Comment by basch | Hacker News Reader

Comment by basch | Hacker News Reader

I find Silver's celebrity worship slightly irritating.

>FiveThirtyEight and the PEC both predicted the outcome of the 2012 presidential race with spectacular accuracy.

Markos Moulitsas and Drew Linzer (Daily Kos and Votamatic respectively) were both more accurate than Silver (https://www.dailykos.com/story/2012/11/14/1161465/-More-accu... http://rationality.org/2012/11/09/was-nate-silver-the-most-a...) AND they teamed up this year (http://elections.dailykos.com/app/elections/2016/office/pres...) AND The Upshot is showing their forecast as the most confident in its projections (http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/upshot/presidential-...)

Why does Silver continue to be rewarded with praise of spectacular accuracy while Markos Moulitsas and Drew Linzer don't get mentioned? Hell, Silver and Wong are products OF Daily Kos. How can you write an entire article about forecasting accuracy and not even link to their site? At least The Upshot respects them enough to include them.

538 was big before it even went to the NYT. It was a pretty fresh take on things back then. It's not purely an academic exercise. Part of this is pure entertainment and Silver is better at that. It's a complex product he's selling and he's very good at it. I say hats off to him.

sure, but this specific article was about which election forcasts are true. Silver being the poster boy in pop culture is fine, but in this context he shouldnt be the prime example.

Well he was also quite good in 2008, and his writing in 2006 to 2012 was a must-read. Since then I've felt less tempted to refresh 538 every ten minutes, but that probably has less to do with a decline in his writing and more with the fact that I had already learned a lot from him and there wasn't much new.

Apart from any measures of accuracy, he does deserve the recognition to have invented the genre. Back in '08 there were I believe two people doing it – him and Tanenbaum's http://www.electoral-vote.com

Do you think this time its different because lots of people don't want to admit to voting for certain candidate for the fear of being labeled a misogynist. I don't think that was the case in 2012 ( or ever?).

what could make this election different is people going to vote, assuming the election is in the bag, and deciding what the hell ill vote third party. then this happens. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jesse_Ventura

could it be that they were affiliated with the dailykos?

the article's questioning the validity of all these estimates (usefulness), and you're mad the wrong guy got all the credit?

Moulitsas and Linzer don't use Silver's publicity firm. The models they all use are fairly questionable.

espn?

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