Articles don't get written by people who wake up and all write the same headline, even lazy journalists do better than that, unless they are being fed information from PRs.
I'm sure it would make a great blog post.
But the storylines or headlines are clearly cynical, PR driven linkbait. Just look at them. They all say the same thing, just slightly disquised like an undergrad trying to hide his plagiarism.
Its just self-awareness that is missing. That's why i posted links: so people can see the patterns.
It's not like 2012 is the first time he's used this methodology. I've been following 538 since it launched in 2008 and generally find it to be insightful and informative. And more right than wrong. And when he's wrong, he usually has a good post to talk about how he got it wrong, and how the miss will factor into future projections.
edit: One of your first submissions is from Andrew Breitbart's site. And you're calling others partisan. Who are you working for?
You might also be more interested in the PhD thesis I submitted on multi-touch user interfaces, adjacent.
or: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4707742
http://flowingdata.com/2009/02/25/googles-chief-economist-ha...
But nice try at the smear.
Orthogonal Datapoint:
S&P guilty of misleading investors
Landmark ruling by Australian court could pave way for flood of cases against ratings agencies
http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2012/nov/05/standard-poor...
http://www.cnn.com/2012/11/05/business/sp-guilt-misleading-i...
Dressing up ideas with statistics is not new, original, or scientific, etc.
Its just an informed, iterative marketing strategy.
In business or politics.
The level (AAA!) and quality of the "analysis" notwithstanding.[1]
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[1] Its worth noting the ~epistemological assymetry of ratings. They are so "objective" and "reliable" that their use is legally mandated, in the US and the EU. But the providers ratings themselves issue them as "non-expert" "public opinions". Thus, they cannot be sued if you rely on them. We'll see how far the Australian precedent goes, internationally. Until then, Caveat Emptor.
Silver does good work, but let's be real - all he does is aggregate existing poll data, and give more weight to pollsters who call cell phones as well as land lines. It's the ground-level pollsters who are geniuses, Silver is just aggregating their work. Smart, but hardly rocket science.
If there's any real genius involved, I'd say it's in the PR campaign that's promoting Silver right now. It's clearly effective and well done.
One: the page had an inordinate amount of detail, including Silver's high school awards and favorite foods. His page read more like the resume of a recent college graduate - which he was - than a typical Wikipedia article.
Two: the information was incredibly detailed and included a comprehensive set of personal data, the sort of over-the-top detail you would expect from a statistician. And very promotional in tone - go find it and look for the "view history" link, see for yourself, it's still there.
Three: at the time, the only other pages edited by "Mack2" were pages about baseball statistics, Soviet history (Silver is reportedly Russian), and Silver's company and co-workers. Nothing else. Does that sounds like a disinterested journalist documenting an interesting topic? Hardly. I suspect it was Nate Silver himself, writing his own PR, using a fake name - just like he eventually acknowledged doing at DailyKos.com.
I had the sense that Silver was promoting himself there, and I thought he did a fantastic job at it. I'm guessing that once the NY Times picked him up, he may have hired a professional PR agent at that time, or the NY Times got him one - it's a win-win for them, after all. PR agents and journalists go hand-in-hand, any there are individuals who do both, or change jobs from PR to journalism and back - all the time. Not unusual at all. PR is a big aspect of newspaper work and journalism.