Nate Silver of FiveThirtyEight Blog Is to Join ESPN Staff
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
1) People only care about election handicapping every 4 (or 2) years in the US.
2) Nate Silver especially made political predictions look really easy (in comparison to the partisan clowns who populate cable news). The outcome you're trying to predict is how people will vote, and you're free to go and ask them how they will vote.
Compare to sports where (1) you have sporting events all the time and (2) you are trying to predict something that is much more uncertain. For someone who is in to sports, I could easily see that being much more interesting.
The counter to this is that politics is (arguably) more important, and is associated with more fame.
He got his start doing sabermetrics (statistics for baseball) and, after reading his book and his column, it honestly seems like he's a lot more passionate about sports than politics.
(I don't think this conflicts with your point about sports' immediacy and uncertainty.)
True, but what Nate Silver brings to the table goes far beyond that. Polls are inaccurate. His statistical models adjust for all sorts of information you don't get from polling. Like which way undecideds will swing late (towards the incumbent) or sampling bias (poll respondents lean Republican) or even outright lying ("sure I'd vote for a black president", then doesn't in the privacy of the voting booth.) That's what set Silver's predictions far above all others in accuracy, and how he correctly captured the election swinging decisively for Obama as hardly anyone else foresaw.
McColin, are you an old Baseball Primer / BTF guy as well?
Certainly there is a lot of ludditism at ESPN concerning statistical analysis, but you might say that their building a prestigious niche of high minded sports analysis. Also, an affiliation with ESPN, I think reaches more sports fans than an affiliation with the NYT, so if he's looking to switch focus to sports, then that's a pretty compelling reason too.
[1] One example: http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/13.11/posts.html?pg=3
I do hope they bring him back for future major Elections. His commentary is a delightful respite from the ultra-polarized world of Reddit and Fox News.
Funny you say that, as Reddit had majorly sided with Nate Silver way before election day. Almost every post of his was frontpaged when political campaigns were in full swing. It's also important to note that Fox News is not in the same category that Reddit is in. Fox News reports new findings, Reddit is a social bookmarking website.
Be that as it may, Nate Silver is actually thoughtful, articulate, and well-reasoned - three words which do not describe /r/politics, etc.
It's not just a matter of which opinions one holds; it's a matter of how intelligently one expresses them and defends them with data and evidence.
(The irony with Reddit's love of FiveThirtyEight - and with the right-wing criticism of FiveThirtyEight being 'partisan' during the 2012 election cycle - is that Nate Silver is not himself an entirely left-wing person as much as people often thing. You'd have to dig pretty deep back into the archives of pre-NYT FiveThirtyEight to notice this, but he holds rather somewhat moderate or right-wing views on a number of issues).
[1] For a year or so before he launched fivethirtyeight.com as an independent site, he posted data-driven election analysis, among other things, at http://www.dailykos.com/blog/poblano
Reddit/MSNBC had it easy this past election, because they could say what they could be optimistic and listen to the experts at the same time. My disillusionment with political journalism will be fully validated during the next election won by Republicans, when Fox is on the side of 'science' and MSNBC says that 'science' can't be trusted.
Winning an election requires enthusiasm and people willing to volunteer their personal efforts, so partisan activists dismissing contradictory polling data should be expected.
What about the interpretation of sports data would qualify as "incredible things"?
Think of this not as a deal with ESPN but a deal with Disney, the parent company.
It's not just Nate able to do more sports. Disney enables 538 to get its content onto multiple "channels" - sports (ESPN), news (ABC), A&E - on cable, radio, books with much greater international exposure.
I really like this move though because lately a lot of ESPN women seemed to have moved to CBS or NBC ie Rachel Nichols, Erin Andrews, Michelle Beadle and I am sure more. Not that Nate Silver or Keith Olberman are women, but it definitely is aimed at the right audience and I look forward to this test run at 11 of what seems to be solid broadcasting.
On another note I think a Daily Show style program that brings in clips of announcers and ESPN and makes fun of them would be a great program. Just putting it out there.
