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FiveThirtyEight Gets the Ax as ABC News Slashes Jobs in Major Shakeup

63 points by gscott 2y ago

PaulHoule 2y ago
To me this is astonishingly bad. I am not interested in partisan takes on politics but I am very interested in political science -- this is the only podcast that I listen to regularly. I can only hope this finds another home.
- cyanydeez 2y ago
  did 538 stay impartial without nate silver? He clearly took a hard right.
  - rurp 2y ago
    I've been following Nate for quite a while and would say that's a pretty gross mischaracterization. He's always been center left and I haven't really seen that change. He does spend quite a bit of time criticizing the far left and doesn't often toe the Democratic line so I can see why a lot of partisans dislike him. He's hardly the only center left writer who dislikes the far left these days though, quite a few are furious at progressives for tanking the Democratic brand and throwing a winnable election to the current administration. Nate has still been far more vocal against Trump and all sorts of right wing nonsense.
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
    - marcuskane2 2y ago
      > center left writer who dislikes the far left these days though, quite a few are furious at progressives for tanking the Democratic brand and throwing a winnable election to the current administration This is such a perfect summary of contemporary American society with regards to politics. I heard one person argue that as the far left progressives endlessly pushed "purity tests" against more extreme positions and became intolerant of any other opinions, it actually fed into why people tolerated or were willing to forgive bad things from the MAGA crowd. Many people felt like the Republicans accepted diverse viewpoints within the party, and people who'd made mistakes in the past, but the Democrats would cancel and exile anyone who wasn't perfectly woke. It's not to excuse people who voted for Trump, but it does help explain the election results.
  - bruceb 2y ago
    This is why news is hard. Don’t serve up rose colored news and you are tagged as hard right. The idea Nate Silver took a far right turn is laughable. Saying the democratic candidate is going to lose or that some D positions are clearly unpopular doesn’t make one hard right, just pointing out what the numbers show. Saying the Dodgers have good chance of winning World Series doesn’t make one a Dodgers fan. Or saying most people like iPhones make one an Apple fan.
    - lkrubner 2y ago
      Nate Silver has shifted his politics very far to the right. That's simply a fact. He used to do reports on polling in which his math was straightforward and very reasonable, and back around 2016 he gave the public a good education about what probability actually meant -- in particular, he performed a real service by reminding people that "a 66% chance of winning" does not mean a person is going to win, it actually means one-third of the time they will lose. But nowadays Nate Silver argues on Twitter in favor of whatever Peter Thiel is doing, even as Peter Thiel endorses a completely illegal coup aimed at destroying the USA.
      - gruez 2y ago
        >But nowadays Nate Silver argues on Twitter in favor of whatever Peter Thiel is doing, even as Peter Thiel endorses a completely illegal coup aimed at destroying the USA. Link to such tweets? I've gone through two pages of his most recent tweets and couldn't find anything obviously matches "argues on Twitter in favor of whatever Peter Thiel is doing, even as Peter Thiel endorses a completely illegal coup aimed at destroying the USA". The closest I could find were "Don't neglect how tedious this platform is becoming. Democrats "won" the battle of being the most annoying party for several years running, but their grip on the title will probably be broken soon." and a series of tweets talking about how smart Musk is. Is that what you meant by "very far to the right"? Is not being infinitely rabid against Trump/Vance/Musk count as "very far to the right" now?
        Clubber 2y ago
        >Is that what you meant by "very far to the right"? Is not being infinitely rabid against Trump/Vance/Musk count as "very far to the right" now? Yes, political discussion has ceased to be rational and has degraded into merely emotional outbursts today. I'm trying really hard to stay away from any political discussion. They're all very predictable and I feel like engaging in them is making me dumber. I see a political post with 500 comments, I don't even have to read it to know the main arguments.
  - asdfasvea 2y ago
    define 'clearly'. I'll take my answer in the form of a link to any of his work.
  - dragonwriter 2y ago
    Silver was always center-right neoliberal, he just didn't do a lot of opinion/advocacy stuff, sticking more to the statistics, while doing 538; when he left 538, he became a lot higher “geneeic politics blogger”-style output, and became more like a slightly-more-to-the-right version of Matt Yglesias. Since Silver took his models with him, and there wasn’t that much time after he left, there wasn't much track record to judge the post-Silver 538, but I think that it remained a first-rate poll aggregator and from all appearances a reasonable poll-based-predictor.
