Skip to main content

It's the math, stupid!

By


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.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire

By
  Welcome to this month's reading group selection.  David Von Drehle mentions The Melting Pot , a play by Israel Zangwill, that premiered on Broadway in 1908.  At that time theater was accessible to a broad section of the public, not the exclusive domain it has become over the decades.  Zangwill carried a hopeful message that America was a place where old hatreds and prejudices were pointless, and that in this new country immigrants would find a more open society.  I suppose the reference was more an ironic one for Von Drehle, as he notes the racial and ethnic hatreds were on display everywhere, and at best Zangwill's play helped persons forget for a moment how deep these divides ran.  Nevertheless, "the melting pot" made its way into the American lexicon, even if New York could best be describing as a boiling cauldron in the early twentieth century. Triangle: The Fire That Changed America takes a broad view of events that led up the notorious fire, not...
230 comments
Read more

Team of Rivals Reading Group

By
''Team of Rivals" is also an America ''coming-of-age" saga. Lincoln, Seward, Chase et al. are sketched as being part of a ''restless generation," born when Founding Fathers occupied the White House and the Louisiana Purchase netted nearly 530 million new acres to be explored. The Western Expansion motto of this burgeoning generation, in fact, was cleverly captured in two lines of Stephen Vincent Benet's verse: ''The stream uncrossed, the promise still untried / The metal sleeping in the mountainside." None of the protagonists in ''Team of Rivals" hailed from the Deep South or Great Plains. _______________________________ From a review by Douglas Brinkley, 2005
293 comments
Read more

The Searchers

By
You are invited to join us in a discussion of  The Searchers , a new book on John Ford's boldest Western, which cast John Wayne against type as the vengeful Ethan Edwards who spends eight years tracking down a notorious Comanche warrior, who had killed his cousins and abducted a 9 year old girl.  The film has had its fair share of detractors as well as fans over the years, but is consistently ranked in most critics'  Top Ten Greatest Films . Glenn Frankel examines the origins of the story as well as the film itself, breaking his book down into four parts.  The first two parts deal with Cynthia Ann Parker and her son Quanah, perhaps the most famous of the 19th century abduction stories.  The short third part focuses on the author of the novel, Alan Le May, and how he came to write The Searchers. The final part is about Pappy and the Duke and the making of the film. Frankel noted that Le May researched 60+ abduction stories, fusing them together into a nar...
123 comments
Read more