

Baseball statistician tries politics and bats almost one thousand - jacobscott
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/10/business/media/10silver.html?pagewanted=all

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robg
This is hilariously awesome:

 _When we took him to preschool one time, we dropped him off, and he
announced, ‘Today, I’m a numbers machine,’ and started counting, Brian Silver
said. When we picked him up two and a half hours later, he was ‘Two thousand
one hundred and twenty-two, two thousand one hundred and twenty-three...’_

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andreyf
Sounds like an early sign of autism...

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robg
My second thought (after the laughter) - but then I think it shows how much we
want to ascribe "problems" to kids. It's obvious he turned out okay and it's
sad to think that under other parents he may have been diagnosed rather than
encouraged.

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unalone
Yeah. It surprises me, when I hear stories about parents overreacting about
kids doing weird things. They're kids. They love experimenting with weird
stuff like that. Hell, some people keep doing it when they get older - they're
the fun sorts of people.

Can anybody here honestly say they didn't do anything weird as a kid? I
remember reciting numbers from the Guinness Book of World Records into a tape
recorder, in the belief that any number I said was the money I'd make. (I also
think I did that with computer pixels on a low-res screen, for that matter.)
I'm sure almost everybody here did strange stuff as a kid.

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jpavlik
Silver predicts White Sox lose 90 games. Is ridiculed in baseball circles.
Vindicated when they end up sucking.

Silver predicts Rays win 88 games. Is ridiculed further. Rays win 97 games and
go to the World Series. Absolute vindication.

That said, I hate his player projection systems. You can't predict baseball
(though he comes about as close as you can).

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fallentimes
Why don't you like player projection systems? While it's impossible to
accurately predict almost anything as complex as baseball consistently,
players projections are an awesome tool.

~~~
jpavlik
I can understand why people like them. I don't say they suck and they're of no
use. I just don't like them personally. Not really sure why. I think it's
because the line "you can't predict baseball" keeps running through my head.
PECOTA is as accurate as they come, though.

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ra
Thanks for posting this. A very enjoyable article that demonstrates how the
broader application of entrepreneurial behaviors to a problem, that Nate
clearly has a passion for, can blow the incumbents clean out of the water.

I doubt we've heard the last of Nate Silver.

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ryanmahoski
_By the end of [election] night, Mr. Silver had predicted the popular vote
within one percentage point, predicted 49 of 50 states’ results correctly, and
predicted all of the resolved Senate races correctly._

From his posted predictions back in March? W-o-w.

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Goladus
No, his site maintained an updated assessment of the current probability. I'm
not really sure what the article means when it says he 'called it' in March.
He was probably just showing Obama with a greater chance of winning.

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unalone
He showed Obama with a higher percentage except for immediately after Palin,
and then he explained that it was a bump that promised to diminish.

What impressed me about his site isn't just his predictions, but how good he
was at predicting how his model would change in the future. He could predict
how his model would change every day for a week in advance, and he was almost
always right as to how the "market" would react.

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ojbyrne
Um, I (and the whole world) called it for Obama before 10pm that night. It
seemed clear to me that the "incumbents" must have been legally required (or
something) to wait till the polls closed on the west coast before they could
make it official.

And lots of people called the election months before too. I followed
<http://electoral-vote.com/> just because I followed them the last two
elections. The job of prediction they did was comparable. Though
FiveThirtyEight.com did seem to have more/better features.

~~~
unalone
Yeah, but he had it predicted back in March, and by two weeks before the
election he had nearly every state accurately predicted.

~~~
ojbyrne
I was mostly commenting on the fluff at the start of the article about calling
the election at 9:48 EST.

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unalone
Agreed. That _was_ silly.

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lunchbox
Does Nate Silver invest on Intrade (or another prediction market) and make
money off of his predictions? If not, why not?

~~~
jedc
There's not really a whole lot of liquidity on the majority of the state
markets. Difficult to make money when the bid-ask spreads are so large.

