11 ms·

Nate Silver of FiveThirtyEight Blog Is to Join ESPN Staff

72 points by jparishy 13y ago

josh2600 13y ago
I adore Nate Silvers work and the presentation for the NYTimes during the Presidential Elections was outstanding. I do hope they bring him back for future major Elections. His commentary is a delightful respite from the ultra-polarized world of Reddit and Fox News.
- clicks 13y ago
  > I do hope they bring him back for future major Elections. His commentary is a delightful respite from the ultra-polarized world of Reddit and Fox News. Funny you say that, as Reddit had majorly sided with Nate Silver way before election day. Almost every post of his was frontpaged when political campaigns were in full swing. It's also important to note that Fox News is not in the same category that Reddit is in. Fox News reports new findings, Reddit is a social bookmarking website.
  - stfu 13y ago
    Still, most of Reddit's political frontpage posts are along the lines of "We can't have cute puppies on the frontpage anymore because Republicans just kill them and drink their blood".
  - chimeracoder 13y ago
    > Funny you say that, as Reddit had majorly sided with Nate Silver way before election day. Be that as it may, Nate Silver is actually thoughtful, articulate, and well-reasoned - three words which do not describe /r/politics, etc. It's not just a matter of which opinions one holds; it's a matter of how intelligently one expresses them and defends them with data and evidence. (The irony with Reddit's love of FiveThirtyEight - and with the right-wing criticism of FiveThirtyEight being 'partisan' during the 2012 election cycle - is that Nate Silver is not himself an entirely left-wing person as much as people often thing. You'd have to dig pretty deep back into the archives of pre-NYT FiveThirtyEight to notice this, but he holds rather somewhat moderate or right-wing views on a number of issues).
    - _delirium 13y ago
      I agree Silver is relatively moderate, but FiveThirtyEight did more or less grow out of DailyKos [1], so it's not a huge stretch to suggest he personally has a clear preference for one or the other side of the American political spectrum. It's not like he also had a blog on the right-wing equivalents of DailyKos, like FreeRepublic or RedState. [1] For a year or so before he launched fivethirtyeight.com as an independent site, he posted data-driven election analysis, among other things, at http://www.dailykos.com/blog/poblano http://www.dailykos.com/blog/poblano
      - sardonicbryan 13y ago
        It could also be because the Daily Kos' founder also cofounded SB Nation, one of the larger networks of sports blogs that are well regarded in the baseball analytics community, so it's likely that Silver had some connection/comfort with DailyKos.
    - Tuna-Fish 13y ago
      And Reddit is not nearly as left-wing as you think. It's populated by tens of millions of people now, all around the political spectrum. If anything, they tend to swing left on social policy issues, but they are not far off from the national average in economic policy. The Obama love last election had a lot more to do with the lack of any reasonable republican candidate than it did with the political makeup of Reddit. Remember, Ron Paul actually received serious support from Reddit.
  - deleted 13y ago
    [deleted]
  - cmsmith 13y ago
    I think it's important to note that they sided with him while he was saying what they wanted to hear. Reddit/MSNBC had it easy this past election, because they could say what they could be optimistic and listen to the experts at the same time. My disillusionment with political journalism will be fully validated during the next election won by Republicans, when Fox is on the side of 'science' and MSNBC says that 'science' can't be trusted.
    - flomo 13y ago
      For example, during the 2010 midterm elections, there were a number of Democrats arguing "Silver is wrong this time because (random political reasons)", which is exactly what the Republicans were doing in 2012. Winning an election requires enthusiasm and people willing to volunteer their personal efforts, so partisan activists dismissing contradictory polling data should be expected.
forsaken 13y ago
Did the NYTimes just break a story about one of their own employees leaving? The tone of the article is really interesting.
- bthomas 13y ago
  I've always thought this was an interesting dynamic too. The Boston Globe recently had a front page article about who is buying the Boston Globe: http://www.bostonglobe.com/business/2013/06/27/least-five-groups-submit-bids-buy-the-boston-globe/SRZ5zPhO6cPwg4LlL9pGzK/story.html http://www.bostonglobe.com/business/2013/06/27/least-five-gr...
