I feel like traditional pundits got pissed off because he kept wrecking their narratives. And he upset them further by turning political prognostication into something understandable by common readers -- instead of something only pointy-hatted political wizards could divine with the right amount of eye-of-newt and other secret ingredients.
Anyway: The New York Times should've worked harder to keep him. They should fire Tom Friedman and Maureen Dowd and put those resources into the kind of analysis Nate Silver espoused. Y'know, the "actual journalism" kind.
>And he upset them further by turning political prognostication into something understandable by common readers -- instead of something only pointy-hatted political wizards could divine with the right amount of eye-of-newt and other secret ingredients.
How did he do that?
If anything, I would argue the opposite, because his model is proprietary and his explanations (presumably deliberately) vague. 538 is awash with numbers but the algorithms used to generate them are the very definition of "eye-of-newt and other secret ingredients".
He effectively gave us the equation and kept secret most of the coefficients (though he explained how to choose many of those coefficients). That wouldn't be acceptable for academic purposes, but it seems quite reasonable for journalistic purposes (and is certainly more than any typical political "analyst" provides). He also couldn't give out all the raw data that went into the analyses, because much of it was stuff he had to pay for. Getting past those paywalls and assembling a comprehensive database of polling information is almost certainly the bulk of the work necessary for reproducing his results.
Silver basically said "here are the exact probabilities we have calculated for these races and here is the gist of our methodology [1]". If that doesn't cut through the rhetoric, opinion, and 'expert analysis' that plagues MSM political coverage, I don't know what else possibly could.
> 538 is awash with numbers but the algorithms used to generate them are the very definition of "eye-of-newt and other secret ingredients".
I agree. I much prefer the (simpler) work of Sam Wang from the Princeton Election Consortium (http://election.princeton.edu/) who did release MATLAB code of his work and his data sources so you could do it yourself. Somehow, Nate Silver got all the media attention though.
>Somehow, Nate Silver got all the media attention though.
Yes, somehow the young, geekily attractive popular sports author, whose blog on an extremely popular alternative news site grew a significant cult following, got all the mainstream media attention. It is extremely surprising that said media attention did not go to the duo of crusty, obscure, highfalutin Ivy-league academics instead.
I'm not sure if they could compete. Disney/ESPN is as deep pocketed, lets him get closer to sports (don't forget, he made his name originally as the guy who created PECOTA), and gives him as much or more freedom as the NYT. Also, I don't doubt he looked at what ESPN has allowed Grantland to become under Bill Simmons.
I think he took the easy path. Probably a lot more money, but also he gets to work on sports predictions instead of angering relatively powerful people.
It's up to him to take whichever path he chooses, and he's not morally better or worse for choosing any over another.
Now that MSM has seen what's possible when logic and statistical analysis is applied to journalism, I'd imagine they'll be able to find a team to reproduce or at least mimic what Silver did in 2012.
I really don't think he cares about angering powerful people. He cares about his freedom to work on what he wants, which ESPN has done an admirably good job of allowing Simmons to do with Grantland.
> And he upset them further by turning political prognostication into something understandable by common readers -- instead of something only pointy-hatted political wizards could divine with the right amount of eye-of-newt and other secret ingredients.
I couldn't agree more. My respect for the NYT is shaky and them letting Nate Silver leave while keeping the vacuous talking heads you named is just shameful.
It sounds like they made Nate an incredible offer and were willing to meet any of his demands. It sounds like they would have done anything to keep him.
Their offer to him was already grating to many others at the Times, I imagine. They offered him quite the little staff, and expansion into any topic he wanted.
I don't think his decision to leave was about their offer, that, or ESPN/ABC just dreamed bigger and gave him a bigger offer.
Either way, I'm psyched to see that he's getting brand separation and returning to his website along with a staff and the ability to write about whatever he wants.
I'm glad Nate walked. He was always a poor fit at the New York Times.
Actually Krugman is also a poor fit. I wish he'd walk away and just keep doing what he does independently. At least then I wouldn't have to go into privacy mode to read his articles.
