11 ms·

Why political journalists can’t stand Nate Silver

206 points by plinkplonk 14y ago

padobson 14y ago
Tl;dr Silver is an agent of disruption, and the incumbents are terrified of him.
quaunaut 14y ago
It's honestly people just not understanding what he's doing, not bothering to try, and then making inane statements about it. There's a reason he's popular, and it's not that journalism is ignoring him, or "can't stand him". It's because a lot of them point at him as their reasoning for events. Sure, a few ignorant ones say things to earn a bit of attention, but they are neither the standard nor the rule.
plinkplonk 14y ago
(submitter here) The original title was "Why political journalists can’t stand Nate Silver: The limits of journalistic knowledge" I had to edit it because of the eighty character limit. Sorry about that. The central point of the article is about misunderstandings between people with different 'modes of knowledge', and not really about current USA politics (in which case I wouldn't have posted this here,I'm not a US citizen and so detached from the partisanship.) Hopefully the discussion here won't get into political argument.
- martythemaniak 14y ago
  I definitely hear that. In fact, Krugman wrote a piece along these lines, arguing that many journalists are very uncomfortable dealing with data. Instead of looking at lots of data and trying to draw conclusions, they want some magical insider to tell them what's really happening. http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/10/30/scoop-dupes/ http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/10/30/scoop-dupes/
  - beagle3 14y ago
    It is not often that I find myself agreeing with Krugman (who likes to ignore data that does not fit his views). But in this case -- possibly because no data is actually invovled -- I agree completely. And unfortunately, that's true for most of the people, most of the time - if you asked your physician to substantiate any non-trivial recommendation he makes, you'd find that data supporting those recommendations is severely lacking or irrelevant. But most people want the magical insider (the doctor, in this case) to tell them what's happening, rather than the facts.
    - rhizome 14y ago
      I think in the case of journalism that the "doctor" wants to preserve some flexibility in interpretation that Mr. Silver takes away.
  - deleted 14y ago
    [deleted]
- tzs 14y ago
  An alternative to truncating to get under 80 is to take out most of the vowels: "Why pltcl jrnlsts cn't stnd Nate Silver: Th lmts of jrnlstc knwldg". That's only 66 characters.
  - tzs 14y ago
    I don't understand why this is getting down voted. Vowel dropping preserves much more information than truncating.
    - pdonis 14y ago
      Because it requires a lot more mental effort to parse a headline without vowels, and people don't want to expend mental effort to parse headlines; they want to be able to make an instant decision on the question "do I bother clicking on this headline or not?" Lack of vowels makes that much harder.
      - aptwebapps 14y ago
        Or easier, if you're lazy like me.
_delirium 14y ago
I agree with this article's conclusion in Silver's case, but I think for different reasons. I think the journalistic epistemology it dismisses is actually a good one, but is not being demonstrated in the attacks on Nate Silver. Long-form, long-lead-time investigative journalism is perhaps where it's best demonstrated, and in that case blends somewhat into the epistemology used by anthropologists, sociologists, and ethnographers: the idea that to understand a situation or culture you need to spend considerable time with it, observing how it works, how the people there think and act, etc., even being yourself embedded in it for a time. But you have to actually do it, which takes considerable work and usually long periods of time, and TV pundits are not. And it's better for some things than others: ethnographers rarely claim that their expertise is in predicting the outcome of elections. If you want to predict something, especially something numerical, an ethnographer would generally say that you're asking the wrong person for that prediction, and should go ask a statistician. That might be one difference with journalists: journalists have less humility about the conclusions they can draw. I don't think that can always be replaced by just data-crunching, in part because you just move the same problem to the 2nd-order problem of interpretive frames for data, which requires the same in-depth ethnographic field work to get right. The proper balance is a big debate in qualitative vs. quantitative sociology, though. I do think that when it comes to predicting the outcome of elections, on the other hand, the decision is not hard, because it's almost a best case of a prediction that can be quantified based on available data. So I'd say this is more an issue of punditry vs. careful methodology (of any kind), rather than qualitative vs. quantitative epistemologies. In this specific case, it's mainly just partisanship: some people don't like that Silver's data shows Obama with an ~80% chance of winning, so plug their ears.
- rndmize 14y ago
  I'd agree with that. For the elections, it's hard to rev up the base when someone points to the numbers and says you have a poor chance of winning. Rove has an editorial at the WSJ right now that's their #1 article, about how Romney has good chances to win; it feels similar to how in 2006 he claimed to have "the math" before the Republicans got their drubbing. It's almost like putting out a big name editorial like that is the last "get the base out to vote" attempt before the election, regardless of what the actual odds are. Problem is having someone like Silver running numbers in a clearly explained way that anyone can replicate, with a high measure of past accuracy, serves to debunk the efforts of people like Rove almost by default.
001sky 14y ago
No, even that’s TL;DR: When journalistic objectivity is confronted with scientific objectivity, its circuits are fried. -- <social science> != Science
- jrajav 14y ago
  And <any kind of science or pseudoscience> != <scientific objectivity>. The idea of scientific objectivity is "forming conclusions based only on independently testable measurements." That seems applicable here.
  - 001sky 14y ago
    political polling data is not independently testable
    - spamizbad 14y ago
      There's actually a fairly major independent test that will be concluded on Tuesday, November 6th. ... but you're technically correct :)
    - Evbn 14y ago
      What are elections?
    - arrrg 14y ago
      Huh? If you know the methodology it’s very simple to independently test polling data.
    - pjscott 14y ago
      If political polling data gives you information about the outcome of an election -- if it can make your probability estimate more accurate than that of someone who hasn't seen any such data -- then I don't see what's so all-important about independent testability. Evidence is evidence; the possibility that a poll is skewed merely weakens its evidentiary value, by increasing the probability that the poll would have those results if they're not true.
fourmii 14y ago
It's another symptom of poisoned politics here in the US. As far as I've seen, the people who are attacking Nate Silver are Republicans who simply don't like what Silver's stats are pointing to. They're the same people who claimed last month's unemployment figures were somehow manipulated because it showed a downward trend in unemployment. It's also an insight into the state of journalism and the press in this country. It's pretty hard to find objective reporting these days, sources of 'news' seems to be full of highly opinionated punditry rather than unbiased reporting.
- briandear 14y ago
  If Silver were predicting the race going the other way, Democrats would attack him. People tend to attack things that don't fit their desired outcomes. Leftists attack Fox for bias but they have no problem with the bias of MSNBC. It isn't bias people care about, it's bias against their own views. There are very few objective people.
  - brown9-2 14y ago
    Did Democrats attack 538 when Silver predicted huge losses in the Congressional races in 2010? I don't recall this. It's not for nothing that one party is considered the anti-science party.
    - Evbn 14y ago
      No one pays attention to off-year races.
  - wonderzombie 14y ago
    Actually, Democrats attacked one another and/or Obama when the race tightened in early October. You wouldn't believe the wailing and gnashing of teeth. But seldom would you hear somebody say, well, the polls must be wrong. The difference is that generally when the polls sour for Dems, they blame themselves collectively. When Repubs see the polls sour, they blame the polls. Neither is objective, but one of them is somewhat less isolated from reality.
  - 14y ago
tmoertel 14y ago
