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.
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.
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.
He is a replaceable statistician. He is a complete unique spokesman.
There might be more worthwhile things he could work on, but sports and politics are what interests him.
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)
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.