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DonViejo

(60,536 posts)
Tue Oct 30, 2012, 10:35 AM Oct 2012

Nate Silver: Poll prophet

His blog has emerged as the go-to destination for an increasingly anxious public. His new book is no less essential

BY SAMUEL POPKIN, THE AMERICAN PROSPECT


We’re heading into the last week of a tight presidential campaign, and polls are coming in too fast to count. Partisans everywhere are desperate for omens. But at moments like these, it’s people who care most intensely that the “right outcome” occur who run a high risk of getting it wrong—picking out positive polls for comfort, or panicking over an unusual and unexpected result they don’t like.

Fortunately, our most prominent number cruncher has been giving us the straight story instead of capitalizing on this anxiety. In 2008, Nate Silver correctly predicted the results of all 35 Senate races and the presidential results in 49 out of 50 states. Since then, his website, fivethirtyeight.com (now central to The New York Times’s political coverage), has become an essential source of rigorous, objective analysis of voter surveys to predict the Electoral College outcome of presidential campaigns.

Publishers lined up to offer Silver a chance to write a blockbuster, and he could have cashed in on his success to sell false confidence, magic bullets, or a secret formula for predicting to beat the experts. Instead, he offers a much-needed reality check. Political junkies, activists, strategists, and journalists will gain a deeper and more sobering sense of Silver’s methods in The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail—But Some Don’t (Penguin Press). A brilliant analysis of forecasting in finance, geology, politics, sports, weather, and other domains, Silver’s book is also an original fusion of cognitive psychology and modern statistical theory. Its most important message is that the first step toward improving our predictions is learning how to live with uncertainty. The second step is starting to understand why it is that big data, super computers, and mathematical sophistication haven’t made us better at separating signals (information with true predictive value) from noise (misleading information).

Silver’s backstory reads like a quirky screenplay. While working as a transfer pricing consultant who helped companies minimize tax exposure from overseas investments, he spent his evenings and weekends perfecting an ingenious computer system for evaluating baseball players’ stats, which outperformed the analyses of many experts. A company running an Internet site for Rotisserie League fans bought his system. Silver used the money to stake himself as a full-time online poker player, quickly earning $400,000. Shortly thereafter, congressional grandstanding before the 2006 midterm elections stifled the online poker business with regulations, leading the best professional players, deprived of the overconfident amateurs they had been feasting on, to go after players like Silver. He lost $130,000. So he turned to politics, attempting to predict the partisan composition of the next Congress to help him decide whether to cut his losses and move on from poker. Thus was born the sideline that became fivethirtyeight.com.

much more:
http://www.salon.com/2012/10/29/nate_silver_poll_prophet/
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Nate Silver: Poll prophet (Original Post) DonViejo Oct 2012 OP
His prediction / probability stats are supported by cilla4progress Oct 2012 #1
I saw him on the Maher show. It's obvious that he loves what he is doing. MADem Oct 2012 #2

cilla4progress

(24,554 posts)
1. His prediction / probability stats are supported by
Tue Oct 30, 2012, 10:37 AM
Oct 2012

all other reputable statisticians: e.g., Princeton, InTrade, et al.

He is not an "outlier"!

MADem

(135,425 posts)
2. I saw him on the Maher show. It's obvious that he loves what he is doing.
Tue Oct 30, 2012, 10:44 AM
Oct 2012

He's not just phoning it in.

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