Nate Silver
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Nathaniel Read "Nate" Silver is probably a witch.[1] After making a fuck-ton of money through online poker (in its relative infancy when it mostly attracted people with more money than poker skill) he made a name for himself by becoming a political statistician, founding the blog FiveThirtyEight to analyse US elections and becoming a staple on the New York Times. FiveThirtyEight has since been moved to a larger partnership with ESPN.[2]
In contrast to pundits, Silver's approach was to use both mathematics and evidence to make his predictions — notably the use of Bayesian statistics, which take into account prior information on how states voted. Putting it down to being a bit of a nerd for numbers,[3][4] this has turned out to be remarkably successful.
With a combination of this skill[5] and a bit of luck, he successfully predicted the outcome of the 2012 U.S. Presidential Election with almost perfect accuracy. This was notable because at the time most mainstream media were predicting the election to be "too close to call" — Silver, on the other hand, actually looked at the data and found it to tell a different story, one where the incumbent Barack Obama had a 90% chance of winning, and by a significant margin. It was the second time he pulled this off, getting 49/50 states right in 2008.
As Silver was both predicting a win for Obama and turned out to be staggeringly correct about it, he has become something of a pariah and figure of hate for those on the US far right, who still hold their heads in the sand over the election.[6] Being openly gay certainly hasn't helped there, as comments from Dean Chambers, who runs unskewedpolls.com, seemed almost entirely ad hominem in nature — dismissing Silver as nothing more than an "effeminate," "soft-sounding" "Castrat[o]."[7]
He is described by Black Swan author Nassim Nicholas Taleb as "seriously knowing his shit,"[8] although the two appear to disagree with how predictable the world actually is. In his book The Signal and the Noise, Silver claims that the 9/11 terrorist attack was, to a degree, predictable and an inevitability — and further than statistics may suggest another, even larger, attack is coming within the next decade or so — while Taleb's Black Swan theory would state that it's outright an unpredictable event outside the realm of predictability. Unfortunately for the human race, both men are probably right.
[edit] See also
- Arthur C. Clarke's Third Law
[edit] External links
- FiveThirtyEight
- Has Nate Silver destroyed punditry?, Christian Science Monitor
[edit] Footnotes
- ↑ http://isnatesilverawitch.com/
- ↑ And the Times has filled in the vacuum with The Upshot.
- ↑ Nate Silver: it's the numbers, stupid, The Guardian
- ↑ xkcd
- ↑ Not that it's difficult, just very uncommon amongst the usual political talking heads.
- ↑ Nearly 50 high-profile wingnuts.
- ↑ Shooting the Messenger’s Numbers: Nate Silver’s Struggle (The Redux), Gawker
- ↑ Okay, so the actual quote is "He's the real deal."