
Why political journalists can’t stand Nate Silver - plinkplonk
http://markcoddington.com/2012/10/31/nate-silver-journalism-politics-knowledge-epistemology/
======
kevinalexbrown
This is a very polite interpretation of (some) traditional journalists'
dislike for Mr Silver. It offers a consistent explanation for the dislike and
vitriol, but there is another explanation to explore. Silver presents a method
of investigation that is not only epistemologically different from traditional
punditry, but threatening to it, and their dislike is centered on the threat
his method poses, not just its intellectual merits or misunderstanding
thereof. There are plenty of things for journalists to intellectually object
to - why focus their efforts here?

Consider that Mr Silver has been given awards and accolades most journalists
would kill for: Time's list of 100 most influential people in the world, best
political blog Webby award, Rolling Stone's 100 agents of change, the editor
in chief of Politico listed him as "one of the most powerful people on earth",
he's given a prestigious lecture at Columbia Journalism School, etc. He's
received accolades, even from traditional journalism sources, that most
journalists, even at the NYTimes, would never dream of. Speaking of which, the
Public Editor of the Times wrote "he’s probably (and please know that I use
the p-word loosely) its most high-profile writer at this particular moment."

All this for someone who has never worked a proper newsroom since college,
never had a television show, cable or otherwise, and just started a blog four
years ago because he was (supposedly) annoyed at laws that threatened his
livelihood - online poker.

So imagine seeing someone like this receiving all the awards you've coveted
since you started journalism in earnest. While the recoil against Mr Silver
might be clothed in intellectual differences for some, the reason they care
probably has more to do with seeing someone who differs from their traditional
approach getting so much recognition.

Finally, I'd note that there are many traditional journalists who support Mr
Silver's approach - his awards from traditional journalist organizations speak
to this. Rather, it's a very specific group that seems to feel threatened.

~~~
randlet
"his livelihood - online poker."

Nate was also an incredible asset to the early online poker community. He was
one of the most respected members of 2+2 and really helped pushed poker
strategy forward. His detailed and analytical approach to the game helped make
a lot of people a bunch of money during the poker boom.

~~~
mtgx
Isn't online poker illegal in US now?

~~~
stanleydrew
I don't think it's illegal to play. It's just illegal for a US financial
institution to transfer funds to an entity that runs an online poker service.
Or something to that effect.

------
_delirium
I agree with this article's conclusion in Silver's case, but I think for
different reasons. I think the journalistic epistemology it dismisses _is_
actually a good one, but is not being demonstrated in the attacks on Nate
Silver. Long-form, long-lead-time investigative journalism is perhaps where
it's best demonstrated, and in that case blends somewhat into the epistemology
used by anthropologists, sociologists, and ethnographers: the idea that to
understand a situation or culture you need to spend considerable time with it,
observing how it works, how the people there think and act, etc., even being
yourself embedded in it for a time. But you have to _actually_ do it, which
takes considerable work and usually long periods of time, and TV pundits are
not. And it's better for some things than others: ethnographers rarely claim
that their expertise is in predicting the outcome of elections. If you want to
_predict_ something, especially something numerical, an ethnographer would
generally say that you're asking the wrong person for that prediction, and
should go ask a statistician. That might be one difference with journalists:
journalists have less humility about the conclusions they can draw.

I don't think that can always be replaced by just data-crunching, in part
because you just move the same problem to the 2nd-order problem of
interpretive frames for data, which requires the same in-depth ethnographic
field work to get right. The proper balance is a big debate in qualitative vs.
quantitative sociology, though.

I do think that when it comes to predicting the outcome of elections, on the
other hand, the decision is not hard, because it's almost a best case of a
prediction that can be quantified based on available data. So I'd say this is
more an issue of punditry vs. careful methodology (of any kind), rather than
qualitative vs. quantitative epistemologies. In this _specific_ case, it's
mainly just partisanship: some people don't like that Silver's data shows
Obama with an ~80% chance of winning, so plug their ears.

~~~
csense
> In this specific case, it's mainly just partisanship: some people don't like
> that Silver's data shows Obama with an ~80% chance of winning, so plug their
> ears.