    - PaulHoule 2y ago
      I'm a critic of neoliberalism but I also enjoy reading The Economist which was originally founded to oppose the corn laws and advocate for free trade in 1843, just a few years before Marx wrote The Communist Manifesto. Based on that you'd expect The Economist to be center right but when people try to compare it with other news sources it is usually rated left-of-center [1] which seems odd to me. On the other hand, the one thing the center-left and center-right have in common is "the center cannot hold", look at how centrist parties are eroding in places like Germany where the usual government coalition now is the CDU (center right) and the SPD (center left) which steadily loses ground to the far right because, even though the center might have its facts straight, it is emotionally false for most people. [1] https://www.allsides.com/news-source/economist https://www.allsides.com/news-source/economist
      - dragonwriter 2y ago
        > Based on that you'd expect The Economist to be center right but when people try to compare it with other news sources it is usually rated left-of-center [1] which seems odd to me. The Economist is almost the archetype of economic center-rightism, but IIRC it tends not to fall even slightly on the right-wing side of social/cultural issues (trans rights excepted, which I’ve seen suggested is largely connected to one particular member of the editorial board), which is pretty unsurprising because right-wing social policy is a state-imposed inefficiency to the pure economic neoliberal. In societies where moderately right stances on social issues are common even on the economic left, when you try to construct a single social/economic left-right axis, I can see this making The Economist seem center-left on that composite axis.
kittikitti 2y ago
Unpopular opinion, but FiveThirtyEight constantly got the polls wrong and this isn't surprising. It gave people exaggerated confidence in their understanding of the polling numbers. The amount of gaslighting I got from FiveThirtyEight readers about how Kamala wasn't guaranteed to win was astronomical.
- kadoban 2y ago
  > The amount of gaslighting I got from FiveThirtyEight readers about how Kamala wasn't guaranteed to win was astronomical. I can't find any way to read this other than that you think that Kamala was guaranteed to win, and are still angry that someone told you otherwise?
  - mandolingual 2y ago
    From what I recall the main narrative was "it's neck and neck but we could be a single polling misstep from a blowout in either direction" which is about as safe a stance as you can take (understandable considering the blowback they got previously).
    - PaulHoule 2y ago
      More to the point the polls do not predict who wins the election because the election is won by the electoral college, not by the popular vote. Even if you got the popular vote exact you still couldn't predict the election accurately. What you have to do is simulate all the states and DC and run a monte carlo simulation and you will always get an equivocal answer if you do that.
      - JumpCrisscross 2y ago
        > polls do not predict who wins the election because the election is won by the electoral college, not by the popular vote Which is why any model worth its salt only uses national polls to predict state results. (State polls are more meaningful. But the headlines they generate aren't as nationally clickable.)
yumraj 2y ago
Interestingly this seems to coincide with Trumps approval-disapproval charts crossing. https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/polls/approval/donald-trump/ https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/polls/approval/donald-t...
- JumpCrisscross 2y ago
  ABC is owned by Disney. Makes sense they'd be slashing their partisan cross section. And it's not like FiveThirtyEight has any monopoly on these sorts of analytics.
  - yumraj 2y ago
    I’m sure it’s just a coincidence, I didn’t mean to imply otherwise.
  - duped 2y ago
    You're assuming a high amount of organizational competency from Disney that probably doesn't exist. They're extremely indecisive and slow to execute. This was probably something internal to ABC, because if it came from Burbank it would have been in the works for two quarters and rumors would have been published in the media for the same amount of time.
KingOfCoders 2y ago
More Gleichschaltung.
lalaland1125 2y ago
Note that this isn't an outlier in the journalism industry. The whole journalism industry is dying off, with relatively frequent layoffs and closures which is well reflected in decreasing numbers of journalists https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2024/01/media-layoffs-la-times/677285/ https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2024/01/media-layo...
mannyv 2y ago
Axe, not ax.
- reaperman 2y ago
  Google it if you want but both ax and axe are correct and equivalent. I also would have preferred axe but it’s just an aesthetic preference.