  - apaprocki 13y ago
    Each news organization is different. Bloomberg News editorial policy is to not cover anything involving the company -- even if a story appears in every other source, positive or negative, it's still off limits.
    - seferphier 13y ago
      no wonder why mr.bloomberg never appears in their own billionaire list. makes the rankings inaccurate though.
jackschultz 13y ago
Interesting move. ESPN actually has a seemingly forward attitude to this sort of "technical" info in sports. They have a regular segment called "Sports Science" where they bring in athletes and hook them up to monitors and measure their output. Unfortunately, this just skims the surface in terms of the actual science since there are no write-ups or documentation on how the data was collected. Hopefully we can get some real stats in written form from Silver like we saw when he was at the NYT.
- crapshoot101 13y ago
  They really don't actually. The best stuff is from independent analysts, or guys like Fangraphs or Tom Tango or MGL. ESPN throws some lipservice to this crowd because some hard-core fans like myself are sabr-types, but the brunt of their coverage is aimed at the "DEREK JETER KNOWS HOW TO WIN BECAUSE HE's A VETERAN" Crowd.
rickdale 13y ago
ESPN has come a long way since 2012 Super Bowl production where they had Herm Edwards explaining the Patriots offense to 2 toddlers who couldn't stand in the same place for a second. It was probably the worst segment in ESPN history. I really like this move though because lately a lot of ESPN women seemed to have moved to CBS or NBC ie Rachel Nichols, Erin Andrews, Michelle Beadle and I am sure more. Not that Nate Silver or Keith Olberman are women, but it definitely is aimed at the right audience and I look forward to this test run at 11 of what seems to be solid broadcasting. On another note I think a Daily Show style program that brings in clips of announcers and ESPN and makes fun of them would be a great program. Just putting it out there.
- newbie12 13y ago
  Keith Olbermann is a dreadfully partisan and negative person. I can't believe they are bringing him back.
  - deleted 13y ago
    [deleted]
- jmduke 13y ago
  During the NBA season, ESPN's commentary and analysis paled in comparison to TNT. I think this is partially by design -- the best analysts don't make for the biggest audiences -- but I think ESPN is understanding that the landscape is more competitive than they thought. I'm looking forward to Silver working with Simmons. His column would fit it quite nicely at Grantland.
  - shawn-furyan 13y ago
    I think Bill Simmons is entertaining, but I'm not sure that he's great to pair with a real statistician. He makes a million assertions a minute. I guess Simmons has done a decent job of interviewing statistical experts at the MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference, but I think he's better by himself or with a group of guys that don't need verification to let his assertions stand in the conversation. I do think that the Henry Abbott + John Hollinger[1] dynamic was good since Abbott is more of a curious amateur type and willing to withhold judgement until the facts come in. But if Silver is a baseball guy (some of the stuff that Silver's done on basketball isn't very good, I don't think he's really immersed in the sport), then I wouldn't necessarily expect the paths of those two guys to cross much. [1] Though I have reservations about some of Hollinger's work, especially PER, which is just a linear weights metric with weights apparently chosen to coincide with conventional wisdom on the value of players. There are superior player evaluation metrics, but PER is very marketable to normal fans. Hollinger does seem to know his stuff though, and he's done a great job in Memphis thus far. It's just unfortunate that he got famous for a ho-hum metric.
mifeng 13y ago
Makes sense. As a political number cruncher, people are really only interested in your opinions once every four years. As a sports analyst, people care about what you write every day.
ssharp 13y ago
Silver seems to fit in with the Grantland side of ESPN, but also seems too big for Grantland. It will be interesting to see how he fits in on that network, given his more complicated analysis. He never seemed nearly as compelling on TV as he was in writing and as a fan of his work, I hope his TV presense improves as a result of this new deal. I think he's certainly earned more than a blog at the NYT.
markbao 13y ago
