FiveThirtyEight relaunches on NYTimes.com | Hacker News Reader

FiveThirtyEight relaunches on NYTimes.com

thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com

72 pointsdonohoe38 comments

Congrats to Nate Silver for his fantastic job. 538's success in predicting the 08 elections was really impressive and glad to see him get even more (well-deserved) coverage.

How about his failure in predicting UK elections results, US unemployment rate, Maine's same sex marriage vote, special Senate elections in Massachusetts? These are just a few examples that I remember. But then the NY Times thinks that Krugman deserves the coverage too...

You do realize that even people who have incredibly good prediction records, do get things wrong. You can't really point to a specific thing and say, "you suck because you didn't predict this". Look at the totality of their record.

And Krugman has a Nobel Prize in Economics, and numerous other awards for his work in Economics. I honestly think you'd be hardpressed to find a more qualified economist (on matters of economics). You may not agree with him, but I don't think anyone at the NYTimes is losing sleep grappling with the issue of if Paul Krugman is worthy of being in the paper.

The point was that selectively praising someone's accurate predictions without mentioning his failures is wrong.

Krugman is a partisan hack that has a Nobel Prize is one very specific area of economics. It does not qualify him to opine on all other areas.

The poster was clearly congratulating Nate, and then pointing out something specifically that Nate had done well.

It's like if you're congratulating Steve Jobs on a successful iPad launch. You aren't obligated to also mention all of the products he has worked on that haven't done so well.

And I hardly doubt anyone was trying to convince you, or any other reader on HN, that Nate may have mispredicted something. In fact, I'm going to go out on a limb and say that there is no one on this planet who has not made a false prediction.

But since you're so adamant about this, could you put together a list of his complete record with links?

And sure, Krugman has a Nobel Prize, Clark Medal, Ivy League tenured job, nominated for a Pulitzer, but he'll have to live with spec calling him a partisan hack.

I'm not sure anyone would mind that tradeoff.

No, that poster was claiming that his coverage was "well-deserved" and I disagreed. He was not obligated to mention his failures, but I did, and that apparently troubles you greatly for some reason. Silver's whole reputation is based on his assumed accuracy and that's why it is important to provide a more complete record of his predictions (not that my post claims to do that or that I would care enough to do that; since you are so impressed by him, you're welcome to try).

Krugman's reputation as a partisan hack that opines on matter he is ignorant about is among other economists with no fewer accomplishments (but his reputation as a pompous ass is among everyone else).

Eerie success is impressive. Routine failure is not anti-impressive.

People treat Google the same way every time some Labs experiment like Wave fails. They think it means Google's lost their Edge and spinning their wheels. It's equal-and-opposite pessimism to go with the optimism.

This is why I do not treat your counterexamples to Silver's accuracy as a convincing slate of proofs. I don't have enough context to judge those failures against the background of his success or vice versa.

I do find Nate Silver interesting not just for his psychic abilities. He also brings a certain love of statistics and visualization that deserves the level of coverage he gets. Is he doing any better predicting than some quant or world-class stat guy? No, and you can probably find someone who has a better combination of predictions and historical accidents. But he's also bringing the science to the populace, and that is worth praising and talking about.

I do find this 2005 (!) opinion piece by Krugman calling the housing bubble to be an interesting datapoint.

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/08/opinion/08krugman.html

But between the Silver stuff and the Krugman stuff I do feel like I have enough context to judge that you have your own axe to grind.

> Krugman is a partisan hack that has a Nobel Prize is one very specific area of economics. It does not qualify him to opine on all other areas.

That seems to be a general feature of politically-engaged economists on both the left and right. I see Krugman as basically a mirror version of Milton Friedman: a blowhard whose statements on politics and policy preferences are usually wildly unsupported by empirical evidence, but who did also do some genuinely good economic work.

