Discussion for article #231080
Tom, you forgot to note that this article is actually “sponsored content” for ESPN and fivethirtyeight. Or do we call it ''native advertising?"
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Why am I needing to care about this?
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Insiders at the company told USA Today’s Jason McIntyre in September that FiveThirtyEight’s disappointing traffic and ad revenue represented a “disaster,” and that the failure was blamed on Bill Simmons, the ESPN star who helped lure Silver from the Times.
Nothing like a random, unexplained slam.
He was far from the only one with that prediction. if one reads his book, it’s apparent that beyond a grasp of measurement and prediction principles, he’s not much of a thinker. His ideas for changing government are mostly libertarian-lite wishful thinking or applying principles of online gambling—if people who bought the book actually read it they’d see that he really lacks breadth or depth and beyond easy to aggregate data, seems doomed to irrelevance. His periodic columns in the Times were a more appropriate venue. His grasp of measurement and prediction is somewhat unique but not novel–basically he recapped things that were part of my foundational courses in measurement in grad school many years ago. A well trained measurement person in psychology or possibly sociology could easily do the same work and probably have more interesting ideas to share.
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Nate became Great on the back of Political forecasting.
Broadening on that core competency to include topics of interest to the other %95 of online media consumers has apparently eluded Silver, ESPN etc etc.
It is somewhat surprising that this experiment with round pegs and randomly shaped holes was conducted on such a large scale. The media moguls behind this let their hubris get the better of them.
I was a huge Nate fan and benefited mightily from his output in '08, 12. It is sort of sad to see his strengths so mis-applied.
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Nerds don’t quit being nerds because a bright light is shined upon them. If a Zebra wrote for ESPN, would it lose it’s stripes or be able to disguise them?
I’ll bet that Nate could do the fantasy thing, fantasy football, etc., exceedingly well. There is the degree of information that can be compiled and applied that isn’t just luck that would seem to be all of what Nate Silver is about. Things that aren’t like this, aren’t like Nate and his brilliance quickly fades outside of that box.
Nerds and sports don’t go together like Wall Street and politics. These are bad mixes.