I think it's a waste of Nate Silver's intelligence to work on something like sports, when there are many other bigger problems to potentially be solved with the help of statistics and prediction. Why might ESPN be a good option for him? Can someone help me see the other side of this? It's totally his decision to make, and I'm sure he's looked at his options rationally, and life circumstances and past experience and etc. certainly play a big role, but I'm curious.
- pulakm 13y ago
  Nate Silver's background is in sports - that's really where his statistics-magic got started. I imagine sports is one of his passions, and he's now gotten to a point where he can combine that with his skill in statistics at the same scale as he was with politics.
- ics 13y ago
  For all the children who will get interested in statistics because of their favorite sport it's pretty cool. That might not be the answer you were looking for, but as someone who grew up collecting baseball cards obsessively I think it's great.
- thejacenxpress 13y ago
  I find it comical questioning his decision to choose sports (or anything for that matter) when he is famous and incredibly accurate for his predictions. While I agree sports may not be the best use of his ability, I'm sure he's done the math for choosing his next career step.
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
- jbooth 13y ago
  Yeah, he should build a social mobile webapp to help find your car keys instead.
- lbrandy 13y ago
  > Can someone help me see the other side of this? Your profile says you dropped out of college and are currently backpacking the world. Is that a waste of your intelligence? Why or why not?
jak88 13y ago
I think that the folks questioning the reasoning/wisdom of Nate's move to ESPN are missing something ... Think of this not as a deal with ESPN but a deal with Disney, the parent company. It's not just Nate able to do more sports. Disney enables 538 to get its content onto multiple "channels" - sports (ESPN), news (ABC), A&E - on cable, radio, books with much greater international exposure.
- andyakb 13y ago
  Exactly. Major elections arre infrequent. Nate got his start with sports. Let him do sports the majority of the time, but when elections come around, give him an outlet to do politics as well. Disney is a pefect fit.
the_economist 13y ago
I find it a bit surprising that he chose the role of working in media over working for a sports organization. The Memphis Grizzlies recently hired John Hollinger, who was ESPN's resident statistician the past few years, as their VP of basketball operations. Nate Silver likely could have a found an even better job. Perhaps not with the ability to dedicate large swaths of time to analyzing politics, though.
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
albertsun 13y ago
While I'm sad that Nate Silver is leaving the Times (I work there), I'm also really excited to see what he's going to be able to do with all the sports data that ESPN has. I'm expecting incredible things to come.
- antidaily 13y ago
  Well hold on... Karl Rove refuses to concede that he's actually left.
- jayzalowitz 13y ago
  Albert! How are you!
- ianb 13y ago
  To preface, this might sound snarky or sarcastic, but ignore that, this is not intended to be a rhetorical question: What about the interpretation of sports data would qualify as "incredible things"?
cmsmith 13y ago
Possible reasons for this move: 1) People only care about election handicapping every 4 (or 2) years in the US. 2) Nate Silver especially made political predictions look really easy (in comparison to the partisan clowns who populate cable news). The outcome you're trying to predict is how people will vote, and you're free to go and ask them how they will vote. Compare to sports where (1) you have sporting events all the time and (2) you are trying to predict something that is much more uncertain. For someone who is in to sports, I could easily see that being much more interesting. The counter to this is that politics is (arguably) more important, and is associated with more fame.
- jmduke 13y ago
  3) Nate Silver really, really likes sports. He got his start doing sabermetrics (statistics for baseball) and, after reading his book and his column, it honestly seems like he's a lot more passionate about sports than politics. (I don't think this conflicts with your point about sports' immediacy and uncertainty.)
- T-hawk 13y ago
  The outcome you're trying to predict is how people will vote, and you're free to go and ask them how they will vote. True, but what Nate Silver brings to the table goes far beyond that. Polls are inaccurate. His statistical models adjust for all sorts of information you don't get from polling. Like which way undecideds will swing late (towards the incumbent) or sampling bias (poll respondents lean Republican) or even outright lying ("sure I'd vote for a black president", then doesn't in the privacy of the voting booth.) That's what set Silver's predictions far above all others in accuracy, and how he correctly captured the election swinging decisively for Obama as hardly anyone else foresaw.
