Nate Silver
Nate Silver
Nathaniel Read "Nate" Silveris an American statistician and writer who analyzes baseballand elections. He is currently the editor-in-chief of ESPN's FiveThirtyEight blog and a Special Correspondent for ABC News. Silver first gained public recognition for developing PECOTA, a system for forecasting the performance and career development of Major League Baseball players, which he sold to and then managed for Baseball Prospectus from 2003 to 2009...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionJournalist
Date of Birth13 January 1978
CityEast Lansing, MI
CountryUnited States of America
I think punditry serves no purpose.
Well, you know, you're not going to have 86 percent of Congress voted out of office.
When you try to predict future E.R.A.'s with past E.R.A.'s, you're making a mistake.
Data-driven predictions can succeed-and they can fail. It is when we deny our role in the process that the odds of failure rise. Before we demand more of our data, we need to demand more of ourselves.
It's a little strange to become a kind of symbol of a whole type of analysis.
A lot of the time nothing happens in a day.
To the extent that you can find ways where you're making predictions, there's no substitute for testing yourself on real-world situations that you don't know the answer to in advance.
To be a very, very minor, eighth-tier celebrity, you realize, 'Hey, celebrities are just like us.'
Any one game in baseball doesn't tell you that much, just as any one poll doesn't tell you that much.
The problem is that when polls are wrong, they tend to be wrong in the same direction. If they miss in New Hampshire, for instance, they all miss on the same mistake.
I view my role now as providing more of a macro-level skepticism, rather than saying this poll is good or this poll is evil.
Remember, the Congress doesn't get as many opportunities to make an impression with the public.
Expert estimates of probability are often off by factors of hundreds or thousands. [...] I used to be annoyed when the margin of error was high in a forecasting model that I might put together. Now I view it as perhaps the single most important piece of information that a forecaster provides. When we publish a forecast on FiveThirtyEight, I go to great lengths to document the uncertainty attached to it, even if the uncertainty is sufficiently large that the forecast won't make for punchy headlines.
I love South American food, and I haven't really been down there. I really need a vacation.