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It's the math, stupid!

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I like the title if nothing else.  Nate Silver was plugging his book on the Colbert Nation.  Here is a review from the LA Times.

And yet during the 2008 elections, it took mere months for Nate Silver to become one of the political world's most respected experts, the guy anyone who wanted to be taken seriously had to cite. With good reason: Unlike so many of the people who make their living predicting elections, Nate Silver can do math.


Silver, who got his start working with baseball statistics before eventually moving on to politics and founding his website FiveThirtyEight.com (now part of the New York Times), acknowledges as much in his new book, "The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail — but Some Don't."

Surprised he didn't go with a baseball metaphor, but I guess he has a thing for Faulkner.

Comments

  1. avrdsNovember 8, 2012 at 4:11 PM

    I remember when Keith Olbermann had him on his show for the first time. So very young, so very uncomfortable, and so very very geeky. I think Olbermann's the one responsible for Silver, since he's a big sports fan. A friend was his book escort when he was on tour in L.A. I can hardly wait to talk to her about him. I find his rise to fame fascinating given who he is.

    ReplyDelete
  2. James FergusonNovember 10, 2012 at 10:57 AM

    It pays to have all that advance publicity because Nate Silver is now seen as the golden boy of political predictions,

    http://news.yahoo.com/called-now-silvers-pop-culture-star-193343931.html

    but this was a pretty easy race to call. I had been telling friends the race would be called as soon as the California polls closed. I was only off by 18 minutes. I thought Obama would get more popular vote, I imagined him winning by 5 per cent, but I had called the states right down the line, including Florida, the only one really up for grabs.

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