talloaktrees 13y ago
I guess we'll see some major moneyball stuff from him?
homosaur 13y ago
I'm less annoyed that Silver is going to work on trivial stuff and more annoyed that he's doing it for ESPN, who is doing everything possible to make sports coverage as dumb as possible. I mean what the hell is Silver going to do there? Tell us the % of time Skip Bayless trolls about LeBron or the probability of Tebow related coverage in the upcoming SportsCenter?
crapshoot101 13y ago
This is fascinating. To out-hipster myself, I've been a BP subscriber since way back when Nate was famous for the PECOTA model - really bringing a comp engine to baseball to predict results / outcomes, etc etc. ESPN just seems strange for him, unless they threw a crazy amount of money - he loses out in brand prestige of going from NYT to them, so I have to assume the financials were a major factor.
- mccolin 13y ago
  I am also a longtime fan of his from his BP days. Here's to hoping ESPN makes great use of his skills. Buried as a contributor to a late night program seems, on the surface, like a situation ripe for underutilization of his talents.
  - crapshoot101 13y ago
    What's funny is that back in the old BP days, you could still argue most of the interesting work in baseball / statistics was being done in the public domain working of standardized data sets - whether it was DIPS via Voros McCracken, or Tom Tango's work, or that of MGL / some of the early BP guys in the past few years. Now, since we're pretty good at capturing offensive value, the really interesting stuff is being done a) on the predictive side and b) on the defensive side. The latter in particular makes use of propeitary data sets like some of the Baseball Info Solutions stuff or Pitch FX's advanced DB's - making it harder for a young analyst who wants to break into baseball to pull a Voros. Moreover, ESPN can certainly afford those resources, but I doubt that the goal is going to be to do groundbreaking stuff anymore - I think it would be a role similar to Hollinger. But given the ESPN "analysts" (and I use the term loosely) consist of idiots like John Kruk, Silver's influence seems as if it will be limited. McColin, are you an old Baseball Primer / BTF guy as well?
    - blatherer 13y ago
      what are the best publicly available sources of baseball data?
- shawn-furyan 13y ago
wglb 13y ago
They used to say "Go West, young man", but today i think the wise ones are saying "Go Stats, young man/woman".
alohahacker 13y ago
If Nate or anyone could program a statistically accurate sports predictor model there would be huge potential in this as far as sports betting goes. The guys that make millions in large part use their own software. I used a simple piece of hardware last year for college football season that was suprisingly accurate. I weighted my own opinion most heavily but would use the software to confirm my picks. If both ways checked out, I would place a bet. Never had a losing week last year and would usually pocket a couple thousand in profit a week. Of course there was alot of lucky but a large part of my success was due to the statistical software I was using.
- patrickk 13y ago
  > If Nate or anyone could program a statistically accurate sports predictor model there would be huge potential in this as far as sports betting goes. Absolutely. > The guys that make millions in large part use their own software. I was fascinated reading about Bob Haralabos' incredible tracking of basketball games: http://espn.go.com/blog/truehoop/post/_/id/4974/following-up-with-haralabos-voulgaris http://espn.go.com/blog/truehoop/post/_/id/4974/following-up... > I used a simple piece of hardware last year for college football season that was suprisingly accurate. I weighted my own opinion most heavily but would use the software to confirm my picks. If both ways checked out, I would place a bet. Care to elaborate (without giving away your secret sauce?) I love reading about this stuff. I try to approach soccer betting in a similar fashion (it's trickier than US sports in some ways, as soccer doesn't lend itself to stats as easily as say baseball and American football). See a comment of mine on reddit here, with tons of resources: http://www.reddit.com/r/SoccerBetting/comments/15dcao/what_variables_do_you_consider_for_football/ http://www.reddit.com/r/SoccerBetting/comments/15dcao/what_v...
pjmorris 13y ago
If you were a sports geek and a numbers geek, wouldn't your dream job be more like ESPN rather than the NYT?