Absolutely agree! Kurgman is a poor fit for any media outlet that tries to appeal to a mainstream audience. It is just saddening that such a brilliant academic mind now dedicates his life to partisan punditry.
Well, I love the concept of proto-Krugman as much as you, but nothing really keeps Krugman at NYT. He obviously enjoys the influence that punditry brings him over flexing his academic mind.
I am not sure if this is real influence or perceived influence. But it would be extremely interesting to get his personal take on his very own path towards punditry. In my opinion becoming just another shouting voice in the wind weakened his expert opinion that he previously had through his academic credentials. Previously quoting Krugman had at least some a general appeal, but today it is making a political statement.
Read this NiemanLab article from 2010. It was always clear (to me at least and a few others) that the NYT thing was just a step along the way (partnership vs acquisition - 3 yr contract, etc):
I don't think Friedman and Dowd should be mutually exclusive with him. It's multiple avenues towards the truth - see who gets their first. When he's correct, it's good for science and math.
On the data journalism mailing list, we've had a small discussion about how Nate could be replaced by any of the other data-minded journalists...it's not because his work was simple, but Silver himself has said that his analysis is straightforward and the math is accessible...the difference is that Silver gives a damn about context and analysis In a methodological way.
He definitely brings in good writing talents and a possibly unmatched inquisitiveness...but his methods and predictive analysis aren't irreplaceable. And yes, part of the draw is the brand that he's worked tirelessly to build...but this is a brand built on verifying results...I.e. being conclusively right....if the Times were to bring in another blogger who predicts the 2014 Congressional race to a T, and explains his/her methods and shows a real love for it, I'll subscribe to that blog and not give a whit about how many years of blogging they've done.
Contrast this with the irreplaceable Roger Ebert. He was incomparable as a writer, but his brand was built on something very subjective...and thus, once he's gone, it's hard to justify going back to RogerEbert.com, no matter how great of critics there are to replace him. Roger's brand is based more on long-built loyalty...Silver's brand is more based on making verifiable hypotheses and being correct...time and time again.
Which mailing list? There seem to be several on this topic.
Also, you're probably right, there are at least three other prominent electoral college forecasters who write well, were as accurate as Nate, and who could possibly be contracted to provide the same analysis and commentary: Andrew Tannenbaum [1], Drew Linzer [2], and Sam Wang [3].
Unlike Nate, forecasting is not their primary career, but it's clearly a labor of love for them and who knows what could be worked out with the right offer. If I were in charge at the NYT I'd be starting up conversations with these and any others doing similar work, stat.
I think the added value that any of these forecasters, including Silver, is greatly overstated. When their accuracy is touted it is usually based on the prediction the day before the election. Is that really useful?
More importantly you can get the same predictive power by just directly using recent polling data.
>When their accuracy is touted it is usually based on the prediction the day before the election.
That's not true in Nate's case at least. One of his biggest wins was debunking some of the BS "narratives" that pundits tried to spring during the election long before election day, the one about "Romney's momentum" in the final weeks of the election being the most memorable one.
Linzer also did a postmortem where he looked at, among other things, accuracy and predictive power of the model at different points in the election [1].
>Is that really useful?
An order of magnitude moreso than traditional punditry, not least because it's honest about what it can and can't tell you, namely "if the election were held today, this is the most likely outcome". No more, no less.
>More importantly you can get the same predictive power by just directly using recent polling data.
You do realize that's exactly what these guys do, right? The problem is, which polling data do you use? They provide a scientific answer to that question. Instead of cherry picking, they use it all, and weight it based on past accuracy and other factors.
I didn't communicate my point effectively. Let me try again.
I believe strongly in quantitative analysis of election data. I place zero value in punditry, especially from main stream media. What I don't believe is that some of these complicated models, Silver's in particular, are meaningfully superior to predicting the election by trivially applying recent polling data augmenting it perhaps with a simple weighted combination of polls based on recency or sample size.
