Nate Silver
Nate Silver
Nathaniel Read "Nate" Silveris an American statistician and writer who analyzes baseballand elections. He is currently the editor-in-chief of ESPN's FiveThirtyEight blog and a Special Correspondent for ABC News. Silver first gained public recognition for developing PECOTA, a system for forecasting the performance and career development of Major League Baseball players, which he sold to and then managed for Baseball Prospectus from 2003 to 2009...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionJournalist
Date of Birth13 January 1978
CityEast Lansing, MI
CountryUnited States of America
We want to get 80%-85% of predictions right, not 100%. Or else we calibrated our estimates in the wrong way.
If the state polls are right, then Mr. Obama will win the Electoral College. If you can't acknowledge that after a day when Mr. Obama leads 19 out of 20 swing-state polls, then you should abandon the pretense that your goal is to inform rather than entertain the public.
Shakespeare's plays often turn on the idea of fate, as much drama does. What makes them so tragic is the gap between what his characters might like to accomplish and what fate provides them.
All I know is that I have way more stuff that I want to write about than I possibly have time to.
The quest for certainty in forecasting outcomes can be the enemy of progress.
I know it's cheaper to fund an op-ed columnist than a team of reporters, but I think it confuses the mission of what these great journalistic brands are about,
To my friends, I’m kind of sexually gay but ethnically straight,
A lot of things can't be modeled very well.
Data scientist is just a sexed up word for statistician.
Not only does political coverage often lose the signal—it frequently accentuates the noise.
Well the way we perceive accuracy and what accuracy is statistically are really two different things.
If you aren't taking a representative sample, you won't get a representative snapshot.
We look at all the polls, not just the Gallup Poll. So, it's kind of like if you have, you know, four out of five doctors agree that reducing cholesterol reduces your risk of a heart attack, Gallup is like the fifth doctor.
If I had a spreadsheet on my computer, it looked like I was busy.