72 points by jparishy 13y ago

I adore Nate Silvers work and the presentation for the NYTimes during the Presidential Elections was outstanding. I do hope they bring him back for future major Elections. His commentary is a delightful respite from the ultra-polarized world of Reddit and Fox News.

clicks 13y ago
> I do hope they bring him back for future major Elections. His commentary is a delightful respite from the ultra-polarized world of Reddit and Fox News. Funny you say that, as Reddit had majorly sided with Nate Silver way before election day. Almost every post of his was frontpaged when political campaigns were in full swing. It's also important to note that Fox News is not in the same category that Reddit is in. Fox News reports new findings, Reddit is a social bookmarking website.
- stfu 13y ago
  Still, most of Reddit's political frontpage posts are along the lines of "We can't have cute puppies on the frontpage anymore because Republicans just kill them and drink their blood".
- chimeracoder 13y ago
  > Funny you say that, as Reddit had majorly sided with Nate Silver way before election day. Be that as it may, Nate Silver is actually thoughtful, articulate, and well-reasoned - three words which do not describe /r/politics, etc. It's not just a matter of which opinions one holds; it's a matter of how intelligently one expresses them and defends them with data and evidence. (The irony with Reddit's love of FiveThirtyEight - and with the right-wing criticism of FiveThirtyEight being 'partisan' during the 2012 election cycle - is that Nate Silver is not himself an entirely left-wing person as much as people often thing. You'd have to dig pretty deep back into the archives of pre-NYT FiveThirtyEight to notice this, but he holds rather somewhat moderate or right-wing views on a number of issues).
  - _delirium 13y ago
    I agree Silver is relatively moderate, but FiveThirtyEight did more or less grow out of DailyKos [1], so it's not a huge stretch to suggest he personally has a clear preference for one or the other side of the American political spectrum. It's not like he also had a blog on the right-wing equivalents of DailyKos, like FreeRepublic or RedState. [1] For a year or so before he launched fivethirtyeight.com as an independent site, he posted data-driven election analysis, among other things, at http://www.dailykos.com/blog/poblano http://www.dailykos.com/blog/poblano
    - sardonicbryan 13y ago
      It could also be because the Daily Kos' founder also cofounded SB Nation, one of the larger networks of sports blogs that are well regarded in the baseball analytics community, so it's likely that Silver had some connection/comfort with DailyKos.
  - Tuna-Fish 13y ago
    And Reddit is not nearly as left-wing as you think. It's populated by tens of millions of people now, all around the political spectrum. If anything, they tend to swing left on social policy issues, but they are not far off from the national average in economic policy. The Obama love last election had a lot more to do with the lack of any reasonable republican candidate than it did with the political makeup of Reddit. Remember, Ron Paul actually received serious support from Reddit.
- deleted 13y ago
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- cmsmith 13y ago
  I think it's important to note that they sided with him while he was saying what they wanted to hear. Reddit/MSNBC had it easy this past election, because they could say what they could be optimistic and listen to the experts at the same time. My disillusionment with political journalism will be fully validated during the next election won by Republicans, when Fox is on the side of 'science' and MSNBC says that 'science' can't be trusted.
  - flomo 13y ago
    For example, during the 2010 midterm elections, there were a number of Democrats arguing "Silver is wrong this time because (random political reasons)", which is exactly what the Republicans were doing in 2012. Winning an election requires enthusiasm and people willing to volunteer their personal efforts, so partisan activists dismissing contradictory polling data should be expected.

forsaken 13y ago

Did the NYTimes just break a story about one of their own employees leaving? The tone of the article is really interesting.

