Comments | ontd_political: Nate Silver to Join ESPN Staff

agentsculder in ontd_political

Nate Silver to Join ESPN Staff

Jul 22, 2013 21:12

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 ( Read more... )

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Comments 21

rex_dart July 23 2013, 03:26:47 UTC

lol at other columnists being butthurt about his ~style~. So sorry Nate spent the 2012 election season calling shit like it was instead of paddling down the Romney campaign kool-aid river in a boat made of rich white male delusion.

crossfire July 23 2013, 15:54:10 UTC

Best first comment.

roseofjuly July 23 2013, 03:41:17 UTC

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 ( ... )

13chapters July 23 2013, 04:14:22 UTC

I'm a huge baseball fan and the baseball nerb squad is really really excited about this. Nate Silver created PECOTA, the prediction system that Baseball Prospectus uses (although I believe they have changed it a lot since he left them) and has long been highly thought of in baseball circles. I think in some ways this he's seen as a prodigal son, returning to baseball after achieving among the normal people who don't have opinions over whether they prefer rWAR or bWAR or the value of catcher framing.

TBH, I'll miss him as a political analyst, though. I feel like the market for sabermetricians is pretty much at an equilibrium anyway.

lone_concertina July 23 2013, 13:32:57 UTC

He'll still be doing politics during election years.

gretchystretchy July 23 2013, 04:14:32 UTC

As a huge sports fan who's been on the Nate Silver bandwagon for over 5 years, I am so on board with this.

And anyway, I figured he'd return to sports at some point. That's how he got his start, after all.

hinoema July 23 2013, 04:36:56 UTC

That's fine, but I hope he still does the political predictions. I hope this isn't people trying to buy him away from that.

agentsculder July 23 2013, 10:46:28 UTC

I don't think so. Reading between the lines a bit, I think one of the things that's going to happen is that fivethirtyeight.com is going to become it's own website again, and that's where he'll do his political predictions. His "regular" job is going to be sports, which is where he started. He's also mentioned in the past he might be interested in doing more pop-culture type predictions (like the Oscars, which he did this year).

I think part of what happened was that the NY Times was interested in letting Nate expand into doing pop culture, but was not willing to let him get into sports. ESPN, understandably was more than willing to bring Nate into the fold as a sports guy.

hinoema July 23 2013, 13:07:05 UTC

Reading between the lines a bit, I think one of the things that's going to happen is that fivethirtyeight.com is going to become it's own website again, and that's where he'll do his political predictions.

Ok, that's even better. Then he won't have to worry about anyone's 'image' but his own.