Nate Silver? More like Nate Bronze. (Enough of the cheap shots). He's a mid-level data scientist who writes competently and has turned that into a very success

Nate Silver? More like Nate Bronze. (Enough of the cheap shots). He's a mid-level data scientist who writes competently and has turned that into a very successful contrarian/thinkfluencer career. The work is mediocre, but the results are excellent. There are two lessons here: * trust "charty" press coverage about as much as you trust onboarding projections from your most recent data science hire – in other words, positively correlated with the underlying but my no means definitive. Polling companies generally publish their methods; you can use that to make calls on their individual methodological rigor; * being 7/10 at two things (in this case, data science and writing) is in many cases more valuable than being 9/10 at one thing _if you can find the right niche_, which Nate Silver did. 538 is the outcome of a very, very well-timed pivot from sports analytics into political analytics. (With legalized gambling in the States, I suspect the pivot these days should be the other direction).