bthomas 13y ago
I've always thought this was an interesting dynamic too. The Boston Globe recently had a front page article about who is buying the Boston Globe: http://www.bostonglobe.com/business/2013/06/27/least-five-groups-submit-bids-buy-the-boston-globe/SRZ5zPhO6cPwg4LlL9pGzK/story.html http://www.bostonglobe.com/business/2013/06/27/least-five-gr...
- apaprocki 13y ago
  Each news organization is different. Bloomberg News editorial policy is to not cover anything involving the company -- even if a story appears in every other source, positive or negative, it's still off limits.
  - seferphier 13y ago
    no wonder why mr.bloomberg never appears in their own billionaire list. makes the rankings inaccurate though.

jackschultz 13y ago

Interesting move. ESPN actually has a seemingly forward attitude to this sort of "technical" info in sports. They have a regular segment called "Sports Science" where they bring in athletes and hook them up to monitors and measure their output. Unfortunately, this just skims the surface in terms of the actual science since there are no write-ups or documentation on how the data was collected. Hopefully we can get some real stats in written form from Silver like we saw when he was at the NYT.

crapshoot101 13y ago
They really don't actually. The best stuff is from independent analysts, or guys like Fangraphs or Tom Tango or MGL. ESPN throws some lipservice to this crowd because some hard-core fans like myself are sabr-types, but the brunt of their coverage is aimed at the "DEREK JETER KNOWS HOW TO WIN BECAUSE HE's A VETERAN" Crowd.

rickdale 13y ago

ESPN has come a long way since 2012 Super Bowl production where they had Herm Edwards explaining the Patriots offense to 2 toddlers who couldn't stand in the same place for a second. It was probably the worst segment in ESPN history. I really like this move though because lately a lot of ESPN women seemed to have moved to CBS or NBC ie Rachel Nichols, Erin Andrews, Michelle Beadle and I am sure more. Not that Nate Silver or Keith Olberman are women, but it definitely is aimed at the right audience and I look forward to this test run at 11 of what seems to be solid broadcasting. On another note I think a Daily Show style program that brings in clips of announcers and ESPN and makes fun of them would be a great program. Just putting it out there.

newbie12 13y ago
Keith Olbermann is a dreadfully partisan and negative person. I can't believe they are bringing him back.
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
jmduke 13y ago
During the NBA season, ESPN's commentary and analysis paled in comparison to TNT. I think this is partially by design -- the best analysts don't make for the biggest audiences -- but I think ESPN is understanding that the landscape is more competitive than they thought. I'm looking forward to Silver working with Simmons. His column would fit it quite nicely at Grantland.
- shawn-furyan 13y ago
  I think Bill Simmons is entertaining, but I'm not sure that he's great to pair with a real statistician. He makes a million assertions a minute. I guess Simmons has done a decent job of interviewing statistical experts at the MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference, but I think he's better by himself or with a group of guys that don't need verification to let his assertions stand in the conversation. I do think that the Henry Abbott + John Hollinger[1] dynamic was good since Abbott is more of a curious amateur type and willing to withhold judgement until the facts come in. But if Silver is a baseball guy (some of the stuff that Silver's done on basketball isn't very good, I don't think he's really immersed in the sport), then I wouldn't necessarily expect the paths of those two guys to cross much. [1] Though I have reservations about some of Hollinger's work, especially PER, which is just a linear weights metric with weights apparently chosen to coincide with conventional wisdom on the value of players. There are superior player evaluation metrics, but PER is very marketable to normal fans. Hollinger does seem to know his stuff though, and he's done a great job in Memphis thus far. It's just unfortunate that he got famous for a ho-hum metric.

mifeng 13y ago

Makes sense. As a political number cruncher, people are really only interested in your opinions once every four years. As a sports analyst, people care about what you write every day.

ssharp 13y ago

Silver seems to fit in with the Grantland side of ESPN, but also seems too big for Grantland. It will be interesting to see how he fits in on that network, given his more complicated analysis. He never seemed nearly as compelling on TV as he was in writing and as a fan of his work, I hope his TV presense improves as a result of this new deal. I think he's certainly earned more than a blog at the NYT.