I take as a given that Silver's model is better than punditry. I am skeptical that it is better than the trivial model which any undergraduate stats student would cook up.
> The problem is, which polling data do you use? They provide a scientific answer to that question. Instead of cherry picking, they use it all, and weight it based on past accuracy and other factors.
What I dispute is whether the "other factors", which is the secret-sauce that allows Silver to give the impression he has a uniquely predictive model, have any real value.
Thanks for the Linzer link. I have to take time to read it carefully but on first glance it again shows one of the things I take issue with: If you are going to claim that a model is accurate you should be asking, compared to what? How can you justify a complex model if you aren't even going to try to show that it is better than some trivial baseline?
> I take as a given that Silver's model is better than punditry. I am skeptical that it is better than the trivial model which any undergraduate stats student would cook up.
This seems quite easy to test. Has anyone done so yet?
I wouldn't say there is a canonical baseline model but your example would be a reasonable place to start. Weighted average by sample size is a straightforward modification. Just using the most recent reliable poll would also be interesting.
I think most of the extra value you could add would be from analyzing the poll data to get a sense of which polls were unreliable.
I was skeptical when Nate Silver first got picked up by the NY Times; I was an avid follower of his site when it was independent (during campaign years).
But, the Times really did a great job of supporting his work. The infographics and visualizations and interactive graphs that they produced -- typically with D3.js, which was cool to see -- were really second-to-none. (Who can forget http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2012/11/02/us/politics/pa... ?)
Visualizations don't seem to be Nate Silver's bailiwick, so that leaves me feeling a little disappointed to see him leaving.
Nate's a clever fellow though, I'm looking forward to seeing what he does with ESPN.
The graphic you linked is absolutely gorgeous. I had(sadly) forgotten about it and I appreciate you linking it again :)
As a long time Nate follower, he is very good at posting basic graphs alongside very strong explanations of said graphs. However, he has very little skill when it comes to more creative, targeted, unique graphs like the one that you linked.
However, he's a smart dude and ESPN has plenty of resources. I'm sure he'll be fine.
Meta comment: the institutionalized role of the "public editor" as a kind of quasi-independent internal advocate for the interests of the public has fascinated me for a while. They generally have no real power, but are given a platform and considerable independence, and are supposed to help hold newspapers to their stated interest in informing the public, with an expectation that they will be critical to some degree. So they can write posts like this, which normally would only come from outside sniping, but with better internal access to sources, and an officially sanctioned platform.
I've on occasion wondered if it would be beneficial for companies in other fields to adopt such a role. Could Google regain some trust and goodwill if it appointed a "public editor" with a suitably credible background, a degree of independence, and a mandate to advocate for the public interest?
Interesting idea, but I think public companies just don't have the culture for this level of self-criticism. The job would inevitably become corrupted somehow, subject to spin and influence from the powers within the company.
I think what should be happening is that investigative journalists in the financial sector should do a better job of finding sources within public companies, who are willing to leak information about practices and policies that are against the company's publicly stated positions, and/or are hurting shareholders, employees, the environment, and so on.
Example: why don't we see detailed leaks about NSA actions at the ISP's, carriers, and large web companies?
"Public editor" is basically a particular incarnation of ombudsman. One thing common to ombudsman roles is that they're powerless and routinely ignored. They're the equivalent of "We are taking this seriously.", a meaningless gesture designed to distract and obfuscate. The people who take such roles are simply pawns.
Sorry, but I have to call this out as blanket, misguided and uninformed criticism. I've been a frequent reader of the Times ombudsman in the 10 or so years since it was put in place after the Jayson Blair scandal. Sullivan has been the most incisive, most responsive of all the ombudsmen so far.
You're right that the position is toothless...she has no ability to fire people or allocate resources of her own. What she does have in terms of power is getting to say whatever she wants, about anyone at the Times, without fear of being fired. She's like an internal affairs cop (who themselves have limited direct power) but who is guaranteed a spot in print and on web in America's biggest paper.