I hope that the rise of Nate Silver portends a day when journalism will not be practiced almost exclusively by people who are functionally illiterate when it comes to all things quantitative. When so much of our world is governed by relationships that are inherently quantitative, it's tragic that, of the people who make it their life's work to explain that world to us, so few are equipped to do the job.
- lifeisstillgood 14y ago
  I found out today that the US weather service gives a % chance of rain estimates. That's good but not enough.
  - fijal 14y ago
    Would you rather find a certainity that every now and then turns into a lie? I wouldn't.
    - lifeisstillgood 14y ago
      ... It's good that one part of the government (Navy?) presents it's predictions with confidence values abd so will introduce the concepts to the nation in an everyday format but just the weather service is not enough (what I would have said had I more time first time)
- llimllib 14y ago
  And then, god forbid, perhaps politicians who are not innumerate? A man can dream.
  - Evbn 14y ago
    Politicians are highly numerate. They just lie about their incentives so the appear innumerate when misjudged.
    - rhizome 14y ago
Alex3917 14y ago
It's worth emphasizing the fact that Nate Silver's model != Nate Silver's prediction. He has explicitly said many times that if you were to ask him what he thought the outcome would be, he wouldn't go entirely by his model. Rather, he uses the model as the basis of his predictions. This confuses a lot of people because he generally doesn't make predictions publicly, but rather he analyzes what's happening based on the model.
Osmium 14y ago
It's in the campaign's interests to paint is a tight race, because they don't want to promote political apathy. They want people to vote. To put it another way if his model suggested, e.g., Obama has a 100% chance of winning, and everyone knew that, his supporters would be less inclined to vote and he could lose. So there's a chaotic element to these things that's just difficult to predict, and journalists are better placed to handle this chaotic element (another example: Hurricane Sandy). That said, given the abundance of polling data, I think his model stands to be a much better predictor than journalistic intuition.
- TwoBit 14y ago
  If Obama was forecast to havee 100% chance of winning, wouldn't voters for alternative candidates also be less inlcined to vote?
  - greenyoda 14y ago
    They might also view it as a challenge to prove the pundits wrong, and turn out in large numbers.
  - kd0amg 14y ago
    Depends how "alternative" those candidates are -- it might convince more people that they can vote for their actual favorite instead of issuing a strategic vote for whichever of the two major-party candidates they find less objectionable than the other.
foobarqux 14y ago
> [Silver's evaluation] involves judgment, too, but because it’s based in a scientific process, we can trace how he applied that judgment to reach his conclusions. No, as far as I know the actual model and its parameters are not public. I understand why this is the case but without that information the basis for the conclusions are effectively as obscure as those produced by the conventional journalists decried in the article.
- _delirium 14y ago
  Weird, in '08 he had a page giving the model in detail, including some of the fit values (e.g. the imputed pollster "house effects"), but I can't find it this time around. Change since the NYT purchase?
  - Anechoic 14y ago
    House effects for 2012: http://fivethirtyeight.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/06/22/calculating-house-effects-of-polling-firms/ http://fivethirtyeight.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/06/22/calculat...
- dbecker 14y ago
  Silver tries to be transparent about his model. For a non- technical description, see [1]. He used to have something more technical/concrete on his personal blog. I'm guessing you can still find that easily. The fact that he doesn't include specific equations in his NYTimes blog is likely only to improve accessibility to non-technical readers. That said, he has given enough detail for others to roughly replicate his work. See [2] [1] http://fivethirtyeight.blogs.nytimes.com/methodology/ http://fivethirtyeight.blogs.nytimes.com/methodology/ [2] https://github.com/jseabold/538model https://github.com/jseabold/538model
  - foobarqux 14y ago
    You substantially underestimate the effect of the (unreported) model parameters. A person can often arbitrarily change the prediction by tweaking the parameters. Thank you for the link to the attempt to reproduce Silver's results. I will have to spend more time to determine how closely they agree -- it isn't obvious after a cursory look.
bmac27 14y ago
I'm not very familiar with Silver's background. I was about to write up how similar this type of analysis (and the ensuing reaction to it from the established pundit class) was to the baseball world and the rise of sabermetrics. Then I saw his background and found out that that's where he started. Not surprising.
jrajav 14y ago
A gist.io of the article to ease the sudden load on the site (or if you simply can't get to it due to 50* error): http://gist.io/4007765 http://gist.io/4007765 (Source: https://gist.github.com/4007765 https://gist.github.com/4007765)
gyardley 14y ago
Can what Nate Silver be doing be considered science? He's dealing with terribly sketchy data. Response rates to political polls in America are south of 10%, and there's no proof that the portion of the population willing to have a conversation about their political preferences with a stranger is representative of the population as a whole. He's also dealing with incomplete data. The 'likely voter' screen pollsters use to determine who's actually going to the polls isn't always revealed, and it varies from organization to organization. Polling is a cash-strapped industry and some polls' likely-voter screens are much more porous, cutting down on staff required and voter contacts needed to generate a 'statistically-significant' sample. But details of the likely-voter screens and response rates aren't always available. His results are also completely unverifiable. Let's say his final prediction is 80-20 in favor of one candidate, but the other candidate wins. Well, his model did say that'll happen one time in five, so you can't really criticize it. The appropriate amount of precision to conclude with, given all of the fuzzy inputs, is something like 'well, we can't tell who's going to win - it's close, although this one candidate's chances look slightly better'. It's not 'Candidate A's chances improved from 74.6% yesterday to 76.5% today'. That's what makes Nate Silver so irritating - he doesn't know any more than the journalists, but he claims he does.
- smackfu 14y ago
  >His results are also completely unverifiable. Let's say his final prediction is 80-20 in favor of one candidate, but the other candidate wins. Well, his model did say that'll happen one time in five, so you can't really criticize it. That's a good point. He is using percentage chances everywhere but then running only one trial (election).
  - defen 14y ago
    Clearly a wager is the way to solve this problem (Bayesian interpretation of probability). Is it legal to gamble on an election result? They could use the following payouts - J represents a regular journalist using 50/50 odds, N represents Nate Silver using 75/25 Obama/Romney: Romney win: J: +1000 N: -1000 Obama win: J: -600 N: +600 With those payouts each side has an expected value of +200 dollars for this wager, using the specified odds they believe to be true, so both should be willing to take it.
lifeisstillgood 14y ago
Punditry is analysis of known facts. Journalists do it through their prism, statisticians do it through theirs (and yes Nate Silver is a statistician and so his assumptions will affect his predictions) Other journalists perform analysis on secret or private facts. The leaks, off the record briefings of normal political discourse, as well as actual real investigative journalism (both of them who are left) Pundits who don't get the difference are doomed to be replaced by pundits with a copy of SASS. Investigative journalism is just doomed.
snowwrestler 14y ago
I think the premise--or at least the wording--is wrong. Journalists like Nate Silver. It is political pundits (who are almost the opposite of journalists) who can't stand him. Fittingly, pundits typically dislike actual journalists for the same reason: they attempt to report things accurately rather than through a party or ideological filter.
- TwoBit 14y ago
  My problem with journalists is they try too hard to report things "fairly."
  - eropple 14y ago
    Agreed. Setting aside the impossibility of unbiased reporting, the current habit of "repeat what both sides say, but don't fact-check anything" is appalling. If one side is outright lying, and you are reporting what they say but not the factual truth behind it, you're doing a disservice to all involved.
    - snowwrestler 14y ago
