The end of the road for FiveThirtyEight?
April 26, 2023 4:01 PM Subscribe
After Disney laid off more than half of FiveThirtyEight's 35 staff members earlier this week, editor-in-chief Nate Silver said on Twitter that he was unlikely to renew his contract when it expires this summer.
Silver founded the election forecasting site in 2008, and then sold it to ESPN in 2013 following a three-year licensing deal with the New York Times. Over the following decade in addition to publishing its namesake election forecasts, the site also launched the journalism careers of Clare Malone, Harry Enten, Perry Bacon Jr., and many others. Although current parent company ABC News says they intend to keep FiveThirtyEight's brand around with a smaller staff, it's not clear how much value that will have in the absence of Silver and the models he developed.
Silver founded the election forecasting site in 2008, and then sold it to ESPN in 2013 following a three-year licensing deal with the New York Times. Over the following decade in addition to publishing its namesake election forecasts, the site also launched the journalism careers of Clare Malone, Harry Enten, Perry Bacon Jr., and many others. Although current parent company ABC News says they intend to keep FiveThirtyEight's brand around with a smaller staff, it's not clear how much value that will have in the absence of Silver and the models he developed.
The end of the road for FiveThirtyEight?
With any luck!
Because: Fuck that guy, and Christ, what an asshole and all that.
posted by dobbs at 4:09 PM on April 26, 2023 [31 favorites]
With any luck!
Because: Fuck that guy, and Christ, what an asshole and all that.
posted by dobbs at 4:09 PM on April 26, 2023 [31 favorites]
I look forward to the inevitable Nate Silver podcast on Crooked Media or Gimlet, which must be titled Somehow Never Wrong.
posted by snuffleupagus at 4:15 PM on April 26, 2023 [27 favorites]
posted by snuffleupagus at 4:15 PM on April 26, 2023 [27 favorites]
won't disagree with anyone who says some variation of "fuck Nate Silver," but having journalistic outfits of even marginal merit get hollowed out and obliterated on a weekly basis by an increasingly thinner gamut of omnivorous corporations has been extremely grim the past few years
posted by Kybard at 4:18 PM on April 26, 2023 [97 favorites]
posted by Kybard at 4:18 PM on April 26, 2023 [97 favorites]
Disney trifecta is in play. Who’s taking odds?
posted by slogger at 4:19 PM on April 26, 2023 [1 favorite]
posted by slogger at 4:19 PM on April 26, 2023 [1 favorite]
journalistic outfits of even marginal merit get hollowed out and obliterated
We lost Buzzfeed News, but Teen Vogue is hanging tough
/s (mostly)
posted by snuffleupagus at 4:20 PM on April 26, 2023 [15 favorites]
We lost Buzzfeed News, but Teen Vogue is hanging tough
/s (mostly)
posted by snuffleupagus at 4:20 PM on April 26, 2023 [15 favorites]
it's not clear how much value that will have in the absence of Silver and the models he developed.
If the answer is greater than zero, then it's more than what I value it at currently. Gave up on it after the 2016 debacle; I'm not sure that I even looked at it once in '20.
posted by Halloween Jack at 4:35 PM on April 26, 2023 [4 favorites]
If the answer is greater than zero, then it's more than what I value it at currently. Gave up on it after the 2016 debacle; I'm not sure that I even looked at it once in '20.
posted by Halloween Jack at 4:35 PM on April 26, 2023 [4 favorites]
Ok, I'll be the one to ask: what's the problem with Nate Silver, and how did he push bothsidesism?
posted by splitpeasoup at 4:36 PM on April 26, 2023 [13 favorites]
posted by splitpeasoup at 4:36 PM on April 26, 2023 [13 favorites]
> it's not clear how much value that will have in the absence of Silver and the models he developed.
