Nate Silver doing AMA on reddit, Tue 2:00pm Eastern | Hacker News Reader

Nate Silver doing AMA on reddit, Tue 2:00pm Eastern

fivethirtyeight.blogs.nytimes.com

29 pointsredthrowaway12 comments

I love the concept of Reddit AMAs, but have been consistently disappointed by the results. It's not the meme-y questions (I actually find the idea of asking everyone the same inane question oddly interesting) but it seems like interesting questions/content never get surfaced- the interviewee gets absolutely overwhelmed with questions and only answers a few.

I'd prefer a system where a notice goes up that Nate Silver is holding an AMA in 24 hours- people post questions then, and get upvotes/downvotes according to community interest. Then the AMA-er answers them in order until they stop.

Yeah, that's how Slashdot did it (and so far as I know, still does it) - they'd solicit questions and take a top 10 to the interviewee.

The downside of that is that you largely sacrifice the feeling that you're talking directly to the interviewee.

That's how Nate's doing this one: thread opens at 12:00, then he shows up at 2:00. It should hopefully work out well.

I think it's become a bit of a problem that people make jokes about his wizardlike ability to "predict" and "calculate" everything.

I hope he takes some time to clear up what it is he actually does, and what statistics are and aren't capable of.

As much as he's done to draw attention to statistics, a lot of misconceptions seem to go with the popularity.

"I hope he takes some time to clear up what it is he actually does, and what statistics are and aren't capable of."

He wrote a whole book about it.

http://www.amazon.com/dp/159420411X

I hope he clears it up without requiring people to read his book. :)

If you guys like a bit of humor, I regularly check this for any updated info on the whether Nate Silver is a witch: http://isnatesilverawitch.com/

As it's reddit I imagine the top question will probably be, "Nate Silver, are you actually a witch?".

Followed by "One horse sized witch, or five witch sized horses?" and "How do you feel about witch mustaches?"

As a horse with a witch mustache, I approve of this question.

You know what's infinitely sadder than Reddit having fun with stupid memes is Hacker News never missing a chance to look down upon them and deriding them as inferiors. It's getting to be pretty pathetic and cliche. So let's just tone down the Reddit-hate, alright guys?

But how can we maintain our air of smug superiority if we can't snidely look down on others?

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