      There is plenty of fact checking being done by journalists, but it has shifted to "fact check" stories that are published separately. This is in part because it takes longer to fact check things, but there is tremendous competitive pressure to be first with news. So the on-scene reporters report what was said in near-real-time, and then the fact check reporters look through and report on how true it was.
      - eropple 14y ago
        Sure, but those "fact check" stories are useless. People see the first thing. They aren't likely to see the next. I get the rationale, but it doesn't do what reporters need to actually do to be an effective part of the political process.
- eropple 14y ago
  If we're being honest, it's overwhelmingly political pundits of a particular political persuasion who can't stand him. Hence the rise of thinly-veiled pundit arms like the Unskewed Polls nonsense.
kevinalexbrown 14y ago
This is a very polite interpretation of (some) traditional journalists' dislike for Mr Silver. It offers a consistent explanation for the dislike and vitriol, but there is another explanation to explore. Silver presents a method of investigation that is not only epistemologically different from traditional punditry, but threatening to it, and their dislike is centered on the threat his method poses, not just its intellectual merits or misunderstanding thereof. There are plenty of things for journalists to intellectually object to - why focus their efforts here? Consider that Mr Silver has been given awards and accolades most journalists would kill for: Time's list of 100 most influential people in the world, best political blog Webby award, Rolling Stone's 100 agents of change, the editor in chief of Politico listed him as "one of the most powerful people on earth", he's given a prestigious lecture at Columbia Journalism School, etc. He's received accolades, even from traditional journalism sources, that most journalists, even at the NYTimes, would never dream of. Speaking of which, the Public Editor of the Times wrote "he’s probably (and please know that I use the p-word loosely) its most high-profile writer at this particular moment." All this for someone who has never worked a proper newsroom since college, never had a television show, cable or otherwise, and just started a blog four years ago because he was (supposedly) annoyed at laws that threatened his livelihood - online poker. So imagine seeing someone like this receiving all the awards you've coveted since you started journalism in earnest. While the recoil against Mr Silver might be clothed in intellectual differences for some, the reason they care probably has more to do with seeing someone who differs from their traditional approach getting so much recognition. Finally, I'd note that there are many traditional journalists who support Mr Silver's approach - his awards from traditional journalist organizations speak to this. Rather, it's a very specific group that seems to feel threatened.
- randlet 14y ago
  "his livelihood - online poker." Nate was also an incredible asset to the early online poker community. He was one of the most respected members of 2+2 and really helped pushed poker strategy forward. His detailed and analytical approach to the game helped make a lot of people a bunch of money during the poker boom.
  - 14y ago
gamble 14y ago
The irony is that 538 can only exist because of gut-based journalism. The polls it aggregates aren't cheap to conduct. Newspapers and television commission them so that they can be the first to run a story alerting the public to some shocking new result, even (or especially) if it's an outlier. If the public stops paying attention to traditional horse-race poll journalism, these outlets won't have any motivation to continue polling.
- brown9-2 14y ago
  I don't think most people would put polling in the "gut-based journalism" category. When people dismiss horse-race reporting and the "gut" stuff, they're dismissing pundits telling us what they think will happen based nothing on the other pundits they talk to and what the campaigns are telling them. In a world where people place less importance on what people like Mark Halperin and Dick Morris think, news organizations would still have plenty of reason to conduct polling - that would be a world in which people value data over what "thought leaders" are telling us what they think.
  - gamble 14y ago
    People may value data, but they don't value a datum. Individually, none of the dozen polls that report in every day are newsworthy except insofar as they feed the commentariat's need for something to hang stories on. 538 is newsworthy because his statistics can draw meaningful results from multiple polls. In aggregate, polls are valuable, but without poor journalism their value to each organization funding individual polls is probably less than the cost of conducting them.
shardling 14y ago
The article seems down to me (503), but here's one that (judging from the headline alone) is about the same topic: "People Who Can't Do Math Are So Mad At Nate Silver" http://www.theatlanticwire.com/politics/2012/10/people-who-cant-do-math-are-so-mad-nate-silver/58460/ http://www.theatlanticwire.com/politics/2012/10/people-who-c... e: The article is now up for me, and it definitely covers the same topic.
jivatmanx 14y ago
There is one interesting question here: Is is harmful to the electoral process if there is far less of a perception of uncertainty about what candidate will win? I'm not certain that there is. The modern political media largely follows politics like sports, and analyze whether a particular event is likely to be good or bad for a candidate, and such shallowness does not make the electorate more informed. However there is a case to be made that more certainty would lower voter turnout, and that that would be bad. I think that the only thing that could clearly improve our political situation is proportional representation and limits on consecutive terms.
PaulHoule 14y ago
Joan Didion wrote an article in the 1980's titled "Insider Baseball" who made an analogy between reporting on elections and reporting on the going-on in baseball locker rooms. Typical election journalism gives the ready the illusion that they're getting an inside view, but ultimately the voter is disenfranchised because the story isn't about the voter's choice, it's about the campaigns. I remember an Issac Asimov story about a future where only one person had to vote, because, based on that person's vote, a supercomputer could predict who would have won the election. That's the strange future of 538. Politics is no longer the art of the possible, it's just like betting on sports.
- jivatmanx 14y ago
  Elections already are about the campaigns. If there is more certainty about the outcome of the election, they will inevitably be less about the campaigns. That would lower turnout... but would it be bad?
  - scott_s 14y ago
    I think Paul's point was that typical election coverage is about the campaigns themselves, as if the campaign was intrinsically important [1]. But the campaign is not what's relevant to a voter. That is, they don't need a narrative about how the campaign is doing, they need information on their choices. [1] Insider campaign coverage is certainly interesting, but that's different from being important. I'm interested in behind-the-scenes narratives in just about everything.
  - eru 14y ago
    If that was really a problem, they could just make voting mandatory. Like it's already in some countries.
- wglb 14y ago
  I also thought her book Political Fictions http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_Fictions http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_Fictions was in a similar vein.
- sharth 14y ago
ajays 14y ago
"Journalists get access to privileged information. . . , then evaluate, filter, and order it through the rather ineffable quality alternatively known as “news judgment,” “news sense,” or “savvy.” This norm of objectivity is how political journalists say to the public. . . . The author uses the word "objectivity" when the right word is "subjectivity". 'savvy', 'news sense', 'gut feeling' are never objective. The author himself says so a few sentences later: Where political journalists’ information is evaluated through a subjective and nebulous professional/cultural sense of judgment. And yet, he concludes by going back to "objectivity" : When journalistic objectivity is confronted with scientific objectivity, its circuits are fried. The bottom line is: this is the age-old war between what I'd call 'science' (Silver, given his methods) and 'art' ( the journalists ).
- mdonahoe 14y ago
  I think the author knows what he is talking about. Journalistic objectivity is about reporting the news without your personal bias. I think you can give your subjective opinion (making predictions, etc) and still have it be considered objective journalism. Thats why his tldr is about the clash between the two objectivities.
jtchang 14y ago