Does Silver retain ownership of the "model"? I would assume the acquisition would have had him handing over the IP rights to the model. It may have been his baby but I doubt they need him to keep it going.
posted by dis_integration at 4:37 PM on April 26, 2023 [3 favorites]
Does Silver retain ownership of the "model"? I would assume the acquisition would have had him handing over the IP rights to the model. It may have been his baby but I doubt they need him to keep it going.
posted by dis_integration at 4:37 PM on April 26, 2023 [3 favorites]
journalistic outfits of even marginal merit
Negative merit, in this case.
posted by Artw at 4:46 PM on April 26, 2023 [1 favorite]
Negative merit, in this case.
posted by Artw at 4:46 PM on April 26, 2023 [1 favorite]
My understanding is that yes, he owns the models.
posted by dyslexictraveler at 4:51 PM on April 26, 2023 [4 favorites]
posted by dyslexictraveler at 4:51 PM on April 26, 2023 [4 favorites]
what's the problem with Nate Silver, and how did he push bothsidesism?
so 538 started off as a reaction to punditry, where talking heads would go onto cable news, make up some reason for what the polls were doing, and when they were inevitably wrong they would rarely face any kind of meaningful consequence. Instead of reading tea leaves, his model analyses the polls themselves, sorts out the house bias, and then runs simulations to predict who'll win the election.
There's two problems with this: firstly, polls should be a lagging indicator of who's winning the political argument. By turning poll-watching into a main event, it makes the American political horse-racing problem worse, where the two sides of politics are treated as Red vs Blue rather than groups with radically different ideas of what the country should look like that need to be interrogated. It replaced the punditry with something more efficient but just as bad.
The second problem is that statistical analysis of polls isn't content, so the FiveThirtyEight staff increasingly became pundits themselves, just with the mott-and-bailey of being able to retreat behind "the model" when they inevitably got pushback for being wrong. Silver was particularly notorious for this, especially during the pandemic, where like everyone else he became an amateur epidemiologist, but unlike everyone else, he thought he was better at it than actual epidemiologists because he was astatistician pundit.
People also get annoyed specifically for the 2016 call, in which 538 had Clinton at first with a 90% chance to win, and then a 70% chance to win, but I personally don't understand that complaint. I'm extremely happy to blame the people who voted for Trump for that error.
posted by Merus at 4:57 PM on April 26, 2023 [122 favorites]
so 538 started off as a reaction to punditry, where talking heads would go onto cable news, make up some reason for what the polls were doing, and when they were inevitably wrong they would rarely face any kind of meaningful consequence. Instead of reading tea leaves, his model analyses the polls themselves, sorts out the house bias, and then runs simulations to predict who'll win the election.
There's two problems with this: firstly, polls should be a lagging indicator of who's winning the political argument. By turning poll-watching into a main event, it makes the American political horse-racing problem worse, where the two sides of politics are treated as Red vs Blue rather than groups with radically different ideas of what the country should look like that need to be interrogated. It replaced the punditry with something more efficient but just as bad.
The second problem is that statistical analysis of polls isn't content, so the FiveThirtyEight staff increasingly became pundits themselves, just with the mott-and-bailey of being able to retreat behind "the model" when they inevitably got pushback for being wrong. Silver was particularly notorious for this, especially during the pandemic, where like everyone else he became an amateur epidemiologist, but unlike everyone else, he thought he was better at it than actual epidemiologists because he was a
People also get annoyed specifically for the 2016 call, in which 538 had Clinton at first with a 90% chance to win, and then a 70% chance to win, but I personally don't understand that complaint. I'm extremely happy to blame the people who voted for Trump for that error.
posted by Merus at 4:57 PM on April 26, 2023 [122 favorites]
i would mourn the loss of this outlet for political journalism, but fivethirtyeight isn't journalism and doesn't discuss politics.
posted by bombastic lowercase pronouncements at 5:14 PM on April 26, 2023 [8 favorites]
posted by bombastic lowercase pronouncements at 5:14 PM on April 26, 2023 [8 favorites]
Also massive launderer of COVID denialism.
posted by Artw at 5:16 PM on April 26, 2023 [36 favorites]
posted by Artw at 5:16 PM on April 26, 2023 [36 favorites]
I finally decided Silver's opinion was bullshit that time he pretty much went full wingnut about "delays" in Pfizer's vaccine developments.
Silver gave platform to, or subtly winked toward, other types of COVID denialism as well.
posted by tclark at 5:19 PM on April 26, 2023 [23 favorites]
Silver gave platform to, or subtly winked toward, other types of COVID denialism as well.
posted by tclark at 5:19 PM on April 26, 2023 [23 favorites]
what's the problem with Nate Silver, and how did he push bothsidesism?
He's always been careful to keep his personal political views close to his chest, but his sentiments seem to fall somewhere in the "libertarian techbro" to "moderate white liberal" spectrum. His analyses of political happenings and polls tend to reflect this, leaving him frequently ruminating about whether a candidate is " too left/right" for the electorate.
