Nate Silver on the Demise of FiveThirtyEight (natesilver.net)
- Reference: 0176643201
- News link: https://politics.slashdot.org/story/25/03/07/1339236/nate-silver-on-the-demise-of-fivethirtyeight
- Source link: https://www.natesilver.net/p/a-few-words-about-fivethirtyeight
> Last night, as President Trump delivered his State of the Union address, the Wall Street Journal reported that ABC News would lay off the remaining staff at 538 as part of broader cuts within corporate parent Disney. Having been through several rounds of this before, including two years ago when the staff was cut by more than half and my tenure expired too, I know it's a brutal process for everyone involved. It's also tough being in a business while having a constant anvil over your head, as we had in pretty much every odd-numbered (non-election) year from 2017 onward at 538/FiveThirtyEight. I don't know all of the staffers from the most recent iteration of the site, but the ones I have met or who I overlapped with are all extremely conscientious and hard-working people and were often forced to work double-duty as jobs were cut but frequently not replaced. My heart goes out to them, and I'm happy to provide recommendations for people I worked with there.
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> [...] The basic issue is that Disney was never particularly interested in running FiveThirtyEight as a business, even though I think it could have been a good business. Although they were generous in maintaining the site for so long and almost never interfered in our editorial process, the sort of muscle memory a media property builds early in its tenure tends to stick. We had an incredibly talented editorial staff, but we never had enough "product" people or strategy people to help the business grow and sustain itself. It's always an uphill battle under those conditions, particularly when it comes to recruiting and retaining staff, who were constantly being poached by outlets like the New York Times and the Washington Post.
[1] https://www.natesilver.net/p/a-few-words-about-fivethirtyeight
Nate trying to call polling a "real business"... (Score:5, Insightful)
Nate trying to call polling a "real business" is hilarious. Polling isn't an academic pursuit that creates value information about the world we live in, it's just political marketing. Polling only makes sense when it's done transparently, by an independent 3rd party. And Nate Silver, a professional pollster who is contracted by politicians for polling and marketing services, is obviously not an independent 3rd party.
Nate wasn't a genius. He was just a lucky degenerate who started a political marketing company. A company that failed miserably. His entire claim to fame is just a probabilistic outcome from gambling on politics. There were hundreds or thousands of people in the same position as Nate, making similar predictions. One of them was bound to be right. Essentially he was part of a decentralized "Baltimore Stockbroker Scam" [source: [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org].
There were a relatively small number of outcomes and a large number of predictors being platformed by the corporate media. One of them was bound to be right. Nate has never demonstrated any skillset other than marketing. And marketing is worthless to consumers so why would he have an audience?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_scams#Baltimore_Stockbroker_/_Psychic_Sports_Picks%5D
Re:Nate trying to call polling a "real business".. (Score:5, Informative)
Much opinion and not much knowledge in this comment.
Nate Silver was never a pollster. Nate Silver is a statistician. He started out with predictions about sport, especially league sports. The methods he learned there he used also for predictions of things like the Oscars or election results. He raised to fame when his predictions went against the common wisdom that Barack Obama was toast in his quest for re-election, because he noticed that election results in many states are correlated, that means, changes in polling results in one state are often mirrored in neighboring states. This has nothing to do with opinion, it's all about statistics.
His website is also the only one that in 2016 in the last update before the presidential election titled "Donald Trump is just a polling error away from the presidency". And that's how it went. The polling error for the average presidential election is about 3%, larger than the lead Hillary Clinton had in the last polling averages as published by 538, and so Nate Silver gave Donald Trump a 30% chance of winning the election, and a 30% chance is pretty good.
Whatever you think about Nate Silver, I know that your opinion is based on wrong information.
Margin of error [Re:Nate trying to call pollin...] (Score:2)
Yes. If he had just stayed rigorous with the way statistics works in the sciences, their final prediction should have been "2016 election result is too close to call", because the margin of error said that the difference between the candidates was not statistically significant. But the drive to make a firm prediction overwhelmed his push to keep the statistics rigorous.
Fivethirtyeight's post-election analysis of why the predictions weren't right was very insightful, however.
Assumptions had changed. (Score:2)
For a 2nd point of reference, I note that in the run up to the 2016 election his *reasoning* for his predictions was based on historical trends.
Before the party conventions he predicted Marco Rubio to be the candidate, because historically the position Marco held had been the candidate in many previous elections.
That's a basic fallacy. The "Baltimore Stockbroker" is more than a scam, it's a fallacy that we should watching for in our daily lives. It comes up in finance whenever you hear "this guy predicted t
Re: (Score:2)
"Nate didn't realize that the assumptions on which his math was based had changed."
But...Reagan happened and the Trump administration was quite literally the exact same campaign. Historically, his win was win was obvious.
Massive corporate media gatekeeps information from the public which essentially gives the cartel of 10 or so massive conglomerates the power to pick the president.
I would argue that a reasonable person, consuming a broad cross section of political marketing would realize that the medi
Re: (Score:2)
> Nate trying to call polling a "real business" is hilarious.
Fivethirtyeight isn't a polling site. It's a news site. They report on polling, but the polling is done by (a wide variety of) other organizations.
With that said, it was a news site occupying a very narrow niche. It was by far the best occupant of that niche, but the niche audience was pretty narrow.
Who needs polling (Score:2, Funny)
If we aren't going to have more elections?
Re: (Score:2)
Even if we do have elections, voter suppression is creating a growing gap between how people want to vote and how they can actually vote. Asking them about their intentions prior to the election is becoming increasingly irrelevant.
Huh! (Score:2)
Wow. Well, at least our Canadian [1]version [338canada.com] still seems to be going strong.
[1] https://338canada.com/
Fuck nate silver (Score:2)
Nobody cares
Nate made one decent model of a single election (Score:2)
And he did a good job of riding it as far as possible.
Who would have think that ABS does not care? (Score:2)
"The basic issue is that Disney was never particularly interested in running FiveThirtyEight as a business, even though I think it could have been a good business."
It does not take Superhero powers to figure out that small business like 538 do not typically thrive under the umbrella of big businesses like that. They are peanuts to them, and if typically does not even matter if they are good. I am sorry for the people who put their hearts into it, but maybe people will learn from this .... Nah, who am I kidd
Polling Averages (Score:2)
The site has really gone downhill since Nate Silver left. However, I am going to miss their [1]polling averages. [fivethirtyeight.com] Outlier polls make news, but the average tells the real story.
[1] https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/polls/
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
Congratulations. You are an idiot.
Re: (Score:1)
You guys have learned nothing I see. Never change!!!
Re: (Score:2)
I seriously doubt we'll see anything as overt as the US military occupying blue and swing states.
It's more likely we'll see a continuation of what happens now: gerrymandering and voter suppression.
Whatever side you're on, go ahead and work for your side to win. But above all, work for democracy. Respect the truth and the law.
Re: (Score:2)
Their [1]"Atlas of Redistricting" [fivethirtyeight.com] is a really nice visual tool as well that makes an important but pretty dry topic interesting to wrap your head around the alternatives.
[1] https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/redistricting-maps/
Re: (Score:2)
> The site has really gone downhill since Nate Silver left. However, I am going to miss their [1]polling averages. [fivethirtyeight.com] Outlier polls make news, but the average tells the real story.
I'll be sorry to see it go. It was one of the very few sites that tried to simply look at the data, without biasing what they see based on a political agenda telling them what they want to see.
[1] https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/polls/
Re: (Score:2)
Did you just say that data is irrelevant to capitalism?