I hope more supposed "journalists" come out and criticize Nate Silver for his methods. Then maybe we can start having a real discussion based around facts and data with real analysis across the board. Take for instance discussions around social security. I swear most of the arguments I hear have no real data to back it up. Nate Silver represents a new generation of reporting that threatens the status quo journalist. Notice I don't say traditional journalism because I don't believe you can replace true journalism (go out and actually do investigation and reporting). I just believe Nate Silver is leading the way to more fact based approach.
- rhizome 14y ago
  It may be more that the old fact-based approach that has been corrupted and stymied over the past 40 years (Watergate) is giving way to a new data-driven fact-based approach, and the people who have spent their careers in the old, broken model now have to fight for their continued relevance and employability.
brownbat 14y ago
It's hardly a war between epistemologies, journalists just have to fill time. They've had Nate Silver on to celebrate his work a dozen times when he serves the purpose, lets them tell a different story than the day before. They're not against his methodology, they're against his current results, which don't make the race as interesting as it could be. (If Nate was the only one saying it was a close race, they'd be pushing his narrative above all others.) News is biased, but not how most people think, it's biased towards conflict (and novelty, doomsaying, and sensationalism). It's just entertainment, there's no permanent epistemology to entertainment.
- nas 14y ago
  It's like ultra-sound, takes all the fun out of guessing the sex of the baby. If he methods were less reliable or the race was closer so the result was more in doubt, he would be fine feed for the grist mill. Right now he's just a party pooper.
- jamesbritt 14y ago
  News is biased, but not how most people think, it's biased towards conflict (and novelty, doomsaying, and sensationalism). They could, however, be using those entertainment factors to cover, say, the fall of real wages, or the current state of unions, or what's actually in a Congressional budget, or any number of other topics that seem to get very little air-time.
  - greenyoda 14y ago
    I'd also like to see more air time devoted to the Congressional budget, but I can't think of a way of presenting it that the average TV viewer would find entertaining.
    - Tloewald 14y ago
      The problem isn't that it's been tried and found difficult, but it's been assumed to be difficult and not tried (to paraphrase P. G. Wodehouse)
aklemm 14y ago
Such an objective approach like Silver's removes the market for the subjective narrative (convention bumps, opinion swings after gaffes, perception of the candidates, etc.) journalists rely on during the many months of campaigning. That's a threat to their jobs. It would be so amazing if the market for punditry would dry up.
- btilly 14y ago
  Have you read 538? Nate has commented on all of those things. He just takes a more quantitative approach.
- philwelch 14y ago
  Except it doesn't have to. It's easy to apply a subjective narrative to changes in numbers. For instance, Obama's electoral vote EV and chance of winning, according to 538, sharply plummets after the first debate before turning around. Between the 3rd and 12th of October, Romney actually tripled his chances of winning from about 13% to about 39%. Then it turned around and Romney dropped to about 16%. It's not difficult to build a dramatic story around that. In fact, this kind of thing is exactly what sportswriters and business journalists do all the time. Which means ESPN is on a (slightly) higher plane of journalism than most political commentary.
- aklemm 14y ago
  Amazingly, Silver himself said it better than I did above: http://www.dailykos.com/story/2012/11/03/1154733/-Nate-Silver-Calls-Out-Those-Whose-Goal-Is-To-Entertain-Rather-Than-Inform http://www.dailykos.com/story/2012/11/03/1154733/-Nate-Silve... Here's the quote on pundits saying the election is a toss-up: "then you should abandon the pretense that your goal is to inform rather than entertain the public".
guscost 14y ago
From what I've heard, Nate Silver received publicity for picking 49 out of 50 states in the 2008 election. I'd like to see how his model fares in 2012 and beyond, or a higher confidence interval at the very least. Is it falsifiable? Then we might be talking about science.
- wtallis 14y ago
  What the hell do you mean "is it falsifiable"? He's making concrete predictions about the outcome of an event that is mere days away. Voters will have the opportunity to select an outcome different from what's been predicted, so it's possible for him to be wrong. Is there some other definition of falsifiable that you are using?
  - pjscott 14y ago
    It's even better than that: by looking at his state-by-state predictions and comparing them to election results, we'll be able to quantify his degree of wrongness.
  - guscost 14y ago
    You're not implying that a Romney win would falsify his model, are you?
    - msprague 14y ago
      I don't think he has a specific "model" for his "predictions". Reading his recent article, he uses statistics and weights informations gathered by polls to determine the probability of each candidate winning per state. You can't really be "wrong" in that sense, but the actual result can vary due to statistical sampling error, polling error, or bias in the polls. Source: fivethirtyeight.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/11/03/nov-2-for-romney-to-win-state-polls-must-be-statistically-biased
npsimons 14y ago
Silver’s methods cannot possibly produce more reliable information than the official sources themselves. These are the savviest, highest inside sources. They are the strongest form of epistemological proof — a “case closed” in an argument against calculations and numbers. Now where have I heard that before . . .
jtfairbank 14y ago
Check out http://electionanalytics.cs.illinois.edu/ http://electionanalytics.cs.illinois.edu/ for an alternative to Nate Silver. It uses bayesian analysis and dynamic program to come up with a deterministic snapshot of the election.
jfc 14y ago
Dr. Sam Wang, a neuroscientist at Princeton University, wrote a spirited defense of Silver on the Princeton Election Consortium blog (http://election.princeton.edu http://election.princeton.edu), where Wang also does some insightful statistical analysis on the Presidential election. Wang sometimes disagrees with Silver, but supports the notion of a data-driven approach. Fascinating stuff on his blog, too: he's running Bayesian prediction models, Random Drift, and has a popular meta-margin that is worth checking out. He also takes some delightful shots at journalists and others who are trying to keep the focus on political "horse race" reporting, instead of using more rigor. And he has a great sense of humor - his "Nerds Under Attack" post is hilarious - http://election.princeton.edu/2012/10/29/nerds-under-attack/ http://election.princeton.edu/2012/10/29/nerds-under-attack/
codex 14y ago
If traditional political journalists assume that the race is too close to call because both campaigns tell them so, then they are gullible chumps, plain and simple. The losing campaign will try to claim the race is close because they don't want their supporters to be discouraged and not turn out. The winning campaign will try to claim the race is close because they don't want their supporters to get lazy and not turn out.
jacques_chester 14y ago
Experts are bad at predicting political outcomes, full stop. Even the "best" experts are absolutely stomped by simple statistical models[1]. And what does Nate Silver use? That's right. [1] http://chester.id.au/2012/07/29/review-expert-political-judgement/ http://chester.id.au/2012/07/29/review-expert-political-judg...
tsotha 14y ago
>Where political journalists’ information is evaluated through a subjective and nebulous professional/cultural sense of judgment, his evaluation is systematic and scientifically based. Oh, bullcrap. Silver is hand weighting different polls based on whether or not he thinks they're reliable. That, in turn, is based on his own " subjective and nebulous professional/cultural sense of judgment". In other words, he's doing exactly what the political journalists are doing and then smearing a thin layer of math over it. This isn't "scientifically based" at all.
expralitemonk 14y ago
If Nate Silver is right, then there is no reason to pay any further attention to the election (other than showing up and voting of course). That means fewer people watching or reading the news and their advertisements.
charlieok 14y ago
“How does Scarborough know that Silver’s estimate is incorrect? He talked to sources in both campaigns. In Scarborough’s journalistic epistemology, this is the trump card: Silver’s methods cannot possibly produce more reliable information than the official sources themselves.” Well, the campaign insiders do have access to internal polling data that the rest of us don't. * * Although, Nate Silver apparently did get to see that data in 2008.
allenwlee 14y ago
a million likes