I used to listen to the 538 podcast (back when it was good) and this stance often shone through there as well. He'd point to polls showing broad support for establishment candidates and use that to scoff at any suggestion that a more progressive stance could be advantageous to Democrats and roll his eyes about "wokeness." And it almost goes without saying that he doesn't really care about the morality of any particular aspect of political life, only what moves the polls.
Still, he'd pay lip service to social issues, leading to occasional instances where he'd be going off on a tangent about some realpolitik strategy only to be reminded by one of the other hosts (usually Clare Malone) that the people he was taking about were, you know, people. He'd then backpeddle and say something like, "well of course we ideally don't want Group X to lose life/liberty/happiness, but polls say that's a winning move."
Just generally the connotations of his writings and analyses argue for a bland, middle of the road-ism. Couple that with his inability to discuss progressive politics without an exasperated, even mocking, tone, and he frequently came off as a dude convinced he's the cleverest boy in the room while being naive about his own blindspots and privilege.
posted by Panjandrum at 5:29 PM on April 26, 2023 [33 favorites]
He's always been careful to keep his personal political views close to his chest, but his sentiments seem to fall somewhere in the "libertarian techbro" to "moderate white liberal" spectrum. His analyses of political happenings and polls tend to reflect this, leaving him frequently ruminating about whether a candidate is " too left/right" for the electorate.
I used to listen to the 538 podcast (back when it was good) and this stance often shone through there as well. He'd point to polls showing broad support for establishment candidates and use that to scoff at any suggestion that a more progressive stance could be advantageous to Democrats and roll his eyes about "wokeness." And it almost goes without saying that he doesn't really care about the morality of any particular aspect of political life, only what moves the polls.
Still, he'd pay lip service to social issues, leading to occasional instances where he'd be going off on a tangent about some realpolitik strategy only to be reminded by one of the other hosts (usually Clare Malone) that the people he was taking about were, you know, people. He'd then backpeddle and say something like, "well of course we ideally don't want Group X to lose life/liberty/happiness, but polls say that's a winning move."
Just generally the connotations of his writings and analyses argue for a bland, middle of the road-ism. Couple that with his inability to discuss progressive politics without an exasperated, even mocking, tone, and he frequently came off as a dude convinced he's the cleverest boy in the room while being naive about his own blindspots and privilege.
posted by Panjandrum at 5:29 PM on April 26, 2023 [33 favorites]
It's true that in recent years Silver has been worse than useless, and a pretty big asshole to boot. (Though I don't think bothsidesism is really the problem, so much as contrarianism and the narcissistic rage of someone who got used to being treated as an oracle, and now can't stand the fact that people don't revere him in the way they did ten years ago.)
But I'd still say that Silver has had a net positive legacy for political journalism. As bad as some of the polling-based journalism of the last decade has been, it's still lightyears better than the vibes-based (aka bullshit-based) journalism of the 90s and 2000s. Remember "Soccer Moms" and "which candidate do voters want to have a beer with?" Before Silver, the polling analyst who everyone treated as an oracle was Mark Fucking Penn, and I'll take Silver over Penn any day of the week and twice on Sunday.
There's a whole generation of great data journalists, both those who came up through 538 and those who were inspired by him, who exist in a niche that he was instrumental in creating. For my money that still out-weighs the impact of his increasingly irrelevant ranting on Twitter.
posted by firechicago at 5:35 PM on April 26, 2023 [59 favorites]
But I'd still say that Silver has had a net positive legacy for political journalism. As bad as some of the polling-based journalism of the last decade has been, it's still lightyears better than the vibes-based (aka bullshit-based) journalism of the 90s and 2000s. Remember "Soccer Moms" and "which candidate do voters want to have a beer with?" Before Silver, the polling analyst who everyone treated as an oracle was Mark Fucking Penn, and I'll take Silver over Penn any day of the week and twice on Sunday.
There's a whole generation of great data journalists, both those who came up through 538 and those who were inspired by him, who exist in a niche that he was instrumental in creating. For my money that still out-weighs the impact of his increasingly irrelevant ranting on Twitter.
posted by firechicago at 5:35 PM on April 26, 2023 [59 favorites]
And anyone who pointed out any of Silver's glaring foibles in the weeks after an election was airily dismissed as not understanding that statistics aren't predictions, despite him being happy to cash in on that misunderstanding during the election cycle. And then briefly pipe down in expectation of everyone forgetting before the next one.