What other companies have such a position? If you're thinking, "X tech company who got hacked and wrote a lovely apology letter about it"...well, then you thoroughly misunderstand the public editor's province. Her equivalent at tech company X would be someone who interviewed the engineers who fucked up and then put their names and quotes into print...not someone who does PR apologetics for the company.
She was among the first under the Times masthead to point out that their incoming CEO had some major problems and to say what many were privately thinking. No, she didn't get him fired or removed...but again, that's not her purview. Her role is to raise awareness and stir the pot in a way that most people internally will never do. She is most certainly not a "pawn"
> What she does have in terms of power is getting to say whatever she wants, about anyone at the Times, without fear of being fired.
Do you really think a corporation would allow serious injury to come to its reputation especially when its reputation is critical to its business?
Do you think if the public editor starting leveling serious critique at the NYT in the vein of FAIR, Media Lens or Chomsky they would retain their position? Do you think the NYT would ever appoint members of those organizations as public editors?
The position is generally given to a veteran journalist...Sullivan was formerly the editor of the Buffalo News. So to answer your question, she, and others before her, aren't likely to launch bombs at the NYT because like most members of a group, you have enough experience to know that controversies are more complicated underneath the surface.
So no, they're not going to hire someone who is either actively bent on discrediting the newspaper...because that would imply the newspaper execs believe that the newspaper is something to be destroyed. The position is meant to be one that improves the newspaper and its accountability to the readers. Many of her columns raise questions and doubts about Times' coverage, but the expectation is that this makes the newsroom a better place...similar to how transparency in government ostensibly makes it better in the long run.
But, on the other hand, if Sullivan became the David Souter of the Times...she would be for all intents and purposes, difficult to fire without creating a shitstorm. I'm not sure what's in the NYT's actual 4-year-contract with her, but barring her committing some journalistic crime (like plagiarism), it's not likely she can be removed for the content of her criticism.
The position is given to someone that is sympathetic to corporate journalism, it has nothing to do with being a "veteran". And the fact that "complicated" issues, as defined of course by someone employed by the NYT, are off-limits just serve to bolster my point. Notwithstanding the fact that nearly all of the important criticisms are dead simple. Why are the main issues raised by serious media critics, like systemic bias and corporate influence, never raised by the public editor?
The intent of real criticism is to improve the actual role of the newspaper in relation to the public. The NYT doesn't hire people who do real criticism because real accountability to the public isn't the main incentive of the NYT: revenue and power relations are. The illusion of accountability is necessary, which is why they have the public editor in the first place, because otherwise people wouldn't buy their products, be influenced by their messages and see their ads.
It is the height of absurdity to believe that someone who gets paid by an organization would be unbiased in its criticism of it or that they would act in the interests of a third party, in this case the public, from whom they receive no direct benefit.
And yet, your comment provides no relevant information I didn't already possess. Shocking that two people with identical knowledge can reach different conclusions, isn't it?
I think this is a needlessly cynical take on the issue, especially in the context of a news disseminating organization like the NYT. The purpose of the public editor is not necessarily to change anything, but to give some insight into the machinery of the news process. Unlike ombudspersons (yeah, went there), they do not need to be heeded to be effective at their role, which is to give the audience context to evaluate the news.
The New York Times Public Editor position was explicitly referred to by the New York Times as an ombudsman[1][2], and it was created in response to a massive ethics scandal. The role has nothing to do with giving the public "context".
It's interesting that he would go to a sports network over the culture clash between statistics and narrative. Sports has traditionally been extremely negative on "stats geeks", and favored narrative explanations, along with factors like "grit" and "determination" and that kind of thing. Silver's own former work in sabermetrics was a frequent target of pot-shots from ESPN commentators for years. There used to be a blog on that kind of anti-intellectualism in sports commentary (written by people who post-blog went on to write for the TV series Parks and Recreation): http://www.firejoemorgan.com/
I actually think the opposite: Sports is full of stats geeks. The whole essence of sports is statistical: Who gets how many points? Who runs faster? Who throws faster? Who's taller? Heavier? Who's highest ranked? Stories glue all of this together, but sports = stats.