206 points by plinkplonk 14y ago

Tl;dr Silver is an agent of disruption, and the incumbents are terrified of him.

It's honestly people just not understanding what he's doing, not bothering to try, and then making inane statements about it. There's a reason he's popular, and it's not that journalism is ignoring him, or "can't stand him". It's because a lot of them point at him as their reasoning for events. Sure, a few ignorant ones say things to earn a bit of attention, but they are neither the standard nor the rule.

plinkplonk 14y ago

(submitter here) The original title was "Why political journalists can’t stand Nate Silver: The limits of journalistic knowledge" I had to edit it because of the eighty character limit. Sorry about that. The central point of the article is about misunderstandings between people with different 'modes of knowledge', and not really about current USA politics (in which case I wouldn't have posted this here,I'm not a US citizen and so detached from the partisanship.) Hopefully the discussion here won't get into political argument.

martythemaniak 14y ago
I definitely hear that. In fact, Krugman wrote a piece along these lines, arguing that many journalists are very uncomfortable dealing with data. Instead of looking at lots of data and trying to draw conclusions, they want some magical insider to tell them what's really happening. http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/10/30/scoop-dupes/ http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/10/30/scoop-dupes/
- beagle3 14y ago
  It is not often that I find myself agreeing with Krugman (who likes to ignore data that does not fit his views). But in this case -- possibly because no data is actually invovled -- I agree completely. And unfortunately, that's true for most of the people, most of the time - if you asked your physician to substantiate any non-trivial recommendation he makes, you'd find that data supporting those recommendations is severely lacking or irrelevant. But most people want the magical insider (the doctor, in this case) to tell them what's happening, rather than the facts.
  - rhizome 14y ago
    I think in the case of journalism that the "doctor" wants to preserve some flexibility in interpretation that Mr. Silver takes away.
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
tzs 14y ago
An alternative to truncating to get under 80 is to take out most of the vowels: "Why pltcl jrnlsts cn't stnd Nate Silver: Th lmts of jrnlstc knwldg". That's only 66 characters.
- tzs 14y ago
  I don't understand why this is getting down voted. Vowel dropping preserves much more information than truncating.
  - pdonis 14y ago
    Because it requires a lot more mental effort to parse a headline without vowels, and people don't want to expend mental effort to parse headlines; they want to be able to make an instant decision on the question "do I bother clicking on this headline or not?" Lack of vowels makes that much harder.
    - aptwebapps 14y ago
      Or easier, if you're lazy like me.

_delirium 14y ago

I agree with this article's conclusion in Silver's case, but I think for different reasons. I think the journalistic epistemology it dismisses is actually a good one, but is not being demonstrated in the attacks on Nate Silver. Long-form, long-lead-time investigative journalism is perhaps where it's best demonstrated, and in that case blends somewhat into the epistemology used by anthropologists, sociologists, and ethnographers: the idea that to understand a situation or culture you need to spend considerable time with it, observing how it works, how the people there think and act, etc., even being yourself embedded in it for a time. But you have to actually do it, which takes considerable work and usually long periods of time, and TV pundits are not. And it's better for some things than others: ethnographers rarely claim that their expertise is in predicting the outcome of elections. If you want to predict something, especially something numerical, an ethnographer would generally say that you're asking the wrong person for that prediction, and should go ask a statistician. That might be one difference with journalists: journalists have less humility about the conclusions they can draw. I don't think that can always be replaced by just data-crunching, in part because you just move the same problem to the 2nd-order problem of interpretive frames for data, which requires the same in-depth ethnographic field work to get right. The proper balance is a big debate in qualitative vs. quantitative sociology, though. I do think that when it comes to predicting the outcome of elections, on the other hand, the decision is not hard, because it's almost a best case of a prediction that can be quantified based on available data. So I'd say this is more an issue of punditry vs. careful methodology (of any kind), rather than qualitative vs. quantitative epistemologies. In this specific case, it's mainly just partisanship: some people don't like that Silver's data shows Obama with an ~80% chance of winning, so plug their ears.

rndmize 14y ago
I'd agree with that. For the elections, it's hard to rev up the base when someone points to the numbers and says you have a poor chance of winning. Rove has an editorial at the WSJ right now that's their #1 article, about how Romney has good chances to win; it feels similar to how in 2006 he claimed to have "the math" before the Republicans got their drubbing. It's almost like putting out a big name editorial like that is the last "get the base out to vote" attempt before the election, regardless of what the actual odds are. Problem is having someone like Silver running numbers in a clearly explained way that anyone can replicate, with a high measure of past accuracy, serves to debunk the efforts of people like Rove almost by default.

001sky 14y ago

No, even that’s TL;DR: When journalistic objectivity is confronted with scientific objectivity, its circuits are fried. -- <social science> != Science

jrajav 14y ago
And <any kind of science or pseudoscience> != <scientific objectivity>. The idea of scientific objectivity is "forming conclusions based only on independently testable measurements." That seems applicable here.
- 001sky 14y ago
  political polling data is not independently testable
  - spamizbad 14y ago
    There's actually a fairly major independent test that will be concluded on Tuesday, November 6th. ... but you're technically correct :)
  - Evbn 14y ago
    What are elections?
  - arrrg 14y ago
    Huh? If you know the methodology it’s very simple to independently test polling data.
  - pjscott 14y ago
    If political polling data gives you information about the outcome of an election -- if it can make your probability estimate more accurate than that of someone who hasn't seen any such data -- then I don't see what's so all-important about independent testability. Evidence is evidence; the possibility that a poll is skewed merely weakens its evidentiary value, by increasing the probability that the poll would have those results if they're not true.

fourmii 14y ago

It's another symptom of poisoned politics here in the US. As far as I've seen, the people who are attacking Nate Silver are Republicans who simply don't like what Silver's stats are pointing to. They're the same people who claimed last month's unemployment figures were somehow manipulated because it showed a downward trend in unemployment. It's also an insight into the state of journalism and the press in this country. It's pretty hard to find objective reporting these days, sources of 'news' seems to be full of highly opinionated punditry rather than unbiased reporting.

briandear 14y ago
If Silver were predicting the race going the other way, Democrats would attack him. People tend to attack things that don't fit their desired outcomes. Leftists attack Fox for bias but they have no problem with the bias of MSNBC. It isn't bias people care about, it's bias against their own views. There are very few objective people.
- brown9-2 14y ago
  Did Democrats attack 538 when Silver predicted huge losses in the Congressional races in 2010? I don't recall this. It's not for nothing that one party is considered the anti-science party.
  - Evbn 14y ago
    No one pays attention to off-year races.
- wonderzombie 14y ago
  Actually, Democrats attacked one another and/or Obama when the race tightened in early October. You wouldn't believe the wailing and gnashing of teeth. But seldom would you hear somebody say, well, the polls must be wrong. The difference is that generally when the polls sour for Dems, they blame themselves collectively. When Repubs see the polls sour, they blame the polls. Neither is objective, but one of them is somewhat less isolated from reality.
- 14y ago

tmoertel 14y ago

I hope that the rise of Nate Silver portends a day when journalism will not be practiced almost exclusively by people who are functionally illiterate when it comes to all things quantitative. When so much of our world is governed by relationships that are inherently quantitative, it's tragic that, of the people who make it their life's work to explain that world to us, so few are equipped to do the job.

