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> After seeing lots of Twitter threads about Nate Silver, condemning his lack of "certainty" in his predictions ("It's such a cop out! Since he never says yes o
by tharne 4y ago
> After seeing lots of Twitter threads about Nate Silver, condemning his lack of "certainty" in his predictions ("It's such a cop out! Since he never says yes or no one way or the other he always has an out when he's wrong!"), I'm even more convinced not just that people don't understand statistics, but they willfully don't want to.
As someone who does understand statistics, it's made me dislike Nate Silver even more than if I didn't. It's been sad to watch his metamorphoses over the years from an interesting numbers guy with nuanced discussions on polling and models, to becoming the exact kind of pundit and talking head he used to make fun of. There's still a little bit of statistics on his site, but the overwhelming majority of content is the same trite punditry you'll find on pretty much any political blog.
- jredwards 4y agoI still respect his models, but I think the rest is the kind of stuff you’re expected to do as part of a media organization.
- tharne 4y ago> I still respect his models, but I think the rest is the kind of stuff you’re expected to do as part of a media organization. Exactly. His models are still outstanding. Ironically, I think the signal from his models gets lost in all the noise around the filler content on his site.
- harry8 4y agoI enjoyed "The Signal and the Noise" I think its focus on the problems of fitting models to noise is something that should be more widely understood and he did that really quite well. It's a while ago but I think it was the massive failures of earthquake predictions was how he did it and it was convincing and readable. I've never read his blog and care stuff all about his political polling predictions.
- tharne 4y ago"The Signal and the Noise" is a great book and it definitely impacted some of the most important choices I made around my career. I think that's part of the reason I'm so annoyed that Nate Silver has gone so far down the punditry rabbit hole.