Nate Silver to Join ESPN Staff

[agentsculder]

Nate Silver, the statistician who attained national fame for his accurate projections about the 2008 and 2012 presidential elections, is parting ways with The New York Times and moving his FiveThirtyEight franchise to ESPN, the sports empire controlled by the Walt Disney Company, according to ESPN employees with direct knowledge of his plans

Comments

[roseofjuly]

I am obsessed with Nate Silver in a ridiculous way, mostly because I want to be a statistician. The Signal and the Noise is on my list.

He did singlehandedly change political reporting, though. I remember watching FiveThirtyEight during the 2008 election while writing a paper; he and CNN were the only people I followed, and he called the election months before. He did the same thing in 2012. I think the reason the Times doesn't like him (other than the fact that calling the election correctly months ahead of time does nothing to sell papers later) is because people generally don't like to think they believe in predictable ways. As a social health psychologist who uses statistical modeling to help predict human behavior, I'm often surprised by the number of people who say (often very angrily) "Well, that doesn't apply to me. I'm different." Everyone wants to believe that they are unique; but years and years of research shows that people are more alike than we are different, lol.

But he's right. There's no horse race coverage. The majority of states are already decided before the election even begins, and the election really falls down to predicting the way the few swing states will decide.

I am sorry to see him go, though. I don't want his chops wasted on predicting sports games (except baseball, because baseball is awesome).