lifeisstillgood 14y ago
I found out today that the US weather service gives a % chance of rain estimates. That's good but not enough.
- fijal 14y ago
  Would you rather find a certainity that every now and then turns into a lie? I wouldn't.
  - lifeisstillgood 14y ago
    ... It's good that one part of the government (Navy?) presents it's predictions with confidence values abd so will introduce the concepts to the nation in an everyday format but just the weather service is not enough (what I would have said had I more time first time)
llimllib 14y ago
And then, god forbid, perhaps politicians who are not innumerate? A man can dream.
- Evbn 14y ago
  Politicians are highly numerate. They just lie about their incentives so the appear innumerate when misjudged.
  - rhizome 14y ago

Alex3917 14y ago

It's worth emphasizing the fact that Nate Silver's model != Nate Silver's prediction. He has explicitly said many times that if you were to ask him what he thought the outcome would be, he wouldn't go entirely by his model. Rather, he uses the model as the basis of his predictions. This confuses a lot of people because he generally doesn't make predictions publicly, but rather he analyzes what's happening based on the model.

Osmium 14y ago

It's in the campaign's interests to paint is a tight race, because they don't want to promote political apathy. They want people to vote. To put it another way if his model suggested, e.g., Obama has a 100% chance of winning, and everyone knew that, his supporters would be less inclined to vote and he could lose. So there's a chaotic element to these things that's just difficult to predict, and journalists are better placed to handle this chaotic element (another example: Hurricane Sandy). That said, given the abundance of polling data, I think his model stands to be a much better predictor than journalistic intuition.

TwoBit 14y ago
If Obama was forecast to havee 100% chance of winning, wouldn't voters for alternative candidates also be less inlcined to vote?
- greenyoda 14y ago
  They might also view it as a challenge to prove the pundits wrong, and turn out in large numbers.
- kd0amg 14y ago
  Depends how "alternative" those candidates are -- it might convince more people that they can vote for their actual favorite instead of issuing a strategic vote for whichever of the two major-party candidates they find less objectionable than the other.

foobarqux 14y ago

> [Silver's evaluation] involves judgment, too, but because it’s based in a scientific process, we can trace how he applied that judgment to reach his conclusions. No, as far as I know the actual model and its parameters are not public. I understand why this is the case but without that information the basis for the conclusions are effectively as obscure as those produced by the conventional journalists decried in the article.

_delirium 14y ago
Weird, in '08 he had a page giving the model in detail, including some of the fit values (e.g. the imputed pollster "house effects"), but I can't find it this time around. Change since the NYT purchase?
- Anechoic 14y ago
  House effects for 2012: http://fivethirtyeight.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/06/22/calculating-house-effects-of-polling-firms/ http://fivethirtyeight.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/06/22/calculat...
dbecker 14y ago
Silver tries to be transparent about his model. For a non- technical description, see [1]. He used to have something more technical/concrete on his personal blog. I'm guessing you can still find that easily. The fact that he doesn't include specific equations in his NYTimes blog is likely only to improve accessibility to non-technical readers. That said, he has given enough detail for others to roughly replicate his work. See [2] [1] http://fivethirtyeight.blogs.nytimes.com/methodology/ http://fivethirtyeight.blogs.nytimes.com/methodology/ [2] https://github.com/jseabold/538model https://github.com/jseabold/538model
- foobarqux 14y ago
  You substantially underestimate the effect of the (unreported) model parameters. A person can often arbitrarily change the prediction by tweaking the parameters. Thank you for the link to the attempt to reproduce Silver's results. I will have to spend more time to determine how closely they agree -- it isn't obvious after a cursory look.

bmac27 14y ago

I'm not very familiar with Silver's background. I was about to write up how similar this type of analysis (and the ensuing reaction to it from the established pundit class) was to the baseball world and the rise of sabermetrics. Then I saw his background and found out that that's where he started. Not surprising.

jrajav 14y ago

A gist.io of the article to ease the sudden load on the site (or if you simply can't get to it due to 50* error): http://gist.io/4007765 http://gist.io/4007765 (Source: https://gist.github.com/4007765 https://gist.github.com/4007765)

gyardley 14y ago

Can what Nate Silver be doing be considered science? He's dealing with terribly sketchy data. Response rates to political polls in America are south of 10%, and there's no proof that the portion of the population willing to have a conversation about their political preferences with a stranger is representative of the population as a whole. He's also dealing with incomplete data. The 'likely voter' screen pollsters use to determine who's actually going to the polls isn't always revealed, and it varies from organization to organization. Polling is a cash-strapped industry and some polls' likely-voter screens are much more porous, cutting down on staff required and voter contacts needed to generate a 'statistically-significant' sample. But details of the likely-voter screens and response rates aren't always available. His results are also completely unverifiable. Let's say his final prediction is 80-20 in favor of one candidate, but the other candidate wins. Well, his model did say that'll happen one time in five, so you can't really criticize it. The appropriate amount of precision to conclude with, given all of the fuzzy inputs, is something like 'well, we can't tell who's going to win - it's close, although this one candidate's chances look slightly better'. It's not 'Candidate A's chances improved from 74.6% yesterday to 76.5% today'. That's what makes Nate Silver so irritating - he doesn't know any more than the journalists, but he claims he does.

smackfu 14y ago
>His results are also completely unverifiable. Let's say his final prediction is 80-20 in favor of one candidate, but the other candidate wins. Well, his model did say that'll happen one time in five, so you can't really criticize it. That's a good point. He is using percentage chances everywhere but then running only one trial (election).
- defen 14y ago
  Clearly a wager is the way to solve this problem (Bayesian interpretation of probability). Is it legal to gamble on an election result? They could use the following payouts - J represents a regular journalist using 50/50 odds, N represents Nate Silver using 75/25 Obama/Romney: Romney win: J: +1000 N: -1000 Obama win: J: -600 N: +600 With those payouts each side has an expected value of +200 dollars for this wager, using the specified odds they believe to be true, so both should be willing to take it.

lifeisstillgood 14y ago

Punditry is analysis of known facts. Journalists do it through their prism, statisticians do it through theirs (and yes Nate Silver is a statistician and so his assumptions will affect his predictions) Other journalists perform analysis on secret or private facts. The leaks, off the record briefings of normal political discourse, as well as actual real investigative journalism (both of them who are left) Pundits who don't get the difference are doomed to be replaced by pundits with a copy of SASS. Investigative journalism is just doomed.

snowwrestler 14y ago

I think the premise--or at least the wording--is wrong. Journalists like Nate Silver. It is political pundits (who are almost the opposite of journalists) who can't stand him. Fittingly, pundits typically dislike actual journalists for the same reason: they attempt to report things accurately rather than through a party or ideological filter.