News flash: It's no secret that the news media (except for Fox) has a distinct
Democratic tilt. I agree with your premise that journalists are closet
partisans, but I disagree that they'd be upset at an analysis that favors
Obama for partisan reasons.

~~~
paulgb
There are plenty of right-wing journalists outside of fox.

~~~
guylhem
Then name 3 of them, from memory, without checking wikipedia.

Bonus points if their run talk show with a political slant like Colbert.

EDIT: thanks for the downvote, but I'm still waiting for triplets.

~~~
cwp
David Brooks, David Frum, Bill Kristol. Not talk-show guys, 'cause I don't
watch much TV.

~~~
ajross
Joe Scarborough quite literally _is_ a republican (6 years in the house from
FL-1) and runs three (I think) hours of coverage every morning on the "most
liberal" of the cable networks. The whole notion of the "liberal media" as a
unified force is itself a creation of the decidedly conservative wing of the
media dominated by News Corp. MSNBC has a bunch of coverage that slants left.
Fox is actually run by republican partisans. Yet it's the people on the right
who complain the loudest, and the reason is _precicely_ that they have their
own partisan media to push the message.

Sigh...

------
plinkplonk
(submitter here) The original title was "Why political journalists can’t stand
Nate Silver: The limits of journalistic knowledge"

I had to edit it because of the eighty character limit. Sorry about that.

The central point of the article is about misunderstandings between people
with different 'modes of knowledge', and not really about current USA politics
(in which case I wouldn't have posted this here,I'm not a US citizen and so
detached from the partisanship.) Hopefully the discussion here won't get into
political argument.

~~~
martythemaniak
I definitely hear that. In fact, Krugman wrote a piece along these lines,
arguing that many journalists are very uncomfortable dealing with data.
Instead of looking at lots of data and trying to draw conclusions, they want
some magical insider to tell them what's really happening.

<http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/10/30/scoop-dupes/>

~~~
beagle3
It is not often that I find myself agreeing with Krugman (who likes to ignore
data that does not fit his views). But in this case -- possibly because no
data is actually invovled -- I agree completely.

And unfortunately, that's true for most of the people, most of the time - if
you asked your physician to substantiate any non-trivial recommendation he
makes, you'd find that data supporting those recommendations is severely
lacking or irrelevant. But most people want the magical insider (the doctor,
in this case) to tell them what's happening, rather than the facts.

~~~
rhizome
I think in the case of journalism that the "doctor" wants to preserve some
flexibility in interpretation that Mr. Silver takes away.

------
PaulHoule
Joan Didion wrote an article in the 1980's titled "Insider Baseball" who made
an analogy between reporting on elections and reporting on the going-on in
baseball locker rooms. Typical election journalism gives the ready the
illusion that they're getting an inside view, but ultimately the voter is
disenfranchised because the story isn't about the voter's choice, it's about
the campaigns.

I remember an Issac Asimov story about a future where only one person had to
vote, because, based on that person's vote, a supercomputer could predict who
would have won the election. That's the strange future of 538. Politics is no
longer the art of the possible, it's just like betting on sports.

~~~
jivatmanx
Elections already are about the campaigns. If there is more certainty about
the outcome of the election, they will inevitably be less about the campaigns.
That would lower turnout... but would it be bad?

~~~
scott_s
I think Paul's point was that typical election coverage is about the campaigns
themselves, as if the campaign was intrinsically important [1]. But the
campaign is not what's relevant to a voter. That is, they don't need a
narrative about how the campaign is doing, they need information on their
choices.

[1] Insider campaign coverage is certainly _interesting_ , but that's
different from being important. I'm interested in behind-the-scenes narratives
in just about everything.

------
tmoertel
I hope that the rise of Nate Silver portends a day when journalism will not be
practiced almost exclusively by people who are functionally illiterate when it
comes to all things quantitative. When so much of our world is governed by
relationships that are inherently quantitative, it's tragic that, of the
people who make it their life's work to explain that world to us, so few are
equipped to do the job.

~~~
llimllib
And then, god forbid, perhaps politicians who are not innumerate? A man can
dream.

~~~
Zigurd
Why has Obama been going to Florida? The only reasonable answer is that he is
looking not only at the snapshot numbers someone like Nate Silver does a good
job of reporting, but the trend, way ahead of current polling. Campaigns are
very numerate.

For the same reasons, Chris Christie and Michael Blomberg feel safe throwing
Romney under the bus.

