4 ms·

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

• 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?
  • markbao 13y ago
    In the same way that I only see Nate Silver's decision from my own perspective, I'm interested in why he might have picked to go to ESPN, because I'm sure that he has his own internal reason for doing so, like I do for traveling. So I'm interested in what that is and why he might have chosen it. From my perspective, I don't think so. Gaining experience about how the world works and learning about other perspectives and cultures is (and has been) useful for expanding my world view. Perhaps my question could have been more carefully worded.
    • eitally 13y ago
      Because he loves sports, it sounded fun and they offered him a boatload of money? Those seem like perfectly legitimate reasons to me. I don't, and never have, understood why people bash celebrity intellectuals who pursue their own passions rather than the passions critics believe are more valid or important.
• reaganing 13y ago
  He'll certainly continue his elections work for ESPN's sister network, ABC. There might be more worthwhile things he could work on, but sports and politics are what interests him.
• jfb 13y ago
  Nate Silver isn't some weird Neo like figure who strides alone dispensing Truth via a college-level understanding of statistics -- his brand of analysis is not unique or even particularly remarkable save that it is rare in the mainstream media. Too, it's a bit rich to be badmouthing sports on Hacker News, home of perhaps the most solipsistic conversations on the internet. Sports is a very important part of many people's lives; surely that alone lends it sufficient heft to be a defensible use of Silver's talent? As for why, Silver got started in sabermetrics, and going back to working on sports stats is almost certainly because he likes it. And I imagine ESPN backed up the proverbial dump truck, too.
  • markbao 13y ago
    > his brand of analysis is not unique or even particularly remarkable save that it is rare in the mainstream media. Ah, so he's good, but it seems like he's doing something totally unique because of the bias that he gets mainstream media attention and most other statisticians don't? > Sports is a very important part of many people's lives; surely that alone lends it sufficient heft to be a defensible use of Silver's talent? Sure does.
    • wavefunction 13y ago
      Silver is very good at generating statistical analyses, as well as determining which set of stats matter and ignoring the ones that don't, imo. It's the second skill that sets him apart from a run-of-the mill statistician.
• sengstrom 13y ago
  Because he is also a sports nut?
• rdouble 13y ago
  Sports are what he did before politics. He's returning to his specialty. Sports and gambling are very typical inspirations for career statisticians.
• tgb 13y ago
  Nate Silver's intelligence is much better spent being a spokesman for statistics than it is on doing statistics. Not that I can critique his statistics - but he's certainly not alone in being able to do standard Bayesian probability and apply it to elections or sports. What he is alone at (so far) is in capturing people's attention and getting many, many more people to think about stats and how it relates to real things than would normal do. He is a replaceable statistician. He is a complete unique spokesman.
• anigbrowl 13y ago
  it's a waste of Nate Silver's intelligence to work on something like sports That's quite amusing considering that he became famous as a pro baseball statistician. I agree with other posters pointing that BB stats are actually a good way of getting kids interested in math. I'm not American but living here has caused me to fall in love with baseball and admire the number-crunching that goes with it. Every so often I see a parent and child at a game filling out a paper score card for the game together, which I think is just fabulous.
• wglb 13y ago
  Wasn't sabermetrics his first love?
  • crapshoot101 13y ago
    Yup. Old BP contributor who developed PECOTA back in the day. I admit I thought that the overlap between Baseball Prospectus type sabremetric nerds and HN types would be limited - those genres of geekdom rarely interact!
• shawn-furyan 13y ago
  One thing to consider is that Nate Silver having a big audience is almost certainly a good thing in the world. It's less important what he works on and more important that he's able to spread some small measure of statistical fluency to as many people as possible. He's a good writer, and is able to convey confusing aspects of statistical analysis to lay people. There are academics doing academic-y things in the shadows, and there will be for the foreseeable future. Silver, though can maximize the impact of his particular gifts by increasing his audience and chipping away at the enormous levels of statistical ignorance in the world. In fact, there's a great tradition of this in the sciences. In terms of popularizing science, Nate Silver is a kindred of people like Carl Sagan (Cosmos), Steven Hawking (A Brief History of Time), Randall Munroe (XKCD), as well as Adam Savage and Jamie Hyneman (MythBusters)
• blatherer 13y ago
  his major achievements to date have been in predicting player performance in baseball, an area which he has spent a large part of his life analyzing. Baseball analytics rewards attention to detail and persistence over technical brilliance/advanced statistical techniques. his special ability is really very domain specific, so it's not like we should expect him to be much more effective than other qualified people if he applied himself to different topics...