Moneyball for politics is something we should want to move away from, not valorize.
posted by snuffleupagus at 5:37 PM on April 26, 2023 [9 favorites]
Moneyball for politics is something we should want to move away from, not valorize.
posted by snuffleupagus at 5:37 PM on April 26, 2023 [9 favorites]
Really this is just hammering the final nails in the coffin. The 2016 election knocked the halo off 538 even as many other news organizations adopted at least some measure of its quantitative approach to political journalism. For the last few years it's also been hemorrhaging talent.
Clare Malone was never my favorite journalist (I often found her longform pieces trite) but she wasn't afraid to call Silver out on his bullshit. The inexplicable choice to lay her off left Perry Bacon Jr. as one of the few people left on the site who had the gumption to go against the tone set by Silver. Once he left, there really wasn't anyone to act as a foil, and Nate Silver desperately needs a foil.
One of the frequent refrains about 538 as it passed from corporate owner to corporate owner is that those businesses didn't know what to do with the site. The 538 model is really one that only becomes relevant every four years, but the NYT/ABC/Disney expected a steady stream of "analysis." Having other strong personalities on staff who were actual journalists doing actual journalism filled that gap, but as those individuals went their separate ways, the site has become increasingly filled with articles that read a poll back to you and then offer up some bland punditry.
posted by Panjandrum at 5:53 PM on April 26, 2023 [7 favorites]
Clare Malone was never my favorite journalist (I often found her longform pieces trite) but she wasn't afraid to call Silver out on his bullshit. The inexplicable choice to lay her off left Perry Bacon Jr. as one of the few people left on the site who had the gumption to go against the tone set by Silver. Once he left, there really wasn't anyone to act as a foil, and Nate Silver desperately needs a foil.
One of the frequent refrains about 538 as it passed from corporate owner to corporate owner is that those businesses didn't know what to do with the site. The 538 model is really one that only becomes relevant every four years, but the NYT/ABC/Disney expected a steady stream of "analysis." Having other strong personalities on staff who were actual journalists doing actual journalism filled that gap, but as those individuals went their separate ways, the site has become increasingly filled with articles that read a poll back to you and then offer up some bland punditry.
posted by Panjandrum at 5:53 PM on April 26, 2023 [7 favorites]
As an immunocompromised person with a PhD in Biology, this is why I say Fuck Nate Silver:
Nate Silver Told to 'Shut Up' As Twitter COVID Musings Face Huge Backlash
Being good at sports stats translated marginally well to election stats. When it comes to epidemiology and public health, it is no substitute for graduate education in a relevant field.
posted by hydropsyche at 6:03 PM on April 26, 2023 [37 favorites]
Nate Silver Told to 'Shut Up' As Twitter COVID Musings Face Huge Backlash
Being good at sports stats translated marginally well to election stats. When it comes to epidemiology and public health, it is no substitute for graduate education in a relevant field.
posted by hydropsyche at 6:03 PM on April 26, 2023 [37 favorites]
The pandemic was a real mask-off moment in a lot of ways for a certain kind of person, and that's certainly true of Nate Silver. I'd heard some behind-the-scenes stories about the FiveThirtyEight newsroom around conferences, and you'd see some high-profile departures like Farai Chideya, who was not quiet about what an asshole Silver could be, or how he tried to shut down her reporting on the racist roots of the Trump wave.
It's funny to place the site in context with something like Vox, which launched around the same time and was originally conceptualized in many ways as "Matt Yglesias explains things to you with stacks of notecards" (I am not making this up). It was undoubtedly the era of an Obnoxious White Dude Who Thinks Scanning Wikipedia Makes Him a Universal Expert wave that passed through the industry.
But it's also true that for news nerds, 538 did genuinely mark a change in the way people thought about data journalism. It inspired a lot of teams. A lot of good people went through that newsroom. I suspect it's part of the reason that I was able to get back into journalism in 2014, as editors felt like this was a kind of storytelling they couldn't ignore. I won't shed a tear for Silver, but I wish this story was one where he left and new (more empathetic) newsroom management was able to revive some of those strengths, instead of Disney kicking a bunch of journalists to the curb wholesale and he'll just start an annoying Substack.
