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Nate Silver has made a career out of predicting things
- SkyMarshal 14y ago<3 Nate's blog. Only two election sites I bother with nowadays are Nate's [1] and Andrew Tannenbaum's [2], both data-oriented. [1]: http://fivethirtyeight.com http://fivethirtyeight.com [2]: http://electoral-vote.com http://electoral-vote.com
- sendos 14y agoFYI, I use the data from electoral-vote.com to turn it into a probability of winning the election at http://prespredict.com http://prespredict.com
- Thrymr 14y agoI like that your site shows the 2008 history right below the 2012 (although it is distracting that the scale in time is different between them). I couldn't even find that comparison when I looked for it on Nate Silver's site. I'm curious about the methodology as well. Why didn't you choose more standard gaussian statistics for the differences, instead of the combination linear/step model? How much difference would it make?
- sendos 14y agoIn this plot http://imgur.com/BAEie http://imgur.com/BAEie you can see the difference between a gaussian model and the model I use for the translating state poll differences into probabilities of winning that state. I prefer to have the flat region of 50% probability when the state poll difference is small, which the gaussian model doesn't have, to take into account (a) the various errors in the polling data and (b) the likelihood that people's minds can change by the time the election comes. As to how much difference it would make, with the current model, Obama's probability is now at 81%, whereas with the Gaussian model it would be around 95%.
- tricolon 14y agoNice site! On the front page, when I hover of the 2008 graph, I see stats for Obama/Romney rather than Obama/McCain.
- sendos 14y agoThanks for catching that! I just fixed it.
- andrewcooke 14y agohe's good because he's careful, he does the maths right, and he's doing meta-analysis, so he has more data than the people he's being compared to. but he's popular mainly because he can communicate so well. doing the maths right is not that hard.
- andrewljohnson 14y agoDoing the math as "right" as he does it is incredibly hard. You can tell because academics do it totally wrong on a regular basis, which leads to many garbage papers, which thankfully sometimes get caught in peer review. It's true he's a good writer, but the proof is in the pudding. He could be foaming at the mouth, but if he's predicting the outcomes, people will tune in.
- tptacek 14y agoThe math he's using is not hard, but the data sets he's working with are annoying.
- ithcy2 14y ago"Predictions are hard—especially about the future." And here I was under the impression that ALL predictions are about the future.
- textminer 14y agoToday's the day you learn about Yogiisms.
- tptacek 14y agoSure it's Yogi? It's also attributed to Samuel Goldwyn and Mark Twain. (I doubt the Twain association).
- textminer 14y agoAlso, Poor Richard's Almanac and Oscar Wilde.
- statictype 14y ago"All quotes, given enough time, are attributed to Mark Twain" - Mark Twain Actually, I saw this one assigned to Neil Bohr. Sounds like a Yogi-ism though.
- ithcy2 14y agoWell, I suck.
- andrewljohnson 14y agoRepublicans say Nate Silver is a biased liberal, and reading his blog this election cycle makes it seem that way to me even. But I would like to know - is there a Republican analog to Nate Silver? Someone who predicts 90% of the races at the end, does the meta-math, and has a computer model? If there is no Republican analog, can you possibly say Nate Silver is liberal or biased? Does using a computer model and math, and blogging about your results make you a Democrat?
- derleth 14y agoDoes following the scientific consensus on issues like anthropogenic global warming, evolution, and sex education make you a Democrat?
- andrewljohnson 14y agoIt correlates! Global warming, 2/3 Republican deny it, more than 3/4 Democrats believe it: http://www.businessweek.com/news/2012-09-30/global-warming-links-democrats-independents-isolating-romney http://www.businessweek.com/news/2012-09-30/global-warming-l... Creationism is 38% for Democrats, 60% for Republicans: http://www.cultureofscience.com/2011/08/19/republicans-and-democrats-differ-on-evolution/ http://www.cultureofscience.com/2011/08/19/republicans-and-d... I think Republicans are more likely not to want to mention or distribute condoms to teens in sex education, but I don't regard this as quite the same general disregard for science and math.
- derleth 14y ago> I think Republicans are more likely not to want to mention or distribute condoms to teens in sex education, but I don't regard this as quite the same general disregard for science and math. It's a fairly settled issue in social science, though, that abstinence-only sex ed doesn't work. Not a hard science, perhaps, but still a science in that it's data-driven and rejects hypotheses based on new data. http://dx.doi.org/10.1097%2FGCO.0b013e3282efdc0b http://dx.doi.org/10.1097%2FGCO.0b013e3282efdc0b http://journals.lww.com/co-obgyn/pages/articleviewer.aspx?year=2007&issue=10000&article=00008&type=abstract http://journals.lww.com/co-obgyn/pages/articleviewer.aspx?ye...
- seunosewa 14y agoI'm lost. What are some of his latest predictions that came true?
- wtallis 14y agoWhy do you only care about his recent predictions? What's unconvincing about the track record of the rest of his career?
- spindritf 14y agoIf he has a good method, if he's on a right track, that method should generally be improving with more work and data so recent predictions should generally be better than distant ones. Also, "You're only as good as your last envelope."
- paulgb 14y agoFrom Wikipedia[1]: > Silver's final 2008 presidential election forecast accurately predicted the winner of 49 of the 50 states as well as the District of Columbia (missing only the prediction for Indiana). As his model predicted, the races in Missouri and North Carolina were particularly close. He also correctly predicted the winners of every U.S. Senate race. The accuracy of his predictions won him further acclaim, including abroad,[49] and added to his reputation as a leading political prognosticator.[50] [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nate_Silver#2008_U.S._elections http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nate_Silver#2008_U.S._elections
- tatsuke95 14y agoNate Silver came from the fantastic world of the statistical analysis of baseball, specifically Baseball Prospectus. You can check out his body of work here (some articles require a subscription): http://www.baseballprospectus.com/author/nate_silver/ http://www.baseballprospectus.com/author/nate_silver/ His big contribution was a model used to predict player statistics. When he first started writing about politics, I assumed the name was a coincidence.
- tptacek 14y agoThe book is pretty good, sort of like a cross between Moneyball and Freakonomics. It's less political than you'd think it'd be, and as an attempt to preach the gospel of Bayesianism, should be congenial to most HN readers.