~~~
scott_s
Regarding Christie, I'm willing to assume that his praise on Obama is genuine,
and not calculated. Christie has had to deal with an enormous disaster, and I
can easily see him being grateful if the President has, in fact, been very
helpful.

------
jfc
Dr. Sam Wang, a neuroscientist at Princeton University, wrote a spirited
defense of Silver on the Princeton Election Consortium blog
(<http://election.princeton.edu>), where Wang also does some insightful
statistical analysis on the Presidential election.

Wang sometimes disagrees with Silver, but supports the notion of a data-driven
approach. Fascinating stuff on his blog, too: he's running Bayesian prediction
models, Random Drift, and has a popular meta-margin that is worth checking
out.

He also takes some delightful shots at journalists and others who are trying
to keep the focus on political "horse race" reporting, instead of using more
rigor. And he has a great sense of humor - his "Nerds Under Attack" post is
hilarious - <http://election.princeton.edu/2012/10/29/nerds-under-attack/>

------
brownbat
It's hardly a war between epistemologies, journalists just have to fill time.
They've had Nate Silver on to celebrate his work a dozen times when he serves
the purpose, lets them tell a different story than the day before.

They're not against his methodology, they're against his current results,
which don't make the race as interesting as it could be. (If Nate was the only
one saying it was a close race, they'd be pushing his narrative above all
others.)

News is biased, but not how most people think, it's biased towards conflict
(and novelty, doomsaying, and sensationalism).

It's just entertainment, there's no permanent epistemology to entertainment.

~~~
jamesbritt
_News is biased, but not how most people think, it's biased towards conflict
(and novelty, doomsaying, and sensationalism)._

They could, however, be using those entertainment factors to cover, say, the
fall of real wages, or the current state of unions, or what's actually in a
Congressional budget, or any number of other topics that seem to get very
little air-time.

~~~
greenyoda
I'd also like to see more air time devoted to the Congressional budget, but I
can't think of a way of presenting it that the average TV viewer would find
entertaining.

~~~
Tloewald
The problem isn't that it's been tried and found difficult, but it's been
assumed to be difficult and not tried (to paraphrase P. G. Wodehouse)

~~~
colmvp
I disagree.

I did work for a startup that specifically showed un-biased news on a variety
of pertinent topics from a variety of great sources.

Yet the videos that made the most money for them (advertising revenue) were
the stupid shit you'd expect. Gossip, memes, sexual related content...

At the end of the day the most mainstream news stories/clips were far more
lucrative than the topics a typical HNers/New Yorker reader might enjoy.

~~~
Tloewald
The OP referred to turning various kinds of interesting subject matter into
entertainment, versus merely reporting it. I think this is actually an
interesting idea, and I don't think it has really been tried.

The typical entertaining news story "writes itself". Gossip, stupid pet
tricks, etc.

Indeed the entertainment industry is itself very conservative in its choices
of subject matter.

------
Osmium
It's in the campaign's interests to paint is a tight race, because they don't
want to promote political apathy. They want people to vote.

To put it another way if his model suggested, e.g., Obama has a 100% chance of
winning, and everyone knew that, his supporters would be less inclined to vote
and he could lose. So there's a chaotic element to these things that's just
difficult to predict, and journalists are better placed to handle this chaotic
element (another example: Hurricane Sandy). That said, given the abundance of
polling data, I think his model stands to be a much better predictor than
journalistic intuition.

~~~
TwoBit
If Obama was forecast to havee 100% chance of winning, wouldn't voters for
alternative candidates also be less inlcined to vote?

~~~
greenyoda
They might also view it as a challenge to prove the pundits wrong, and turn
out in large numbers.

------
snowwrestler
I think the premise--or at least the wording--is wrong. Journalists like Nate
Silver. It is political pundits (who are almost the opposite of journalists)
who can't stand him.

Fittingly, pundits typically dislike actual journalists for the same reason:
they attempt to report things accurately rather than through a party or
ideological filter.