I think of that as more akin to how political pundits use polls: they cite numbers, but they object to the use of statistics as an analytical tool to tie them together. The Moneyball approach in baseball was hugely controversial, as were (are?) sabermetricians like Silver trying to push predictive statistics like VORP and FIP over the more traditional descriptive statistics. Perhaps more to the point, also to challenge traditional narratives (not that different from the political horse-race narratives) of "momentum" and "choking" and "playoff runs" with statistical analysis. The above-cited Joe Morgan (ESPN commentator 1990-2010) was a famous example of ranting on air constantly about this kind of thing. One of his more notorious comments was that on-base percentage (OBP) is a stupid statistic because he doesn't like people "clogging up the basepaths". Perhaps that genre of ESPN commentator is finally on the way out.
>Perhaps that genre of ESPN commentator is finally on the way out.
There is room for both, IMO. The 40+ year old crowd are largely comprised of people who are "done learning things" (a quote my father actually told me when I told him about my baseball research), so you need to have the Joe Morgans of the world.
But since all of the winning teams in baseball rely on an analytical approach, it's never been more obvious that nerds dominate the level of the sport where decisions are made. And commentators are shifting as a result of that, since it's just natural.
But you do need both, often because the people in the 2nd group tend to have worse social/presentation skills than the individuals in the 1st group. No slight intended (I belong mostly in the 2nd group, for god's sake), but it is not an unfair generalization.
I think, at least in baseball, the culture has come around to the importance of statistics and numbers in the game. The fact that Silver has a decent track record in his analysis and that sabermetrics has been showing some positive results probably make him a welcome voice in ESPN's baseball programming. Numbers are a fun thing to show a viewer and to make comparisons with and I think ESPN is coming around to that (they developed their own QB Rating for football a few years ago).
That said, it also makes him an interesting counter to some sports pundits when there are invariably differences between the numbers and perception of players and teams. This will make for some good television. Heck, ESPN just started a show called "By the Numbers" a few months/years ago, so I think there really is a move to numbers-based analysis in sports. The key is just making digestible to the general public, which Silver has been very good at on 538.
Readers prefer reading human narratives over rational analysis in all areas, whether sports or politics. It's not even really about a distaste for mathematical analysis so much as a distaste for cold rationality in general. There's lots of fascinating strategy involved with blocking schemes in American football ("if I step here, he'll step here, so instead I move this way...") that are analytical but not numerical. With the occasional exceptional comment by John Madden, these are rarely discussed.
So you are right about the typical role of stats in sports. Commenters like chasing and lnanek2 are mistakenly keying on the fact that sports, having well-defined rules and human-constructed elements, are very easy to measure and so lots of numbers exist. As you correctly point out in reply to chasing, these numbers are simply thrown out there without actually being used in a coherent analysis.
Are you sure the blocking stuff has no numerical solution or reasonable analysis?
I would not be surprised if the "how to block" mini-game could be productively analyzed in a game theoretic fashion in terms of a few discrete tactics and empirical success probabilities given the tactics choices. From that data, you can compute equilibrium mixed strategies for both the offensive and defensive positions. This was kind of analysis was by economists for the determining equilibrium strategies for making/defending penalty kicks.
http://www2.owen.vanderbilt.edu/mike.shor/courses/game-theor...
Of course, the blocking in American football situation is much harder to analyze/collect data for, because it's not just a 1 on 1 successfully blocked or not, but rather the outcome of the play that matters.
Given a discrete list of tactics and enough data, it's of course possible to generate a best strategy for any particular situation numerically. So yes, if your question is "should I pull block or chip block here?" and you are willing to throw out all the information specific to the situation not found in the data (e.g. the fact that the left tackle's ankle is a bit sore today), then you can do it.
But the point is that detailed blocking foot work is not adequately captured by such a framework (unless you're going to do detailed numerical simulations of every part of everyone's body). There is no concise way to explain exactly why chop blocks work well in certain situations, and why a hypothetical block which seems mechanically similar is completely useless in the same situation. Human bodies are complicated, and the answer is usually just "empirically, that's how it works out".