This is generally true of politically-engaged writers of any sort. Politics, at least popular politics (versus academic writing), is polarizing by definition. And generally the data isn't there to support any preference (or equally true... the data is there to support any preference).

This is why, I believe, that why someone supports a particular preference is almost as important as the preference. Although I should add figuring out why people have certain preferences is often difficult, since people are often not forthcoming with their underlying assumptions.

I read a piece on Krugman that was really interesting. For one, it challenged the exact perception that you're advocating: that Krugman takes strong stances on policy matters and uses strong language to defend them, to the detriment of the economics behind them. Interestingly, the piece pointed out that Krugman is usually the stereotypical economist -- quick to qualify and slow to make a strong policy statement without mountains of evidence. The writing style of Paul Krugman may be more the writing style of his wife, who encouraged him to advocate for more policy change. The article definitely painted Krugman's column as more of a cooperation between him and his wife than a straightforward economics work.

There is a very common fallacy committed by people outside economics in thinking that Krugman has something substantial to say in areas of economics outside of his very narrow focus of expertise. Let's say you founded a successful advertising-based Web startup from a scratch and you exited for 8 digits. People who are only vaguely familiar with technology and computers (let's say nurses, taxi drivers, high school teachers) will now think you are an expert in pretty much all matters related to starting a business and computers. However, unless you are a pompous egoist, you should realize that your opinions, even in seemingly very related matters, like running a Web store or creating an iPhone app, will likely be quite uninformed. Krugman's opinions are about economic matters much further away from his true area of expertise than your opinions about running a Web store.

That's a somewhat strange example to use on a site hosted by Paul Graham, who writes about a pretty broad set of things, not all of them very strictly tied to the things he's particularly famous for.

> And Krugman has a Nobel Prize in Economics, and numerous other awards for his work in Economics. I honestly think you'd be hardpressed to find a more qualified economist (on matters of economics).

Krugman's Nobel work was on international trade, and it's lightyears different from his popular work. Outside of international trade, I'd say if you compared him to someone like John Forbes Nash or Vilfredo Pareto, you'd find him sorely lacking. His Nobel is arguably well deserved, but his popular stuff is not Nobel-quality economic work and shouldn't be mistaken for it.

Edit: This is all tangential to the Silver discussion. I like Nate Silver, he seems like a smart guy who explains things well and it's very cool he's moving over to a larger platform.

It's still a Nobel prize in economics. John Carmack made his name writing 3D games, but if he was standing behind me while I was writing some web code and had some ideas for me, I wouldn't tell him to piss off because he's a game programmer.

It would be very creepy to have Carmack standing behind you all the time.

As someone who has spent the better part of their life studying economics, I would have to disagree. Krugman is by no means a respected economist. I would even go as far as to say that he is regarded as being a laughing stock in our field.

Search "Nobel Krugman Fraud." Better yet, here's a direct link: http://www.lewrockwell.com/anderson/anderson229.html

Agree that we should be thoughtful of the misses as well as the hits, and he's had some misses.

However, I didn't recall Silver getting the special MA Senate election of Scott Brown wrong, and he seems not to have: (http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/2010/01/538-model-posits-brow...). It would have been surprising if he did, since it was an easy one. Were you thinking of a different election?

You're right - it appears that he updated his model right before the elections and I only saw his earlier posts. However, he had a post in 2009 entitled "Could a Republican Win Ted Kennedy's Senate Seat?" with his answer being "Very probably not."

His modus operandi is to build a model and feed it data as it becomes available. So when polling of a race is inconsistent and infrequent until right before the election, you shouldn't imply that it is at all improper behavior or Nate Silver's fault if his model and thus his prediction change drastically right before an election.

As for the early, subjective post about the odds, that was posted on 27 August 2009, just days after Ted Kennedy died, long before there was any concrete information about who would run even for the primaries, and before there was any concrete information about the electoral influence of the tea party movement. And Nate Silver was still probably right that Romney wouldn't have been able to take Kennedy's seat, since Romney wouldn't have attracted as many of the Tea Party voters.

