A 2009 Netroots Nation panel with Nate Silver. The panelists were Greg Dworkin (moderator), contributing editor at Daily Kos, Charlie Cook of The Cook Political Report, Mark Blumenthal, editor and publisher of Pollster.com (now Huffington Post Pollster), Nate Silver of FiveThirtyEight.com (a stand alone at the time), and Charles Franklin, the co-developer of Pollster.com.
Lots on Nate Silver today, but interestingly, it's about the quality of Nate the Great's writing, not his math skills. (h/t HuffPost Pollster).
The greatest thing @fivethirtyeight ever accomplished was not forecasting elections. It was proving the market for data-driven news analysis
— @DrewLinzer
:
But when you look at it, with all due respect to Silver, his ability to beat the armchair analysis of the TV pundits is much more a story about the TV pundits being morons than it is a story about Silver having an amazingly innovative analytic method....
But most of all, from a non-grumpy viewpoint Silver's success is a reminder that journalism is about more than getting the answers right. He's a fantastic and engaging writer, who not only came up with an election forecasting method that far outpaces the TV pundits but more impressively he found a large audience for it.
Ezra Klein:
Silver’s reputation as a math wizard often obscures his innovations as a journalist. But it’s the latter that makes him such a valuable hire for ESPN and ABC News. Lots of people can run the numbers. But Silver can use those numbers to tell readers an engaging, fast-paced and constantly changing story about subjects they care about. That’s a rare talent.
More politics and policy below the fold.
John Sides:
He has the same view of quantitative election forecasting. In a section of the book called “Weighing Qualitative Information,” he lauds the value in the in-depth interviewing of candidates that is done by David Wasserman and others at the Cook Political Report. Silver uses the ratings that Cook and others have developed in his own House forecasts and finds that they also add value.
So the irony, as I see it, is that Silver faced resentment within the newsroom even though his approach explicitly values the work that reporters do. Although I suspect that Times reporters wouldn’t like to simply be inputs in one of Silver’s models, I could easily see how the Times could have set up a system by which campaign reporters fed their impressions to Silver based on their reporting and then Silver worked to incorporate their impressions in a systematic fashion.
In short, even though it may be impossible to eliminate the tension between Silver’s approach and that of at least some reporters, I think there is an under-appreciated potential for symbiosis. Perhaps Silver will find that at ESPN and ABC.
Of course, Nate's one of our own, having spent a short time posting here at Daily Kos, participating in NN (see video at top), and being an overall mensch for the times we've interacted (I was mildly skeptical of his earliest posts, but he proved me and many others wrong).
But the important thing about this discussion isn't who does or doesn't like Nate, it's how and what one can do to improve political reporting. I'm sorry the Times lost him, because that leaves us with Tom Friedman and David Brooks, but I'm glad Nate will have a platform.
Nate Silver didn't fit at the NY Times because he was too often right, a crime that Friedman, Douthat, Dowd, Brooks et al never commit.
— @Devilstower
Meanwhile, cue the Anthony Weiner jokes. (
NY Times):
As a new scandal involving explicit online messages engulfed Anthony D. Weiner, the former congressman brushed aside calls to quit the New York City mayor’s race.
The amount of moralizing by reporters is of interest in the above context about Nate Silver's work.We know the
NY Times doesn't like him:
The timing here matters, as it would for any politician who violates the public’s trust and then asks to have it back. Things are different now, he insists. “This behavior is behind me,” he said again on Tuesday. He suggested that people should have known that his sexting was an unresolved problem well into 2012.
That’s ridiculous and speaks to a familiar but repellent pattern of misleading and evasion. It’s up to Mr. Weiner if he wants to keep running, to count on voters to forgive and forget and hand him the keys to City Hall. But he has already disqualified himself.
A reminder: while they might be right, what the
Times thinks of Weiner doesn't matter, it's what NY Dem primary voters think. Me? I don't know if Weiner can handle the job. But that's just me.
First clue that heir to UK throne is Jewish
http://t.co/... : his grandmother already thinks he's royalty (courtesy @chevesligon )
— @davidfrum