> Sports has traditionally been extremely negative on "stats geeks"
On the flip side, bookies have always been taken seriously.
The average sports fan might find the commentators more amusing or moving but if you ask them who has a better handle on what's really going to happen, a professional bookie or a commentator, I bet you'll get the right answer.
You should read Silver's book; "The Signal and the Noise". There he reveals that he was a poker and baseball geek long before and much more than a political analyst. In the book he actually shows respects for both views.
Obviously you don't watch sports. "Teams down by 10 points in the middle of the third quarter while on the road in November during a waxing moon have won 23.3% of the time in the last 16 years."
Traditionally, but not recently. Sports has been very focused on statistics for at least the last decade, probably longer. Most large sports organizations have dedicated statistics departments and make many of their decisions based on the same.
That's a good point. I was thinking more about sports commentary, rather than what happens in the teams themselves, but it's true that teams have been all over statistics for years. I do think commentators, perhaps conscious of their role as public faces of an entertainment product, have been more resistant to statistics-driven commentary, and have instead played up horse-race type narratives.
To be fair, when you're watching the game, horse-race commentary is just straight up more fun to hear. I love hearing a radio announcer just get excited about what's happening. However, even live, they do throw in some statistics. Admittedly, these are the sort of post-hoc statistics that aren't good for anything (e.g. "they win 90% of their away games that fall on Friday").
Offline, fans of some sports are almost exclusively about statistics and numbers. Baseball is famous for this.
There is a big difference between "focused on statistics" and a valid statistical approach. Quoting ERA, Wins, RBIs, and even advanced metrics like WAR/FIP/VORP is totally different than validating methods through regression, machine learning, and the like.
Everyone is happy to point at "stats." Almost nobody wants to hear about confidence intervals.
More trivia than stats. That is a distinction Silver was big on in his first incarnation as sports statistician, and he got huge pushback from it. Nobody in traditional baseball commentary wanted to talk about VORP, say, and they certainly didn't want to root their commentary in solid statistical analysis. Traditional baseball use of statistics (I mainly follow baseball) has been very much of the trivia variety: this is the first time a right-handed batter has has two hits in the same inning against a left-handed pitcher while the wind is between 12mph and 15mph on a Tuesday. Not so much about backing up your opinions with solid predictive statistics.
The geeks are winning that culture clash. ESPN.com now includes a lot of advanced metrics in their stats and last year in the Mike Trout vs Miguel Cabrera MVP race they discussed why Mike Trout was the favorite of the new school at length, constantly discussing his obscene WAR[1].
Nate Silver was ahead of his time on those advanced metrics but he was undoubtedly one of the pioneers. If people had been more receptive to his brand of statistics five years ago he likely never even goes into politics. Sports was his first love (along with poker, which he goes out of his way to not mention these days, unfortunately. He even obscured his username on the largest poker forum[2], so it would be harder to find with search engines).
Completely random thought that probably means nothing, but is worth noting: he's openly gay[3]. With the tide on gay athletes turning sharply and quickly, I have to think that factored into his decision. Perhaps he is hopeful he can play a role in that, being the champion of the gay athlete or at least the one guy at ESPN they know will be on their side.
slightly off topic, but it's absurd to think that Trout should have won the MVP, when Cabrera was the first Triple Crown winner in 45 years. I don't care what his WAR was.
That was the old school argument, verbatim. The new school disagrees. I don't really have an opinion but I'm pretty certain Nate agrees with the new school and would disagree strongly with your view.
The new school argument is something like: the Triple Crown is an overvalued and superficial accomplishment and giving a player the MVP based solely on that is making a similar error to the scenes in Moneyball where the scouts cared about irrelevant things like whether a player has an attractive girlfriend or how he gets on base (walks vs hits).