markbao 13y ago

I think it's a waste of Nate Silver's intelligence to work on something like sports, when there are many other bigger problems to potentially be solved with the help of statistics and prediction. Why might ESPN be a good option for him? Can someone help me see the other side of this? It's totally his decision to make, and I'm sure he's looked at his options rationally, and life circumstances and past experience and etc. certainly play a big role, but I'm curious.

pulakm 13y ago
Nate Silver's background is in sports - that's really where his statistics-magic got started. I imagine sports is one of his passions, and he's now gotten to a point where he can combine that with his skill in statistics at the same scale as he was with politics.
ics 13y ago
For all the children who will get interested in statistics because of their favorite sport it's pretty cool. That might not be the answer you were looking for, but as someone who grew up collecting baseball cards obsessively I think it's great.
thejacenxpress 13y ago
I find it comical questioning his decision to choose sports (or anything for that matter) when he is famous and incredibly accurate for his predictions. While I agree sports may not be the best use of his ability, I'm sure he's done the math for choosing his next career step.
deleted 13y ago
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jbooth 13y ago
Yeah, he should build a social mobile webapp to help find your car keys instead.
lbrandy 13y ago
> Can someone help me see the other side of this? Your profile says you dropped out of college and are currently backpacking the world. Is that a waste of your intelligence? Why or why not?

jak88 13y ago

I think that the folks questioning the reasoning/wisdom of Nate's move to ESPN are missing something ... Think of this not as a deal with ESPN but a deal with Disney, the parent company. It's not just Nate able to do more sports. Disney enables 538 to get its content onto multiple "channels" - sports (ESPN), news (ABC), A&E - on cable, radio, books with much greater international exposure.

andyakb 13y ago
Exactly. Major elections arre infrequent. Nate got his start with sports. Let him do sports the majority of the time, but when elections come around, give him an outlet to do politics as well. Disney is a pefect fit.

the_economist 13y ago

I find it a bit surprising that he chose the role of working in media over working for a sports organization. The Memphis Grizzlies recently hired John Hollinger, who was ESPN's resident statistician the past few years, as their VP of basketball operations. Nate Silver likely could have a found an even better job. Perhaps not with the ability to dedicate large swaths of time to analyzing politics, though.

deleted 13y ago
[deleted]

albertsun 13y ago

While I'm sad that Nate Silver is leaving the Times (I work there), I'm also really excited to see what he's going to be able to do with all the sports data that ESPN has. I'm expecting incredible things to come.

antidaily 13y ago
Well hold on... Karl Rove refuses to concede that he's actually left.
jayzalowitz 13y ago
Albert! How are you!
ianb 13y ago
To preface, this might sound snarky or sarcastic, but ignore that, this is not intended to be a rhetorical question: What about the interpretation of sports data would qualify as "incredible things"?

cmsmith 13y ago

Possible reasons for this move: 1) People only care about election handicapping every 4 (or 2) years in the US. 2) Nate Silver especially made political predictions look really easy (in comparison to the partisan clowns who populate cable news). The outcome you're trying to predict is how people will vote, and you're free to go and ask them how they will vote. Compare to sports where (1) you have sporting events all the time and (2) you are trying to predict something that is much more uncertain. For someone who is in to sports, I could easily see that being much more interesting. The counter to this is that politics is (arguably) more important, and is associated with more fame.

jmduke 13y ago
3) Nate Silver really, really likes sports. He got his start doing sabermetrics (statistics for baseball) and, after reading his book and his column, it honestly seems like he's a lot more passionate about sports than politics. (I don't think this conflicts with your point about sports' immediacy and uncertainty.)
T-hawk 13y ago
The outcome you're trying to predict is how people will vote, and you're free to go and ask them how they will vote. True, but what Nate Silver brings to the table goes far beyond that. Polls are inaccurate. His statistical models adjust for all sorts of information you don't get from polling. Like which way undecideds will swing late (towards the incumbent) or sampling bias (poll respondents lean Republican) or even outright lying ("sure I'd vote for a black president", then doesn't in the privacy of the voting booth.) That's what set Silver's predictions far above all others in accuracy, and how he correctly captured the election swinging decisively for Obama as hardly anyone else foresaw.