I'm looking forward to Silver working with Simmons. His column would fit it quite nicely at Grantland.
I do think that the Henry Abbott + John Hollinger[1] dynamic was good since Abbott is more of a curious amateur type and willing to withhold judgement until the facts come in. But if Silver is a baseball guy (some of the stuff that Silver's done on basketball isn't very good, I don't think he's really immersed in the sport), then I wouldn't necessarily expect the paths of those two guys to cross much.
[1] Though I have reservations about some of Hollinger's work, especially PER, which is just a linear weights metric with weights apparently chosen to coincide with conventional wisdom on the value of players. There are superior player evaluation metrics, but PER is very marketable to normal fans. Hollinger does seem to know his stuff though, and he's done a great job in Memphis thus far. It's just unfortunate that he got famous for a ho-hum metric.
The guys that make millions in large part use their own software.
I used a simple piece of hardware last year for college football season that was suprisingly accurate. I weighted my own opinion most heavily but would use the software to confirm my picks. If both ways checked out, I would place a bet.
Never had a losing week last year and would usually pocket a couple thousand in profit a week. Of course there was alot of lucky but a large part of my success was due to the statistical software I was using.
Absolutely.
> The guys that make millions in large part use their own software.
I was fascinated reading about Bob Haralabos' incredible tracking of basketball games: http://espn.go.com/blog/truehoop/post/_/id/4974/following-up...
> I used a simple piece of hardware last year for college football season that was suprisingly accurate. I weighted my own opinion most heavily but would use the software to confirm my picks. If both ways checked out, I would place a bet.
Care to elaborate (without giving away your secret sauce?) I love reading about this stuff.
I try to approach soccer betting in a similar fashion (it's trickier than US sports in some ways, as soccer doesn't lend itself to stats as easily as say baseball and American football). See a comment of mine on reddit here, with tons of resources:
http://www.reddit.com/r/SoccerBetting/comments/15dcao/what_v...
Why might ESPN be a good option for him? Can someone help me see the other side of this? It's totally his decision to make, and I'm sure he's looked at his options rationally, and life circumstances and past experience and etc. certainly play a big role, but I'm curious.
Your profile says you dropped out of college and are currently backpacking the world. Is that a waste of your intelligence? Why or why not?
From my perspective, I don't think so. Gaining experience about how the world works and learning about other perspectives and cultures is (and has been) useful for expanding my world view.
Perhaps my question could have been more carefully worded.
There might be more worthwhile things he could work on, but sports and politics are what interests him.
Too, it's a bit rich to be badmouthing sports on Hacker News, home of perhaps the most solipsistic conversations on the internet. Sports is a very important part of many people's lives; surely that alone lends it sufficient heft to be a defensible use of Silver's talent?
As for why, Silver got started in sabermetrics, and going back to working on sports stats is almost certainly because he likes it. And I imagine ESPN backed up the proverbial dump truck, too.
Ah, so he's good, but it seems like he's doing something totally unique because of the bias that he gets mainstream media attention and most other statisticians don't?
> Sports is a very important part of many people's lives; surely that alone lends it sufficient heft to be a defensible use of Silver's talent?
Sure does.
It's the second skill that sets him apart from a run-of-the mill statistician.
He is a replaceable statistician. He is a complete unique spokesman.
That's quite amusing considering that he became famous as a pro baseball statistician. I agree with other posters pointing that BB stats are actually a good way of getting kids interested in math. I'm not American but living here has caused me to fall in love with baseball and admire the number-crunching that goes with it. Every so often I see a parent and child at a game filling out a paper score card for the game together, which I think is just fabulous.
In fact, there's a great tradition of this in the sciences. In terms of popularizing science, Nate Silver is a kindred of people like Carl Sagan (Cosmos), Steven Hawking (A Brief History of Time), Randall Munroe (XKCD), as well as Adam Savage and Jamie Hyneman (MythBusters)
I mean what the hell is Silver going to do there? Tell us the % of time Skip Bayless trolls about LeBron or the probability of Tebow related coverage in the upcoming SportsCenter?