
Nate Silver Unloads on The New York Times - danso
http://www.cjr.org/analysis/fivethirtyeight.php
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douglance
Silver got lucky a couple times with predictions and people believe everything
he and his company says now. Now that they have clout, they use their
predictions to push an agenda, which is why their predictions are so
innaccurate.

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smt88
[https://github.com/fivethirtyeight/data](https://github.com/fivethirtyeight/data)

You're welcome to use their data and come up with your own analyses or just
not read what they write. It's not like they're particularly influential, even
if they are highly regarded.

I'm also semi-interested to know what agenda you're talking about. I read
every political article they publish, and I'm actually irritated by how
neutral they are.

~~~
xlm1717
They sure dropped the neutrality when Nate Silver got mad at Jim Rutenberg for
saying Silver missed the mark on his predictions. He definitely returned the
high school lunchroom attitude back, and doesn't handle being wrong well at
all.

~~~
smt88
We're definitely talking about different kinds of neutrality.

In previous comments, I was talking about neutrality in his articles,
particularly the political ones. That kind of neutrality is what people
usually call "journalistic integrity".

Responding to Jim Rutenberg was a personal issue and had nothing to do with
journalistic integrity. Silver perceived an attack and responded with an
attack. You can definitely argue that it was immature, but it has nothing to
do with his political commentary.

I also think this is a relevant quote:

> _And this is someone who, by the way, doesn’t talk about that we were
> colleagues together at The New York Times, a person who cherrypicks the
> facts he’s looking at. So he mentions that in our Indiana prediction for the
> Democrat election, the underdog won [i.e., Sanders over Clinton], but in
> fact the favorite has won 51 of 56 times in our polls-only forecast. To me,
> that’s dishonest and unethical, frankly. And he doesn’t really take the time
> to truly understand what’s going on._