Based on your post, it appears that you don't understand how things like statistical significance work. If there is not enough data to make a prediction, you simply should not make a prediction and wait. If you ignore this and your whole business is based on the accuracy of your predictions, expect to be held accountable.

You also apparently didn't read his post I mentioned. It does not talk about just Romney. Here is the direct quote: "As for other Republicans in Massachusetts, their prospects don't figure to be much better."

Silver's whole failed business was based on what Taleb called the "Ludic fallacy" in The Black Swan.

"Based on your post, it appears that you don't understand how things like statistical significance work. If there is not enough data to make a prediction, you simply should not make a prediction and wait."

Silver doesn't make "predictions", he gives odds. Giving odds implicitly admits that there exists a chance of beating those odds, and attempts to quantify how big or small that chance is. Sure, improbable things happen. That does not make them not improbable. Really, if someone is giving probabilities, you don't just count how many times the lower-probability events happened against him, you take all of his 20% probabilities and look to see whether about 20% of them ended up happening.

Look at it the other way--if all of Nate Silver's "predictions" came true, he'd be way more wrong than if some of them didn't come true, because he's not predicting things with 100% probability! Of all the things he thinks are 70% likely to happen, he's just as wrong if 100% of them happen as if 40% of them happen--he's only right if 70% of his 70% shots happen!

You are absolutely and factually wrong. He absolutely calls them predictions when he is right. Here is a direct quote from Silver: "predicting 49 of 50 states correctly in the presidential election." http://fivethirtyeight.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/08/25/welcome-...

OK--he does, in fact, use the word "prediction", but on the same token, he's still fairly open about his predictions being probabilistic in nature, and about the predictions changing over time as more evidence is presented.

But you're going to have to do better than pounce on my word choice if you want to prove your point.

The facts of the matter at that time were different from the facts of the matter when Scott Brown eventually won. When you come out and say it's only 20% probable for a given outcome to happen, and that outcome happens, it doesn't mean you were wrong, it just means a long shot happened. In fact, you would expect just about exactly 1 out of every 5 20% longshots to end up happening.

Honestly, I don't find value in 538 based on the accuracy of its predictions, I find it in Nate's thoughtful and uncommonly math-informed analysis and commentary.

So, he doesn't always get it right when there's a dearth of good polling data on hard-to-predict issues. And an American didn't do a very good job on his first attempt to predict a parliamentary election. Big deal.

He's only been in this business for two years, and in that time he's truly earned himself a good reputation. He's also been more open about his methodology than anybody in the mainstream media, and as he gets experience and constructive criticism he's put it to use improving his models. Regardless of whatever axe you have to grind, acquiring 538 represents a raising of the bar for the NYT's standards.

(The 538 team has been open enough about their methodology that it is very tempting to simply tell you to put up or shut up: Either find and explain some real flaws in his methods, come up with a better evidence-based method to predict something, or don't criticize him.)

What's exciting to me is that Nate's got a voice in the NY Times. That the NY Times voice is suddenly more open, scientific, and math-centric in their political reporting.

I hope the trend continues in other areas of the NYT.

This is not a new trend. The Times even offers a set of APIs:

http://developer.nytimes.com/docs

Direct link: http://fivethirtyeight.blogs.nytimes.com/

For a second I got them confused with TwentyThreeSix and was momentarily excited.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K3Z-Jqe5yG4

This is most certainly a sidetrack, but a worthwhile one.

Congrats to Nate, but I wonder why this was necessary. How could this possibly lead to better quality posts?

He can focus on doing research, not having to run a business.

Not necessary better quality post but better income; key for the blog survival.

For one thing, he gets access to the superb (unrivaled?) dataviz team at the Times.

He also gets access to their data sources

Much faster page loads. YMMV

His posts feel like they have a bit of a cleaner voice; I'd guess they've been run past Times editors.

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