(And I think Panjandrum may be right to some extent, you can't publish high-volume political content without slipping into horse-race punditry, and that meant there wasn't ultimately much to distinguish their political coverage from anyone else. In a lot of ways, the model I'd want to stand up against 538 is The Pudding, which launched a few years later. They publish maybe 10-20 data-heavy stories per year, and the range of topics is broad, but they're almost all bangers. Imagine a world where that was more common!)
posted by Four String Riot at 6:33 PM on April 26, 2023 [34 favorites]
It's funny to place the site in context with something like Vox, which launched around the same time and was originally conceptualized in many ways as "Matt Yglesias explains things to you with stacks of notecards" (I am not making this up). It was undoubtedly the era of an Obnoxious White Dude Who Thinks Scanning Wikipedia Makes Him a Universal Expert wave that passed through the industry.
But it's also true that for news nerds, 538 did genuinely mark a change in the way people thought about data journalism. It inspired a lot of teams. A lot of good people went through that newsroom. I suspect it's part of the reason that I was able to get back into journalism in 2014, as editors felt like this was a kind of storytelling they couldn't ignore. I won't shed a tear for Silver, but I wish this story was one where he left and new (more empathetic) newsroom management was able to revive some of those strengths, instead of Disney kicking a bunch of journalists to the curb wholesale and he'll just start an annoying Substack.
(And I think Panjandrum may be right to some extent, you can't publish high-volume political content without slipping into horse-race punditry, and that meant there wasn't ultimately much to distinguish their political coverage from anyone else. In a lot of ways, the model I'd want to stand up against 538 is The Pudding, which launched a few years later. They publish maybe 10-20 data-heavy stories per year, and the range of topics is broad, but they're almost all bangers. Imagine a world where that was more common!)
posted by Four String Riot at 6:33 PM on April 26, 2023 [34 favorites]
As a PhD probabilist who models complex systems for a living, I also say fuck this guy. I guess we can't call him an amateur since he does this for a job, but he's certainly never convinced me he's that good at modeling anything (I've never looked at his sports stuff).
posted by SaltySalticid at 6:51 PM on April 26, 2023 [7 favorites]
posted by SaltySalticid at 6:51 PM on April 26, 2023 [7 favorites]
He was pretty valuable member of the Daily Kos community back in the day. And early 538 with mostly just him and pocketnines was a pretty interesting endeavor. Can't blame anyone for taking a payout, but the exigencies of modern journalism do seem to have taken a bit of a toll over time.
I still have 538 in my Feedly, but it's been a while since I saw anything very interesting under Nate's byline.
posted by Not A Thing at 6:57 PM on April 26, 2023 [2 favorites]
I still have 538 in my Feedly, but it's been a while since I saw anything very interesting under Nate's byline.
posted by Not A Thing at 6:57 PM on April 26, 2023 [2 favorites]
so 538 started off as a reaction to punditry, where talking heads would go onto cable news, make up some reason for what the polls were doing, and when they were inevitably wrong they would rarely face any kind of meaningful consequence. Instead of reading tea leaves, his model analyses the polls themselves, sorts out the house bias, and then runs simulations to predict who'll win the election.
I think he also ran into a PEO (Polling Engine Optimization) problem much like Google has with SEO (Search Engine Optimization). Once his trick was widely known it was gamed super hard by big money players. There now isn't a campaign out there that doesn't have multitudes of companies doing polling (or claiming to be doing polling) and there's no way to really vet them anymore and the devastating cuts to journalism have made it hard to even learn which polls are inhouse and which are not.
The Chicago mayoral election just had a minor fake polling scandal where a bluedog democrat with weird MAGA social media habits, Paul Vallas, had a partisan "polling agency" that was also one of their political donors produce a poll during the run up to the initial election to inflate the numbers of the candidate he felt he would be most able to beat in a runoff election. Hilariously it worked. The media fell hard for it in a big way and he got the runoff opponent he wanted, Brandon Johnson, as progressives strategically voted based on the polling numbers for the guy they though would make the runoff (who they still liked but a lot of people actually preferred Kam Buckner, a more experienced pol, over Johnson). Then that opponent, a very progressive teachers' union guy, kicked bluedog butt and will be Chicago's next mayor. Sidenote: Vallas also got conned out of $700L+ by a black activist grifter who promised access to black pastors and to help suppress the black vote and Vallas is now suing to try and get the money back. Chicago dodged a bullet there and I can't stop laughing about how it played out.
posted by srboisvert at 7:30 PM on April 26, 2023 [37 favorites]
I think he also ran into a PEO (Polling Engine Optimization) problem much like Google has with SEO (Search Engine Optimization). Once his trick was widely known it was gamed super hard by big money players. There now isn't a campaign out there that doesn't have multitudes of companies doing polling (or claiming to be doing polling) and there's no way to really vet them anymore and the devastating cuts to journalism have made it hard to even learn which polls are inhouse and which are not.