TwoBit 14y ago
My problem with journalists is they try too hard to report things "fairly."
- eropple 14y ago
  Agreed. Setting aside the impossibility of unbiased reporting, the current habit of "repeat what both sides say, but don't fact-check anything" is appalling. If one side is outright lying, and you are reporting what they say but not the factual truth behind it, you're doing a disservice to all involved.
  - snowwrestler 14y ago
    There is plenty of fact checking being done by journalists, but it has shifted to "fact check" stories that are published separately. This is in part because it takes longer to fact check things, but there is tremendous competitive pressure to be first with news. So the on-scene reporters report what was said in near-real-time, and then the fact check reporters look through and report on how true it was.
    - eropple 14y ago
      Sure, but those "fact check" stories are useless. People see the first thing. They aren't likely to see the next. I get the rationale, but it doesn't do what reporters need to actually do to be an effective part of the political process.
eropple 14y ago
If we're being honest, it's overwhelmingly political pundits of a particular political persuasion who can't stand him. Hence the rise of thinly-veiled pundit arms like the Unskewed Polls nonsense.

kevinalexbrown 14y ago

This is a very polite interpretation of (some) traditional journalists' dislike for Mr Silver. It offers a consistent explanation for the dislike and vitriol, but there is another explanation to explore. Silver presents a method of investigation that is not only epistemologically different from traditional punditry, but threatening to it, and their dislike is centered on the threat his method poses, not just its intellectual merits or misunderstanding thereof. There are plenty of things for journalists to intellectually object to - why focus their efforts here? Consider that Mr Silver has been given awards and accolades most journalists would kill for: Time's list of 100 most influential people in the world, best political blog Webby award, Rolling Stone's 100 agents of change, the editor in chief of Politico listed him as "one of the most powerful people on earth", he's given a prestigious lecture at Columbia Journalism School, etc. He's received accolades, even from traditional journalism sources, that most journalists, even at the NYTimes, would never dream of. Speaking of which, the Public Editor of the Times wrote "he’s probably (and please know that I use the p-word loosely) its most high-profile writer at this particular moment." All this for someone who has never worked a proper newsroom since college, never had a television show, cable or otherwise, and just started a blog four years ago because he was (supposedly) annoyed at laws that threatened his livelihood - online poker. So imagine seeing someone like this receiving all the awards you've coveted since you started journalism in earnest. While the recoil against Mr Silver might be clothed in intellectual differences for some, the reason they care probably has more to do with seeing someone who differs from their traditional approach getting so much recognition. Finally, I'd note that there are many traditional journalists who support Mr Silver's approach - his awards from traditional journalist organizations speak to this. Rather, it's a very specific group that seems to feel threatened.

randlet 14y ago
"his livelihood - online poker." Nate was also an incredible asset to the early online poker community. He was one of the most respected members of 2+2 and really helped pushed poker strategy forward. His detailed and analytical approach to the game helped make a lot of people a bunch of money during the poker boom.
- 14y ago

gamble 14y ago

The irony is that 538 can only exist because of gut-based journalism. The polls it aggregates aren't cheap to conduct. Newspapers and television commission them so that they can be the first to run a story alerting the public to some shocking new result, even (or especially) if it's an outlier. If the public stops paying attention to traditional horse-race poll journalism, these outlets won't have any motivation to continue polling.

brown9-2 14y ago
I don't think most people would put polling in the "gut-based journalism" category. When people dismiss horse-race reporting and the "gut" stuff, they're dismissing pundits telling us what they think will happen based nothing on the other pundits they talk to and what the campaigns are telling them. In a world where people place less importance on what people like Mark Halperin and Dick Morris think, news organizations would still have plenty of reason to conduct polling - that would be a world in which people value data over what "thought leaders" are telling us what they think.
- gamble 14y ago
  People may value data, but they don't value a datum. Individually, none of the dozen polls that report in every day are newsworthy except insofar as they feed the commentariat's need for something to hang stories on. 538 is newsworthy because his statistics can draw meaningful results from multiple polls. In aggregate, polls are valuable, but without poor journalism their value to each organization funding individual polls is probably less than the cost of conducting them.

shardling 14y ago

The article seems down to me (503), but here's one that (judging from the headline alone) is about the same topic: "People Who Can't Do Math Are So Mad At Nate Silver" http://www.theatlanticwire.com/politics/2012/10/people-who-cant-do-math-are-so-mad-nate-silver/58460/ http://www.theatlanticwire.com/politics/2012/10/people-who-c... e: The article is now up for me, and it definitely covers the same topic.

jivatmanx 14y ago

There is one interesting question here: Is is harmful to the electoral process if there is far less of a perception of uncertainty about what candidate will win? I'm not certain that there is. The modern political media largely follows politics like sports, and analyze whether a particular event is likely to be good or bad for a candidate, and such shallowness does not make the electorate more informed. However there is a case to be made that more certainty would lower voter turnout, and that that would be bad. I think that the only thing that could clearly improve our political situation is proportional representation and limits on consecutive terms.

PaulHoule 14y ago

Joan Didion wrote an article in the 1980's titled "Insider Baseball" who made an analogy between reporting on elections and reporting on the going-on in baseball locker rooms. Typical election journalism gives the ready the illusion that they're getting an inside view, but ultimately the voter is disenfranchised because the story isn't about the voter's choice, it's about the campaigns. I remember an Issac Asimov story about a future where only one person had to vote, because, based on that person's vote, a supercomputer could predict who would have won the election. That's the strange future of 538. Politics is no longer the art of the possible, it's just like betting on sports.

jivatmanx 14y ago
Elections already are about the campaigns. If there is more certainty about the outcome of the election, they will inevitably be less about the campaigns. That would lower turnout... but would it be bad?
- scott_s 14y ago
  I think Paul's point was that typical election coverage is about the campaigns themselves, as if the campaign was intrinsically important [1]. But the campaign is not what's relevant to a voter. That is, they don't need a narrative about how the campaign is doing, they need information on their choices. [1] Insider campaign coverage is certainly interesting, but that's different from being important. I'm interested in behind-the-scenes narratives in just about everything.
- eru 14y ago
  If that was really a problem, they could just make voting mandatory. Like it's already in some countries.
wglb 14y ago
I also thought her book Political Fictions http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_Fictions http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_Fictions was in a similar vein.
sharth 14y ago

ajays 14y ago

"Journalists get access to privileged information. . . , then evaluate, filter, and order it through the rather ineffable quality alternatively known as “news judgment,” “news sense,” or “savvy.” This norm of objectivity is how political journalists say to the public. . . . The author uses the word "objectivity" when the right word is "subjectivity". 'savvy', 'news sense', 'gut feeling' are never objective. The author himself says so a few sentences later: Where political journalists’ information is evaluated through a subjective and nebulous professional/cultural sense of judgment. And yet, he concludes by going back to "objectivity" : When journalistic objectivity is confronted with scientific objectivity, its circuits are fried. The bottom line is: this is the age-old war between what I'd call 'science' (Silver, given his methods) and 'art' ( the journalists ).

mdonahoe 14y ago
I think the author knows what he is talking about. Journalistic objectivity is about reporting the news without your personal bias. I think you can give your subjective opinion (making predictions, etc) and still have it be considered objective journalism. Thats why his tldr is about the clash between the two objectivities.

jtchang 14y ago

I hope more supposed "journalists" come out and criticize Nate Silver for his methods. Then maybe we can start having a real discussion based around facts and data with real analysis across the board. Take for instance discussions around social security. I swear most of the arguments I hear have no real data to back it up. Nate Silver represents a new generation of reporting that threatens the status quo journalist. Notice I don't say traditional journalism because I don't believe you can replace true journalism (go out and actually do investigation and reporting). I just believe Nate Silver is leading the way to more fact based approach.

