I was looking for something like baseball, where there’s a lot of data and the competition was pretty low. That’s when I discovered politics.Nate Silver • Discussing his move into the political realm after years as a baseball statistics nerd. The Guardian’s piece on Silver is super-fascinating.
Top: Conservative commentator Jonah Goldberg’s hit piece on Nate Silver, published one hour ago. Bottom Left: The current map on the New York Times home page. Bottom Right: Nate Silver’s map.
It’s a little early to know exactly what we can learn from social media metrics. I think the way we’ll be looking at this stuff will be very different in four years, in eight years, in twelve years. For right now, we’re kind of in an awkward adolescent age … we’re out of the classical innocent era of our youth where you could just call someone on the phone. But we’re not sure what the substitute for that is yet.With all the recent brewhaha about Nate Silver’s controversial projections for tonight’s outcome, and while we’re all waiting for some legit data to come back from the polls, it seems like a good time to revisit our exclusive interview with Mr. Silver back in September. Enjoy! (via election)
Probability is counterintuitive.
The idea that the chance of something happening doesn’t change is hard for us to wrap our heads around. Understandably so—if I tell you that you have a 70 percent chance of making a putt, most people would expect that after ten putts, seven will have gone in the hole. This, however, is not the case.
That’s what’s hard to grasp about probability, the idea that one result has no effect on what happens in the future.
Related to this great piece (a topic which Stefan totally beat me to, because I had a half-written, not-as-good take hiding in my drafts) is the rebuke he got from his public editor on Thursday. If you ask me, the New York Times’ public editor, Margaret Sullivan, totally should have run a statistical model on whether that column was a good idea.
— Ernie @ ShortFormBlog
A very smart take on the political journalism topic du jour.
Shorter Dean Chambers in the Arlington Conservative Examiner: Nate Silver is wrong about polling because he’s not a real man:
Nate Silver is a man of very small stature, a thin and effeminate man with a soft-sounding voice that sounds almost exactly like the “Mr. New Castrati” voice used by Rush Limbaugh on his program. In fact, Silver could easily be the poster child for the New Castrati in both image and sound. Nate Silver, like most liberal and leftist celebrities and favorites, might be of average intelligence but is surely not the genius he’s made out to be. His political analyses are average at best and his projections, at least this year, are extremely biased in favor of the Democrats.
HT: Justin Green.
There’s been something of a rhetorical war happening lately on the topic of polling mavens – Nate Silver, who runs FiveThirtyEight.com for The New York Times, has been running a prediction model since the 2008 presidential election, when he famously called the winner in 49 of 50 states. Conversely, Dean Chambers founded UnskewedPolls.com, a site dedicated to undoing the allegedly liberal bias of polling samples. In his attempt to take on Silver personally, Chambers reveals a deeply unpleasant side – when your argument over somebody’s integrity requires you to attack their appearance, voice, and masculinity (as well as introducing them, in the first paragraph, by copying a line directly from their Wikipedia article), that’s not a position of strength you’re signaling.
A very good point. We tend to forget that, as crazy as it sounds, some people’s idea of fun doesn’t involve reading about the debt limit, America’s credit rating, or parliamentary procedure in the United States Senate. source
Just as the conditions promising at least a pretty bad Democratic year have been with us for some time, the uncertainty has been with us all along as well, like a virus with an exceptionally long latency period; on Tuesday, we’ll see which of the polls it has infected.FiveThirtyEight guy Nate Silver • Offering a key piece of final analysis that we should probably take into the elections today. While the polls have largely remained consistent about how many seats the Democrats will lose and the Republicans will gain, it’s good to keep at least a little bit of perspective no matter how you lean. Remember, back in 1994 the analysts were relatively consistent too, but in the end, the Republicans did way better than most of them expected – by a long shot. No matter the case, you should probably get out there and vote your heart out for both the ballot measures and the candidates – unless you live in DC and know the results of every election already. We’ll have lots of key results from our non-existent glass-enclosed nerve center at a late-night coffee shop in Dupont Circle tomorrow night. source (via)
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