~~~
TwoBit
My problem with journalists is they try too hard to report things "fairly."

~~~
eropple
Agreed. Setting aside the impossibility of unbiased reporting, the current
habit of "repeat what both sides say, but don't fact-check anything" is
appalling. If one side is outright _lying_ , and you are reporting what they
say but not the factual truth behind it, you're doing a disservice to all
involved.

~~~
snowwrestler
There is plenty of fact checking being done by journalists, but it has shifted
to "fact check" stories that are published separately.

This is in part because it takes longer to fact check things, but there is
tremendous competitive pressure to be first with news. So the on-scene
reporters report what was said in near-real-time, and then the fact check
reporters look through and report on how true it was.

~~~
eropple
Sure, but those "fact check" stories are useless. People see the first thing.
They aren't likely to see the next.

I get the rationale, but it doesn't do what reporters need to actually do to
be an effective part of the political process.

------
fourmii
It's another symptom of poisoned politics here in the US. As far as I've seen,
the people who are attacking Nate Silver are Republicans who simply don't like
what Silver's stats are pointing to. They're the same people who claimed last
month's unemployment figures were somehow manipulated because it showed a
downward trend in unemployment.

It's also an insight into the state of journalism and the press in this
country. It's pretty hard to find objective reporting these days, sources of
'news' seems to be full of highly opinionated punditry rather than unbiased
reporting.

~~~
briandear
If Silver were predicting the race going the other way, Democrats would attack
him. People tend to attack things that don't fit their desired outcomes.
Leftists attack Fox for bias but they have no problem with the bias of MSNBC.
It isn't bias people care about, it's bias against their own views. There are
very few objective people.

~~~
brown9-2
Did Democrats attack 538 when Silver predicted huge losses in the
Congressional races in 2010? I don't recall this.

It's not for nothing that one party is considered the anti-science party.

~~~
Evbn
No one pays attention to off-year races.

------
jtchang
I hope more supposed "journalists" come out and criticize Nate Silver for his
methods. Then maybe we can start having a real discussion based around facts
and data with real analysis across the board.

Take for instance discussions around social security. I swear most of the
arguments I hear have no real data to back it up. Nate Silver represents a new
generation of reporting that threatens the status quo journalist. Notice I
don't say traditional journalism because I don't believe you can replace true
journalism (go out and actually do investigation and reporting). I just
believe Nate Silver is leading the way to more fact based approach.

~~~
rhizome
It may be more that the old fact-based approach that has been corrupted and
stymied over the past 40 years (Watergate) is giving way to a new data-driven
fact-based approach, and the people who have spent their careers in the old,
broken model now have to fight for their continued relevance and
employability.

------
bmac27
I'm not very familiar with Silver's background. I was about to write up how
similar this type of analysis (and the ensuing reaction to it from the
established pundit class) was to the baseball world and the rise of
sabermetrics. Then I saw his background and found out that that's where he
started. Not surprising.

------
Alex3917
It's worth emphasizing the fact that Nate Silver's model != Nate Silver's
prediction. He has explicitly said many times that if you were to ask him what
he thought the outcome would be, he wouldn't go entirely by his model. Rather,
he uses the model as the basis of his predictions. This confuses a lot of
people because he generally doesn't make predictions publicly, but rather he
analyzes what's happening based on the model.

------
shardling
The article seems down to me (503), but here's one that (judging from the
headline alone) is about the same topic: "People Who Can't Do Math Are So Mad
At Nate Silver"

[http://www.theatlanticwire.com/politics/2012/10/people-
who-c...](http://www.theatlanticwire.com/politics/2012/10/people-who-cant-do-
math-are-so-mad-nate-silver/58460/)

 _e:_ The article is now up for me, and it definitely covers the same topic.

------
gyardley
Can what Nate Silver be doing be considered science?

He's dealing with terribly sketchy data. Response rates to political polls in
America are south of 10%, and there's no proof that the portion of the
population willing to have a conversation about their political preferences
with a stranger is representative of the population as a whole.

He's also dealing with incomplete data. The 'likely voter' screen pollsters
use to determine who's actually going to the polls isn't always revealed, and
it varies from organization to organization. Polling is a cash-strapped
industry and some polls' likely-voter screens are much more porous, cutting
down on staff required and voter contacts needed to generate a 'statistically-
significant' sample. But details of the likely-voter screens and response
rates aren't always available.

His results are also completely unverifiable. Let's say his final prediction
is 80-20 in favor of one candidate, but the other candidate wins. Well, his
model did say that'll happen one time in five, so you can't really criticize
it.

The appropriate amount of precision to conclude with, given all of the fuzzy
inputs, is something like 'well, we can't tell who's going to win - it's
close, although this one candidate's chances look slightly better'. It's not
'Candidate A's chances improved from 74.6% yesterday to 76.5% today'.

 _That's_ what makes Nate Silver so irritating - he doesn't know any more than
the journalists, but he claims he does.

