some shocking results.
For the record, a fundamentally similar methodological error to Wang's helped Wall Street think that bonds backed by subprime mortgages were safe.