The Chicago mayoral election just had a minor fake polling scandal where a bluedog democrat with weird MAGA social media habits, Paul Vallas, had a partisan "polling agency" that was also one of their political donors produce a poll during the run up to the initial election to inflate the numbers of the candidate he felt he would be most able to beat in a runoff election. Hilariously it worked. The media fell hard for it in a big way and he got the runoff opponent he wanted, Brandon Johnson, as progressives strategically voted based on the polling numbers for the guy they though would make the runoff (who they still liked but a lot of people actually preferred Kam Buckner, a more experienced pol, over Johnson). Then that opponent, a very progressive teachers' union guy, kicked bluedog butt and will be Chicago's next mayor. Sidenote: Vallas also got conned out of $700L+ by a black activist grifter who promised access to black pastors and to help suppress the black vote and Vallas is now suing to try and get the money back. Chicago dodged a bullet there and I can't stop laughing about how it played out.
posted by srboisvert at 7:30 PM on April 26, 2023 [37 favorites]
I know multiple people who worked as writers at Five Thirty Eight, mostly not doing politics at all. All really great writers. These layoffs hurt those people. It has become very fashionable to hate on Nate Silver for his Twitter antics, but he is almost 100% shielded from anything bad in this layoff: he made good money on the original sale to ABC/ESPN/Disney and still owns all the rights to his models. I feel bad for all these writers and editors, and hope they are able to find new jobs in an increasingly fraught mediascape.
posted by 3j0hn at 8:05 PM on April 26, 2023 [17 favorites]
posted by 3j0hn at 8:05 PM on April 26, 2023 [17 favorites]
It has become very fashionable to hate on Nate Silver for his Twitter antics
Blaming "fashion" for people daring to disagree with a rich white guy is pretty amusing.
posted by aramaic at 8:39 PM on April 26, 2023 [26 favorites]
Blaming "fashion" for people daring to disagree with a rich white guy is pretty amusing.
posted by aramaic at 8:39 PM on April 26, 2023 [26 favorites]
FiveThirtyEight has for me a mixed legacy. Good modelling, bad punditry. I think there's a lot of data-driven journalism that has one root in 538's soil, but probably also a lot of Team Red vs Team Blue horse-race coverage. I drifted away from the site the last few years, so I missed the pandemic coverage, but it sounds like I missed little.
As a probabalist who models complex systems for a living, I will say that I was always impressed with the way that Silver reported on the election and sports models from a methodology perspective, on the iterations to the models over time to enhance them, on the relative transparency on reporting results, and on the site's attempt to provide improved visualizations. The models have been reasonably well calibrated historically, from what I've seen. Particularly given the high-stakes nature of the work.
It's also been informative to see modelling done in a way that evokes public response, and that there's a slice of the public who just don't seem to understand probabilities other than 100% guaranteed, 0% impossible and 50/50 coin toss. I don't know if it's psychological or educational, but it's hard to deal with complex situations that way as a society.
I think it's silly to pretend that no one reported on the polls before 2008, or that partisans never leaked dubious polls, or that the media had a pure heart about only reporting on the policy statements and platforms of politicians. It's been horse race stories for a long time -- and a lot more based on one conversation in a diner than on thousands of poll responses. I wonder if the greater polarization in politics has contributed to that.
I think about weather forecasters, who have been able to find a niche where they get 1 minute of coverage a day, more if there's a natural disaster. Nobody's going around blaming the lack of climate change coverage on them. In a way, that's Silver's natural niche -- the poll reporter. As I said I haven't followed recently, but he's done a fair amount of fake pollster outing back in the day.
In a way, it's a classic example of the internet age -- what should have been a small business becoming a large one to it's detriment. Most of what 538 added beyond the model-based forecasting work was, as they say in the sports statistics world, below replacement value. But the media business world can't handle someone who has four busy months every four years, and nothing to do in odd numbered ones.
posted by Superilla at 10:13 PM on April 26, 2023 [19 favorites]
As a probabalist who models complex systems for a living, I will say that I was always impressed with the way that Silver reported on the election and sports models from a methodology perspective, on the iterations to the models over time to enhance them, on the relative transparency on reporting results, and on the site's attempt to provide improved visualizations. The models have been reasonably well calibrated historically, from what I've seen. Particularly given the high-stakes nature of the work.