~~~
andrewljohnson
A couple of points:

1) His model is easy to verify... wait for the elections to be over, and see
how much his predictions correlate with reality. He predicts a great many
races, and the results speak for themselves.

"The accuracy of his November 2008 presidential election predictions—he
correctly predicted the winner of 49 of the 50 states—won Silver further
attention and commendation. The only state he missed was Indiana, which went
for Barack Obama by 1%. He also correctly predicted the winner of all 35
Senate races that year."

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nate_Silver>

2) Also, his model accounts for the response rate figures you cite - that was
actually the point of his most recent blog post. The reason Nate gives Romney
any chance at all to win is because his model predicts that there is less than
1/5 chance that the polls are systematically biased (based on data since
1968). He thinks that if he's wrong, it's exactly for the reason you say -
that those who respond to the polls are a small group that don't represent the
population. He has a large enough sample size to eliminate sampling error, and
we're close enough to election day to discount error due to polls being a
snapshot in time. So there is only systematic bias left to discuss...

"So why, then, do we have Mr. Obama as “only” an 83.7 percent favorite to win
the Electoral College, and not close to 100 percent? This is because of the
other potential sources of error in polling."

And that error is simply that polls don't reflect reality, and he thinks that
is about a 15% chance.

[http://fivethirtyeight.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/11/03/nov-2-fo...](http://fivethirtyeight.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/11/03/nov-2-for-
romney-to-win-state-polls-must-be-statistically-biased/)

~~~
streptomycin
_His model is easy to verify... wait for the elections to be over, and see how
much his predictions correlate with reality._

FWIW, he got a bunch of congressional races wrong in 2010.

~~~
jfc
What you just posted is misleading. Silver's model gave the GOP a 2 in 3
chance of winning the House in 2010, predicting a net gain of 45-50 House
seats, and the majority -
[http://fivethirtyeight.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/09/10/g-o-p-
ha...](http://fivethirtyeight.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/09/10/g-o-p-
has-2-in-3-chance-of-taking-house-model-forecasts/)

~~~
andrewljohnson
Also, his modeling is MUCH more accurate for presidential races, where there
is more polling data, and thus a lower sampling error.

------
foobarqux
> [Silver's evaluation] involves judgment, too, but because it’s based in a
> scientific process, we can trace how he applied that judgment to reach his
> conclusions.

No, as far as I know the actual model and its parameters are not public. I
understand why this is the case but without that information the basis for the
conclusions are effectively as obscure as those produced by the conventional
journalists decried in the article.

~~~
dbecker
Silver tries to be transparent about his model. For a non- technical
description, see [1]. He used to have something more technical/concrete on his
personal blog. I'm guessing you can still find that easily.

The fact that he doesn't include specific equations in his NYTimes blog is
likely only to improve accessibility to non-technical readers.

That said, he has given enough detail for others to roughly replicate his
work. See [2]

[1] <http://fivethirtyeight.blogs.nytimes.com/methodology/>

[2] <https://github.com/jseabold/538model>

~~~
foobarqux
You substantially underestimate the effect of the (unreported) model
parameters. A person can often arbitrarily change the prediction by tweaking
the parameters.

Thank you for the link to the attempt to reproduce Silver's results. I will
have to spend more time to determine how closely they agree -- it isn't
obvious after a cursory look.

~~~
dbecker
That's a good point about the importance of parameters.

I wonder whether Silver would be responsive if you emailed him asking about
parameters.