rhizome 14y ago
It may be more that the old fact-based approach that has been corrupted and stymied over the past 40 years (Watergate) is giving way to a new data-driven fact-based approach, and the people who have spent their careers in the old, broken model now have to fight for their continued relevance and employability.

brownbat 14y ago

It's hardly a war between epistemologies, journalists just have to fill time. They've had Nate Silver on to celebrate his work a dozen times when he serves the purpose, lets them tell a different story than the day before. They're not against his methodology, they're against his current results, which don't make the race as interesting as it could be. (If Nate was the only one saying it was a close race, they'd be pushing his narrative above all others.) News is biased, but not how most people think, it's biased towards conflict (and novelty, doomsaying, and sensationalism). It's just entertainment, there's no permanent epistemology to entertainment.

nas 14y ago
It's like ultra-sound, takes all the fun out of guessing the sex of the baby. If he methods were less reliable or the race was closer so the result was more in doubt, he would be fine feed for the grist mill. Right now he's just a party pooper.
jamesbritt 14y ago
News is biased, but not how most people think, it's biased towards conflict (and novelty, doomsaying, and sensationalism). They could, however, be using those entertainment factors to cover, say, the fall of real wages, or the current state of unions, or what's actually in a Congressional budget, or any number of other topics that seem to get very little air-time.
- greenyoda 14y ago
  I'd also like to see more air time devoted to the Congressional budget, but I can't think of a way of presenting it that the average TV viewer would find entertaining.
  - Tloewald 14y ago
    The problem isn't that it's been tried and found difficult, but it's been assumed to be difficult and not tried (to paraphrase P. G. Wodehouse)

aklemm 14y ago

Such an objective approach like Silver's removes the market for the subjective narrative (convention bumps, opinion swings after gaffes, perception of the candidates, etc.) journalists rely on during the many months of campaigning. That's a threat to their jobs. It would be so amazing if the market for punditry would dry up.

btilly 14y ago
Have you read 538? Nate has commented on all of those things. He just takes a more quantitative approach.
philwelch 14y ago
Except it doesn't have to. It's easy to apply a subjective narrative to changes in numbers. For instance, Obama's electoral vote EV and chance of winning, according to 538, sharply plummets after the first debate before turning around. Between the 3rd and 12th of October, Romney actually tripled his chances of winning from about 13% to about 39%. Then it turned around and Romney dropped to about 16%. It's not difficult to build a dramatic story around that. In fact, this kind of thing is exactly what sportswriters and business journalists do all the time. Which means ESPN is on a (slightly) higher plane of journalism than most political commentary.
aklemm 14y ago
Amazingly, Silver himself said it better than I did above: http://www.dailykos.com/story/2012/11/03/1154733/-Nate-Silver-Calls-Out-Those-Whose-Goal-Is-To-Entertain-Rather-Than-Inform http://www.dailykos.com/story/2012/11/03/1154733/-Nate-Silve... Here's the quote on pundits saying the election is a toss-up: "then you should abandon the pretense that your goal is to inform rather than entertain the public".

guscost 14y ago

From what I've heard, Nate Silver received publicity for picking 49 out of 50 states in the 2008 election. I'd like to see how his model fares in 2012 and beyond, or a higher confidence interval at the very least. Is it falsifiable? Then we might be talking about science.

wtallis 14y ago
What the hell do you mean "is it falsifiable"? He's making concrete predictions about the outcome of an event that is mere days away. Voters will have the opportunity to select an outcome different from what's been predicted, so it's possible for him to be wrong. Is there some other definition of falsifiable that you are using?
- pjscott 14y ago
  It's even better than that: by looking at his state-by-state predictions and comparing them to election results, we'll be able to quantify his degree of wrongness.
- guscost 14y ago
  You're not implying that a Romney win would falsify his model, are you?
  - msprague 14y ago
    I don't think he has a specific "model" for his "predictions". Reading his recent article, he uses statistics and weights informations gathered by polls to determine the probability of each candidate winning per state. You can't really be "wrong" in that sense, but the actual result can vary due to statistical sampling error, polling error, or bias in the polls. Source: fivethirtyeight.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/11/03/nov-2-for-romney-to-win-state-polls-must-be-statistically-biased

npsimons 14y ago

Silver’s methods cannot possibly produce more reliable information than the official sources themselves. These are the savviest, highest inside sources. They are the strongest form of epistemological proof — a “case closed” in an argument against calculations and numbers. Now where have I heard that before . . .

jtfairbank 14y ago

Check out http://electionanalytics.cs.illinois.edu/ http://electionanalytics.cs.illinois.edu/ for an alternative to Nate Silver. It uses bayesian analysis and dynamic program to come up with a deterministic snapshot of the election.

jfc 14y ago

Dr. Sam Wang, a neuroscientist at Princeton University, wrote a spirited defense of Silver on the Princeton Election Consortium blog (http://election.princeton.edu http://election.princeton.edu), where Wang also does some insightful statistical analysis on the Presidential election. Wang sometimes disagrees with Silver, but supports the notion of a data-driven approach. Fascinating stuff on his blog, too: he's running Bayesian prediction models, Random Drift, and has a popular meta-margin that is worth checking out. He also takes some delightful shots at journalists and others who are trying to keep the focus on political "horse race" reporting, instead of using more rigor. And he has a great sense of humor - his "Nerds Under Attack" post is hilarious - http://election.princeton.edu/2012/10/29/nerds-under-attack/ http://election.princeton.edu/2012/10/29/nerds-under-attack/

codex 14y ago

If traditional political journalists assume that the race is too close to call because both campaigns tell them so, then they are gullible chumps, plain and simple. The losing campaign will try to claim the race is close because they don't want their supporters to be discouraged and not turn out. The winning campaign will try to claim the race is close because they don't want their supporters to get lazy and not turn out.

jacques_chester 14y ago

Experts are bad at predicting political outcomes, full stop. Even the "best" experts are absolutely stomped by simple statistical models[1]. And what does Nate Silver use? That's right. [1] http://chester.id.au/2012/07/29/review-expert-political-judgement/ http://chester.id.au/2012/07/29/review-expert-political-judg...

tsotha 14y ago

>Where political journalists’ information is evaluated through a subjective and nebulous professional/cultural sense of judgment, his evaluation is systematic and scientifically based. Oh, bullcrap. Silver is hand weighting different polls based on whether or not he thinks they're reliable. That, in turn, is based on his own " subjective and nebulous professional/cultural sense of judgment". In other words, he's doing exactly what the political journalists are doing and then smearing a thin layer of math over it. This isn't "scientifically based" at all.

expralitemonk 14y ago

If Nate Silver is right, then there is no reason to pay any further attention to the election (other than showing up and voting of course). That means fewer people watching or reading the news and their advertisements.

charlieok 14y ago

“How does Scarborough know that Silver’s estimate is incorrect? He talked to sources in both campaigns. In Scarborough’s journalistic epistemology, this is the trump card: Silver’s methods cannot possibly produce more reliable information than the official sources themselves.” Well, the campaign insiders do have access to internal polling data that the rest of us don't. * * Although, Nate Silver apparently did get to see that data in 2008.

allenwlee 14y ago

a million likes