63 points by gscott 2y ago

To me this is astonishingly bad. I am not interested in partisan takes on politics but I am very interested in political science -- this is the only podcast that I listen to regularly. I can only hope this finds another home.

cyanydeez 2y ago
did 538 stay impartial without nate silver? He clearly took a hard right.
- rurp 2y ago
  I've been following Nate for quite a while and would say that's a pretty gross mischaracterization. He's always been center left and I haven't really seen that change. He does spend quite a bit of time criticizing the far left and doesn't often toe the Democratic line so I can see why a lot of partisans dislike him. He's hardly the only center left writer who dislikes the far left these days though, quite a few are furious at progressives for tanking the Democratic brand and throwing a winnable election to the current administration. Nate has still been far more vocal against Trump and all sorts of right wing nonsense.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - marcuskane2 2y ago
    > center left writer who dislikes the far left these days though, quite a few are furious at progressives for tanking the Democratic brand and throwing a winnable election to the current administration This is such a perfect summary of contemporary American society with regards to politics. I heard one person argue that as the far left progressives endlessly pushed "purity tests" against more extreme positions and became intolerant of any other opinions, it actually fed into why people tolerated or were willing to forgive bad things from the MAGA crowd. Many people felt like the Republicans accepted diverse viewpoints within the party, and people who'd made mistakes in the past, but the Democrats would cancel and exile anyone who wasn't perfectly woke. It's not to excuse people who voted for Trump, but it does help explain the election results.
- bruceb 2y ago
  This is why news is hard. Don’t serve up rose colored news and you are tagged as hard right. The idea Nate Silver took a far right turn is laughable. Saying the democratic candidate is going to lose or that some D positions are clearly unpopular doesn’t make one hard right, just pointing out what the numbers show. Saying the Dodgers have good chance of winning World Series doesn’t make one a Dodgers fan. Or saying most people like iPhones make one an Apple fan.
  - lkrubner 2y ago
    Nate Silver has shifted his politics very far to the right. That's simply a fact. He used to do reports on polling in which his math was straightforward and very reasonable, and back around 2016 he gave the public a good education about what probability actually meant -- in particular, he performed a real service by reminding people that "a 66% chance of winning" does not mean a person is going to win, it actually means one-third of the time they will lose. But nowadays Nate Silver argues on Twitter in favor of whatever Peter Thiel is doing, even as Peter Thiel endorses a completely illegal coup aimed at destroying the USA.
    - gruez 2y ago
      >But nowadays Nate Silver argues on Twitter in favor of whatever Peter Thiel is doing, even as Peter Thiel endorses a completely illegal coup aimed at destroying the USA. Link to such tweets? I've gone through two pages of his most recent tweets and couldn't find anything obviously matches "argues on Twitter in favor of whatever Peter Thiel is doing, even as Peter Thiel endorses a completely illegal coup aimed at destroying the USA". The closest I could find were "Don't neglect how tedious this platform is becoming. Democrats "won" the battle of being the most annoying party for several years running, but their grip on the title will probably be broken soon." and a series of tweets talking about how smart Musk is. Is that what you meant by "very far to the right"? Is not being infinitely rabid against Trump/Vance/Musk count as "very far to the right" now?
      - Clubber 2y ago
        >Is that what you meant by "very far to the right"? Is not being infinitely rabid against Trump/Vance/Musk count as "very far to the right" now? Yes, political discussion has ceased to be rational and has degraded into merely emotional outbursts today. I'm trying really hard to stay away from any political discussion. They're all very predictable and I feel like engaging in them is making me dumber. I see a political post with 500 comments, I don't even have to read it to know the main arguments.
- asdfasvea 2y ago
  define 'clearly'. I'll take my answer in the form of a link to any of his work.
- dragonwriter 2y ago
  Silver was always center-right neoliberal, he just didn't do a lot of opinion/advocacy stuff, sticking more to the statistics, while doing 538; when he left 538, he became a lot higher “geneeic politics blogger”-style output, and became more like a slightly-more-to-the-right version of Matt Yglesias. Since Silver took his models with him, and there wasn’t that much time after he left, there wasn't much track record to judge the post-Silver 538, but I think that it remained a first-rate poll aggregator and from all appearances a reasonable poll-based-predictor.
  - PaulHoule 2y ago
    I'm a critic of neoliberalism but I also enjoy reading The Economist which was originally founded to oppose the corn laws and advocate for free trade in 1843, just a few years before Marx wrote The Communist Manifesto. Based on that you'd expect The Economist to be center right but when people try to compare it with other news sources it is usually rated left-of-center [1] which seems odd to me. On the other hand, the one thing the center-left and center-right have in common is "the center cannot hold", look at how centrist parties are eroding in places like Germany where the usual government coalition now is the CDU (center right) and the SPD (center left) which steadily loses ground to the far right because, even though the center might have its facts straight, it is emotionally false for most people. [1] https://www.allsides.com/news-source/economist https://www.allsides.com/news-source/economist
    - dragonwriter 2y ago
      > Based on that you'd expect The Economist to be center right but when people try to compare it with other news sources it is usually rated left-of-center [1] which seems odd to me. The Economist is almost the archetype of economic center-rightism, but IIRC it tends not to fall even slightly on the right-wing side of social/cultural issues (trans rights excepted, which I’ve seen suggested is largely connected to one particular member of the editorial board), which is pretty unsurprising because right-wing social policy is a state-imposed inefficiency to the pure economic neoliberal. In societies where moderately right stances on social issues are common even on the economic left, when you try to construct a single social/economic left-right axis, I can see this making The Economist seem center-left on that composite axis.