------
quaunaut
It's honestly people just not understanding what he's doing, not bothering to
try, and then making inane statements about it. There's a reason he's popular,
and it's not that journalism is ignoring him, or "can't stand him". It's
because a lot of them point at him as their reasoning for events.

Sure, a few ignorant ones say things to earn a bit of attention, but they are
neither the standard nor the rule.

------
npsimons
_Silver’s methods cannot possibly produce more reliable information than the
official sources themselves. These are the savviest, highest inside sources.
They are the strongest form of epistemological proof — a “case closed” in an
argument against calculations and numbers._

Now where have I heard that before . . .

------
jrajav
A gist.io of the article to ease the sudden load on the site (or if you simply
can't get to it due to 50* error):

<http://gist.io/4007765> (Source: <https://gist.github.com/4007765>)

------
lifeisstillgood
Punditry is analysis of known facts.

Journalists do it through their prism, statisticians do it through theirs (and
yes Nate Silver is a statistician and so his assumptions will affect his
predictions)

Other journalists perform analysis on secret or private facts. The leaks, off
the record briefings of normal political discourse, as well as actual real
investigative journalism (both of them who are left)

Pundits who don't get the difference are doomed to be replaced by pundits with
a copy of SASS.

Investigative journalism is just doomed.

------
ajays
_"Journalists get access to privileged information. . . , then evaluate,
filter, and order it through the rather ineffable quality alternatively known
as “news judgment,” “news sense,” or “savvy.” This norm of objectivity is how
political journalists say to the public. . . ._

The author uses the word "objectivity" when the right word is "subjectivity".
'savvy', 'news sense', 'gut feeling' are never objective. The author himself
says so a few sentences later:

 _Where political journalists’ information is evaluated through a subjective
and nebulous professional/cultural sense of judgment._

And yet, he concludes by going back to "objectivity" :

 _When journalistic objectivity is confronted with scientific objectivity, its
circuits are fried._

The bottom line is: this is the age-old war between what I'd call 'science'
(Silver, given his methods) and 'art' ( the journalists ).

~~~
mdonahoe
I think the author knows what he is talking about.

Journalistic objectivity is about reporting the news without your personal
bias. I think you can give your subjective opinion (making predictions, etc)
and still have it be considered objective journalism.

Thats why his tldr is about the clash between the two objectivities.

------
tsotha
>Where political journalists’ information is evaluated through a subjective
and nebulous professional/cultural sense of judgment, his evaluation is
systematic and scientifically based.

Oh, bullcrap. Silver is hand weighting different polls based on whether or not
he thinks they're reliable. That, in turn, is based on his own " subjective
and nebulous professional/cultural sense of judgment".

In other words, he's doing exactly what the political journalists are doing
and then smearing a thin layer of math over it. This isn't "scientifically
based" at all.

------
001sky
_No, even that’s TL;DR: When journalistic objectivity is confronted with
scientific objectivity, its circuits are fried._

\-- <social science> != Science

~~~
jrajav
And <any kind of science or pseudoscience> != <scientific objectivity>. The
idea of scientific objectivity is "forming conclusions based only on
independently testable measurements." That seems applicable here.

~~~
001sky
political polling data is not independently testable

~~~
spamizbad
There's actually a fairly major independent test that will be concluded on
Tuesday, November 6th.

... but you're technically correct :)

------
jtfairbank
Check out <http://electionanalytics.cs.illinois.edu/> for an alternative to
Nate Silver. It uses bayesian analysis and dynamic program to come up with a
deterministic snapshot of the election.

------
jivatmanx
There is one interesting question here: Is is harmful to the electoral process
if there is far less of a perception of uncertainty about what candidate will
win?

I'm not certain that there is. The modern political media largely follows
politics like sports, and analyze whether a particular event is likely to be
good or bad for a candidate, and such shallowness does not make the electorate
more informed.

However there is a case to be made that more certainty would lower voter
turnout, and that that would be bad.

I think that the only thing that could clearly improve our political situation
is proportional representation and limits on consecutive terms.