talloaktrees 13y ago

I guess we'll see some major moneyball stuff from him?

homosaur 13y ago

I'm less annoyed that Silver is going to work on trivial stuff and more annoyed that he's doing it for ESPN, who is doing everything possible to make sports coverage as dumb as possible. I mean what the hell is Silver going to do there? Tell us the % of time Skip Bayless trolls about LeBron or the probability of Tebow related coverage in the upcoming SportsCenter?

crapshoot101 13y ago

This is fascinating. To out-hipster myself, I've been a BP subscriber since way back when Nate was famous for the PECOTA model - really bringing a comp engine to baseball to predict results / outcomes, etc etc. ESPN just seems strange for him, unless they threw a crazy amount of money - he loses out in brand prestige of going from NYT to them, so I have to assume the financials were a major factor.

mccolin 13y ago
I am also a longtime fan of his from his BP days. Here's to hoping ESPN makes great use of his skills. Buried as a contributor to a late night program seems, on the surface, like a situation ripe for underutilization of his talents.
- crapshoot101 13y ago
  What's funny is that back in the old BP days, you could still argue most of the interesting work in baseball / statistics was being done in the public domain working of standardized data sets - whether it was DIPS via Voros McCracken, or Tom Tango's work, or that of MGL / some of the early BP guys in the past few years. Now, since we're pretty good at capturing offensive value, the really interesting stuff is being done a) on the predictive side and b) on the defensive side. The latter in particular makes use of propeitary data sets like some of the Baseball Info Solutions stuff or Pitch FX's advanced DB's - making it harder for a young analyst who wants to break into baseball to pull a Voros. Moreover, ESPN can certainly afford those resources, but I doubt that the goal is going to be to do groundbreaking stuff anymore - I think it would be a role similar to Hollinger. But given the ESPN "analysts" (and I use the term loosely) consist of idiots like John Kruk, Silver's influence seems as if it will be limited. McColin, are you an old Baseball Primer / BTF guy as well?
  - blatherer 13y ago
    what are the best publicly available sources of baseball data?
shawn-furyan 13y ago

wglb 13y ago

They used to say "Go West, young man", but today i think the wise ones are saying "Go Stats, young man/woman".

alohahacker 13y ago

If Nate or anyone could program a statistically accurate sports predictor model there would be huge potential in this as far as sports betting goes. The guys that make millions in large part use their own software. I used a simple piece of hardware last year for college football season that was suprisingly accurate. I weighted my own opinion most heavily but would use the software to confirm my picks. If both ways checked out, I would place a bet. Never had a losing week last year and would usually pocket a couple thousand in profit a week. Of course there was alot of lucky but a large part of my success was due to the statistical software I was using.

patrickk 13y ago
> If Nate or anyone could program a statistically accurate sports predictor model there would be huge potential in this as far as sports betting goes. Absolutely. > The guys that make millions in large part use their own software. I was fascinated reading about Bob Haralabos' incredible tracking of basketball games: http://espn.go.com/blog/truehoop/post/_/id/4974/following-up-with-haralabos-voulgaris http://espn.go.com/blog/truehoop/post/_/id/4974/following-up... > I used a simple piece of hardware last year for college football season that was suprisingly accurate. I weighted my own opinion most heavily but would use the software to confirm my picks. If both ways checked out, I would place a bet. Care to elaborate (without giving away your secret sauce?) I love reading about this stuff. I try to approach soccer betting in a similar fashion (it's trickier than US sports in some ways, as soccer doesn't lend itself to stats as easily as say baseball and American football). See a comment of mine on reddit here, with tons of resources: http://www.reddit.com/r/SoccerBetting/comments/15dcao/what_variables_do_you_consider_for_football/ http://www.reddit.com/r/SoccerBetting/comments/15dcao/what_v...

pjmorris 13y ago

If you were a sports geek and a numbers geek, wouldn't your dream job be more like ESPN rather than the NYT?