kittikitti 2y ago

Unpopular opinion, but FiveThirtyEight constantly got the polls wrong and this isn't surprising. It gave people exaggerated confidence in their understanding of the polling numbers. The amount of gaslighting I got from FiveThirtyEight readers about how Kamala wasn't guaranteed to win was astronomical.

kadoban 2y ago
> The amount of gaslighting I got from FiveThirtyEight readers about how Kamala wasn't guaranteed to win was astronomical. I can't find any way to read this other than that you think that Kamala was guaranteed to win, and are still angry that someone told you otherwise?
- mandolingual 2y ago
  From what I recall the main narrative was "it's neck and neck but we could be a single polling misstep from a blowout in either direction" which is about as safe a stance as you can take (understandable considering the blowback they got previously).
  - PaulHoule 2y ago
    More to the point the polls do not predict who wins the election because the election is won by the electoral college, not by the popular vote. Even if you got the popular vote exact you still couldn't predict the election accurately. What you have to do is simulate all the states and DC and run a monte carlo simulation and you will always get an equivocal answer if you do that.
    - JumpCrisscross 2y ago
      > polls do not predict who wins the election because the election is won by the electoral college, not by the popular vote Which is why any model worth its salt only uses national polls to predict state results. (State polls are more meaningful. But the headlines they generate aren't as nationally clickable.)

yumraj 2y ago

Interestingly this seems to coincide with Trumps approval-disapproval charts crossing. https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/polls/approval/donald-trump/ https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/polls/approval/donald-t...

JumpCrisscross 2y ago
ABC is owned by Disney. Makes sense they'd be slashing their partisan cross section. And it's not like FiveThirtyEight has any monopoly on these sorts of analytics.
- yumraj 2y ago
  I’m sure it’s just a coincidence, I didn’t mean to imply otherwise.
- duped 2y ago
  You're assuming a high amount of organizational competency from Disney that probably doesn't exist. They're extremely indecisive and slow to execute. This was probably something internal to ABC, because if it came from Burbank it would have been in the works for two quarters and rumors would have been published in the media for the same amount of time.

KingOfCoders 2y ago

More Gleichschaltung.

lalaland1125 2y ago

Note that this isn't an outlier in the journalism industry. The whole journalism industry is dying off, with relatively frequent layoffs and closures which is well reflected in decreasing numbers of journalists https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2024/01/media-layoffs-la-times/677285/ https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2024/01/media-layo...

mannyv 2y ago

Axe, not ax.

reaperman 2y ago
Google it if you want but both ax and axe are correct and equivalent. I also would have preferred axe but it’s just an aesthetic preference.