------
gamble
The irony is that 538 can only exist because of gut-based journalism. The
polls it aggregates aren't cheap to conduct. Newspapers and television
commission them so that they can be the first to run a story alerting the
public to some shocking new result, even (or especially) if it's an outlier.
If the public stops paying attention to traditional horse-race poll
journalism, these outlets won't have any motivation to continue polling.

~~~
brown9-2
I don't think most people would put polling in the "gut-based journalism"
category. When people dismiss horse-race reporting and the "gut" stuff,
they're dismissing pundits telling us what they think will happen based
nothing on the other pundits they talk to and what the campaigns are telling
them.

In a world where people place less importance on what people like Mark
Halperin and Dick Morris think, news organizations would still have plenty of
reason to conduct polling - that would be a world in which people value data
over what "thought leaders" are telling us what they think.

~~~
gamble
People may value data, but they don't value a datum. Individually, none of the
dozen polls that report in every day are newsworthy except insofar as they
feed the commentariat's need for something to hang stories on. 538 is
newsworthy because his statistics can draw meaningful results from multiple
polls. In aggregate, polls are valuable, but without poor journalism their
value to each organization funding individual polls is probably less than the
cost of conducting them.

------
charlieok
“How does Scarborough know that Silver’s estimate is incorrect? He talked to
sources in both campaigns. In Scarborough’s journalistic epistemology, this is
the trump card: Silver’s methods cannot possibly produce more reliable
information than the official sources themselves.”

Well, the campaign insiders do have access to internal polling data that the
rest of us don't. *

* Although, Nate Silver apparently did get to see that data in 2008.

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codex
If traditional political journalists assume that the race is too close to call
because both campaigns tell them so, then they are gullible chumps, plain and
simple.

The losing campaign will try to claim the race is close because they don't
want their supporters to be discouraged and not turn out.

The winning campaign will try to claim the race is close because they don't
want their supporters to get lazy and not turn out.

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aklemm
Such an objective approach like Silver's removes the market for the subjective
narrative (convention bumps, opinion swings after gaffes, perception of the
candidates, etc.) journalists rely on during the many months of campaigning.
That's a threat to their jobs. It would be so amazing if the market for
punditry would dry up.

~~~
philwelch
Except it doesn't have to. It's easy to apply a subjective narrative to
changes in numbers.

For instance, Obama's electoral vote EV and chance of winning, according to
538, sharply plummets after the first debate before turning around. Between
the 3rd and 12th of October, Romney actually tripled his chances of winning
from about 13% to about 39%. Then it turned around and Romney dropped to about
16%. It's not difficult to build a dramatic story around that.

In fact, this kind of thing is exactly what sportswriters and business
journalists do all the time. Which means ESPN is on a (slightly) higher plane
of journalism than most political commentary.

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jacques_chester
Experts are bad at predicting political outcomes, full stop. Even the "best"
experts are absolutely stomped by simple statistical models[1].

And what does Nate Silver use? That's right.

[1] [http://chester.id.au/2012/07/29/review-expert-political-
judg...](http://chester.id.au/2012/07/29/review-expert-political-judgement/)

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expralitemonk
If Nate Silver is right, then there is no reason to pay any further attention
to the election (other than showing up and voting of course). That means fewer
people watching or reading the news and their advertisements.

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padobson
Tl;dr Silver is an agent of disruption, and the incumbents are terrified of
him.

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guscost
From what I've heard, Nate Silver received publicity for picking 49 out of 50
states in the 2008 election. I'd like to see how his model fares in 2012 and
beyond, or a higher confidence interval at the very least. Is it falsifiable?
Then we might be talking about science.

~~~
wtallis
What the hell do you mean "is it falsifiable"? He's making concrete
predictions about the outcome of an event that is mere days away. Voters will
have the opportunity to select an outcome different from what's been
predicted, so it's possible for him to be wrong. Is there some other
definition of falsifiable that you are using?

~~~
guscost
You're not implying that a Romney win would falsify his model, are you?

~~~
msprague
I don't think he has a specific "model" for his "predictions". Reading his
recent article, he uses statistics and weights informations gathered by polls
to determine the probability of each candidate winning per state. You can't
really be "wrong" in that sense, but the actual result can vary due to
statistical sampling error, polling error, or bias in the polls.

Source: fivethirtyeight.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/11/03/nov-2-for-romney-to-win-
state-polls-must-be-statistically-biased

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allenwlee
a million likes