WAR is a nice stat as far as a general manager is concerned (or for fantasy), but it shouldn't decide who is the MVP. Last year Cabrera had the best hitting season anyone has had in decades. He finished 4th in WAR because of various weightings given to defense, baserunning, position played, and the bizarre and nebulous "replacement player." WAR is also sadly calculated differently by everyone, making it harder to judge as a useful metric. A single + SB is calculated as being worth more than a double. Why?
I have no problem with using WAR as something to include in the discussion, but it should not be the complete deciding factor.
I still think it's funny that the Times framed him joining them as being a huge win for him, lending him credibility, etc. The benefit to Silver was certainly money, but it was really more about the Times joining Silver than vice versa, in terms of political analysis.
I'm not at all surprised he moved on - I suspect that they expected him to be grateful, when the reverse would have been more reasonable.
At the time it was a win for him. It gave him credibility, a steady paycheck and guaranteed lasting exposure at a time when he could have easily faded into obscurity after the 08 elections were over.
Back then he was just a novelty with a website it looked like his 15 year old cousin built for him one weekend. And one who was going to find it very challenging to remain relevant until the next election cycle.
Now he's arguably outgrown them, having become a household name to anybody who follows politics closely, become a TV personality etc - but lets not rewrite history. He definitely stood on their shoulders to get where he is today, at least for the first year or two.
Nate's work was practically the definition of "disruptive" when he started and it's been a joy to follow him over the years. As far as papers go I happen to like the NY Times, so I'm a bit sad to see him go. But I'll gladly follow him no matter where he is. This is definitely much more of a loss for the Times than for Nate.
I'll be curious to see what he says about why he left. It's very easy to imagine several reasons the he found it hard to work for the Times. It was very interesting to me to see how hostile some folks were to him during the 2012 election cycle. He obviously threatened the viability of a great deal of the(mostly useless) political punditry that we see. I think it's hard to separate which parts of that hostility were conscious reactions to a perceived threat and which parts were an unconscious reaction to ideas of how the news should work.
I'm sure Nate will do a great job with ESPN and I hope he likes it more than his time with the Times.
ESPN has a ton of money (about $4.69/month from every cable subscriber in the country whether they watch sports or not, $10b total revenue), a big audience, and they could put him on ABC. They made him an offer he couldn't refuse.
Sounds like the NYT did everything they could to keep him, but against money and mass audience, prestige only takes you so far, especially when a stodgy old guard is fighting a rear guard action against you.
Not surprised that political journalists at the time were so threatened by his work, since it renders what they do utterly useless, and entirely about manufacturing drama and conflict and personality narratives when the numbers tell a more complete and more accurate story.
I'm not sure if people understand that Nate Silver likes sports. Under the tweed blazer and spectacles, the guy loves baseball. There are very few topics of study with more data points than baseball. Besides, there are sports 100% of the time during the year, and a US national election once every 4 (Senate and house races are boring).
Seriously, it may not have been about money or fit. If someone came along and said that you could continue to code software and get paid to do it, but didn't have to work for CrushSoul, Inc., anymore AND it was in something you found insanely fun and interesting, wouldn't you do it?
I just read Silver's book "The Signal and the Noise" and I think this makes a lot of sense. Silver never was a political junkie, as all the NYT political journalists are. He was drawn into political statistical analysis almost by accident: he saw how "noisy" the political analysis were and knew that he could do something about it. In the book he clearly shows that baseball and poker are a lot more interesting subjects for him.
Nate Silver is unique because he's more rational than most people. This is why he can effectively use data to see things that the data revealed all along.
So it's no surprise to me that he'd find it difficult to work for an organization like the NY Times... The NY Times was not only complicit in the Iraq war, but came out strongly against Julian Assange through a series of horrible articles.
The purpose of the NY Times is to serve powerful interests and to prevent the embarrassment of powerful people.
Just skimming many of the regular op-ed contributors and editorial writing gives a window into the mentality of the paper. It's coasting on past glories and continually offering a message to readers that the world is full of illegitimacy and suffering outside the US.
