Nate Silver

thumb|I've always felt like something of an outsider. I've always had friends, but I've always come from an outside point of view. I think that's important. Nathaniel Read "Nate" Silver (born 13 January, 1978) is an American statistician and writer who analyzes baseball (see sabermetrics) and elections (see psephology). He is the founder and editor-in-chief of FiveThirtyEight and a Special Correspondent for ABC News. Quotes I'd say I am somewhere in between being a libertarian and a liberal. So if I were to vote it would be kind of a Gary Johnson versus Mitt Romney decision, I suppose. Interview with Charlie Rose (29 October 2012) I've always felt like something of an outsider. I've always had friends, but I've always come from an outside point of view. I think that's important. If you grow up gay, or in a household that's agnostic, when most people are religious, then from the get-go, you are saying that there are things that the majority of society believes that I don't believe. As quoted in "Nate Silver: it's the numbers, stupid" (17 November 2012), by Carole Cadwalladr, The Guardian There are entire disciplines in which predictions have been failing, often at great cost to society. Consider something like biomedical research. In 2005, an Athens-raised medical researcher named John P. Ioannidis published a controversial paper titled "Why Most Published Research Findings Are False." ... The paper studied positive findings documented in peer-reviewed journals: descriptions of successful predictions of medical hypotheses carried out in laboratory experiments. It concluded that most of these findings were likely to fail when applied in the real world. Bayer Laboratories recently confirmed Ioannidis's hypothesis. They could not replicate about two-thirds of the positive findings in medical journals when they attempted the experiments themselves. ... The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail—but Some Don't https://books.google.com/books?id=ykSKDQAAQBAJ&pg=PA11 2012 11 Penguin Press 978-1-59420-411-1 ...I actually found though, overall, that there’s like a little bit more value in micromanagement than I thought. Not about everything, but strategically saying, “I’m going to spend a lot of time going into detail on this one.” Or, I guess it’s just mentoring, I guess, is a way to put it. <...> Figure out the people who will listen to you, but also challenge you at the right times. A lot of 9/11 conspiracy books are rated pretty well on Amazon, because only the conspiracists bother to read them. Whereas, Othello or Macbeth or something, everyone reads, a lot of kids have to read it for homework when they don’t want to, necessarily, so they’ll leave a bad review there, potentially. The long way of saying this is that I’m not sure that I’m any better than the average pundit unless I have a model. The disciplining effect of a model, doing your thinking in advance, and setting up rules of evidence is probably quite important. At the same time people are social beings, and they behave in herds sometimes. One of the reasons why I was initially skeptical about Trump is that America has a history of not nominating candidates, and electing candidates, rightly, who are blatantly unfit for office. 2016 https://conversationswithtyler.com/episodes/nate-silver/ GOP are so all-in on an "all base mobilization, all the time" strategy that people just take for granted it must be smart politics when it's far from obvious that's the case. Twitter post (30 October 2018) Bernie Sanders proudly describes himself as a “socialist” (or more commonly, as a “democratic socialist”). To Americans of a certain age, this is a potential liability. I’m just old enough (38) to have grown up during the Cold War, a time when “socialist” did not just mean “far left” but also implied something vaguely un-American. If you’re older than me, you may have even more acutely negative associations with “socialism” and may see it as a step on the road to communism. If you’re a few years younger than me, however, you may instead associate “socialism” with the social democracies of Northern Europe, which have high taxes and large welfare states. Sweden may not be your cup of tea, but it isn’t scary in the way the USSR was to people a generation ago. "Why Young Democrats Love Bernie Sanders" (8 February 2016), FiveThirtyEight Since December 2015, there have 10 incidents that killed 10 or more people. That’s more than there was in 30 years between 1982 and 2011. And five of the 10 deadliest mass shootings in modern American history have all happened in the last five years. August 11, 2019 on ABC's This Week ('This Week' Transcript 8-11-19 ABC News August 11, 2019 This Week https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/week-transcript-11-19-sen-cory-booker/story?id=64908165) External links Category:Journalists from the United States Category:Mathematicians from the United States Category:Bloggers from the United States Category:1978 births Category:Living people Category:People from Michigan Category:LGBT people Category:Poker players from the United States