The sports stats on ESPN / Politics on ABC angle is hard to argue against. I like to think though that corporate parent Disney is really looking at the bigger picture here; how Silver fits into its Marvel and Star Wars acquisitions.
Setting aside all creative considerations, the Avengers remains one of Hollywood's most impressive acts of longterm chutzpah, building individual franchises out of B-string characters helmed by way outta left-field director choices and bringing them all together in one film years down the line.
They could, of course, rest on their laurels and churn out a triptych of Avengers movies, each with their orbiting solo films. But Disney thinks bigger than that. Picture the scene in Avengers 3 (after the credits, natch) where Galactus looms into view over Mos Eisley, Hans Solo all wtf. Turns out the next three Star Wars films have all been building to an Avengers/Star Wars merger, dragging in its wake 15 tv series, 45 ancillary films and a trail of comics so large that collectors turn collectivists in order to purchase vast communal warehouses to store their collections.
As the credits roll on Star Wars/Avengers 3, we'd probably forgive Disney if the final card announced that they were following billg into philanthropy. They now account for 10% of US GDP and President Cory Booker is terrified that the gravy train is about to come off the rails and plunge the US economy into recession. BOOM. Audiences gasp. It's a post credits sequence. The camera tracks slowly through a darkened office, over a minimalist, uncluttered desk, towards a high-backed chair that's facing the wall. The phone rings. A hand reaches out to put it on speaker phone. We hear an efficient sounding secretary: "Connecting Mr Fett" and then a pause, the sound of breathing perhaps before Fett says "I'm sorry I failed you". The tension is palpable, as the chair slowly begins to rotate towards the camera. OMG. It's Nate Silver, wizard. "No no, Boba, it's all exactly as I planned it."
Cue the incorporation of 538 into the Star Wars/Avengers franchise, a development freighted so subtly in the accumulated oeuvre to date that only Nate Silver's super algorithm can track and maintain a consistent canon, further fuelling a blog empire.
There are so many more inputs and outcomes to model in sports than in politics, I'm not surprised that it's a more interesting subject matter for a statistician. He never seemed too much into the wonkier side of politics.
The science of predicting election outcomes may continue to be improved, but perhaps it's essentially solved in a way that sports prediction isn't.
Definitely agree that ABC will host election coverage, and that Nate will appear on the network!
But did want to mention that ESPN is 80% owned by The Walt Disney Company (which also owns ABC)... and 20% owned by Hearst.
Here's the history of ESPN's ownership, from Wikipedia: "In 1984, ABC made a deal with Getty Oil to acquire ESPN. ABC retained an 80% share, and sold 20% to Nabisco. The Nabisco shares were later sold to Hearst Corporation, which still holds a 20% stake today. In 1986, ABC was purchased for $3.5 billion by Capital Cities Communications. In 1996, The Walt Disney Company purchased Capital Cities/ABC for $19 billion and picked up the 80% stake in ESPN at that time."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_ESPN
I've met with Hearst a few times, and their executives love to mention their 20% stake in ESPN!
I want to know details about how he constructs his models. At least in terms of what kinds of models he uses, what types of statistics are needed. Is it all "Bayesian"? I could not find much via google, anyone have pointers?
I wonder if the strengthening paywall at NYTimes was a factor.
I hit the ESPN 'premium' wall far less often than at NYTimes. 'Grantland' has been mentioned as a model for the Silver subbrand at ESPN; are any 'Grantland' stories premium-only?
Sell any NYT stock you are holding. Nate was one of the last honest things at the increasingly craven, frumpy NYT, where Occupy didn't merit coverage until the third month, and the Iraq war got the greased-rails treatment.
Don't forget who has forsaken their credibility. Never forget that. It is only by remembering who has lied that we avoid future lies.
Would you lend money to a bankrupt company? No? Why then do you read the NYT?
Anyway: The New York Times should've worked harder to keep him. They should fire Tom Friedman and Maureen Dowd and put those resources into the kind of analysis Nate Silver espoused. Y'know, the "actual journalism" kind.