It's also been informative to see modelling done in a way that evokes public response, and that there's a slice of the public who just don't seem to understand probabilities other than 100% guaranteed, 0% impossible and 50/50 coin toss. I don't know if it's psychological or educational, but it's hard to deal with complex situations that way as a society.
I think it's silly to pretend that no one reported on the polls before 2008, or that partisans never leaked dubious polls, or that the media had a pure heart about only reporting on the policy statements and platforms of politicians. It's been horse race stories for a long time -- and a lot more based on one conversation in a diner than on thousands of poll responses. I wonder if the greater polarization in politics has contributed to that.
I think about weather forecasters, who have been able to find a niche where they get 1 minute of coverage a day, more if there's a natural disaster. Nobody's going around blaming the lack of climate change coverage on them. In a way, that's Silver's natural niche -- the poll reporter. As I said I haven't followed recently, but he's done a fair amount of fake pollster outing back in the day.
In a way, it's a classic example of the internet age -- what should have been a small business becoming a large one to it's detriment. Most of what 538 added beyond the model-based forecasting work was, as they say in the sports statistics world, below replacement value. But the media business world can't handle someone who has four busy months every four years, and nothing to do in odd numbered ones.
posted by Superilla at 10:13 PM on April 26, 2023 [19 favorites]
Merus: like everyone else he became an amateur epidemiologist, but unlike everyone else, he thought he was better at it than actual epidemiologists because he was a statistician pundit
It can’t be underestimated how badly Silver went off the rails over the course of the Covid pandemic. I listened to every episode of the 538 Politics podcast from its inception to the Biden inauguration and he was sometimes annoying, but his instinctive contrarianism was modulated by people on the podcast debating him, and he would change his mind, and usually his change of mind would hold. During the first year of Covid that pattern still held.
After the Biden inauguration I decided, for my own mental health as much as anything else, to stop paying close attention to American politics. But in the run-up to the 2022 mid-terms I resubscribed to the politics podcasts I used to listen to and the change in Nate Silver was striking. He was a lot less nimble, mentally, and would tie himself in knots to make the data fit his gut instinct. The one that was most striking to me is that he accurately called out a dodgy polling firm for essentially making shit up, but couldn’t take the next step that the narrative about the red wave, which partly rested on those polls, was shakier than conventional wisdom had it. That was the sort of logical step he took all the time before Covid.
Since then, he’s gotten worse, if anything. I listened to a recent episode of the podcast because Clare Malone was a guest, and he seemed like a full-on crank, saying that AI was a greater threat to humanity than climate change, and was just plain boorish, even joking about firing his employee and replacing him with an AI bot. Which seems even less okay now than then, because he must’ve had an inkling what was going to happen.
On the last episode of the Josh Marshall Podcast, the host mentioned that Silver had ended their friendship over a Covid policy disagreement. That, and that he’s pushing the lab leak nonsense on Twitter when a cursory look at the evidence shows how unlikely it is, makes me think that Silver has just completely gone round the bend.
Hopefully he’ll come back to reality, but to be honest I expect him to go further out. I’d be unsurprised that when he resurfaces it’ll be with a cranky book or a website that uses AI bots to write analysis of his model’s outputs.
posted by Kattullus at 10:38 PM on April 26, 2023 [21 favorites]
It can’t be underestimated how badly Silver went off the rails over the course of the Covid pandemic. I listened to every episode of the 538 Politics podcast from its inception to the Biden inauguration and he was sometimes annoying, but his instinctive contrarianism was modulated by people on the podcast debating him, and he would change his mind, and usually his change of mind would hold. During the first year of Covid that pattern still held.
After the Biden inauguration I decided, for my own mental health as much as anything else, to stop paying close attention to American politics. But in the run-up to the 2022 mid-terms I resubscribed to the politics podcasts I used to listen to and the change in Nate Silver was striking. He was a lot less nimble, mentally, and would tie himself in knots to make the data fit his gut instinct. The one that was most striking to me is that he accurately called out a dodgy polling firm for essentially making shit up, but couldn’t take the next step that the narrative about the red wave, which partly rested on those polls, was shakier than conventional wisdom had it. That was the sort of logical step he took all the time before Covid.
Since then, he’s gotten worse, if anything. I listened to a recent episode of the podcast because Clare Malone was a guest, and he seemed like a full-on crank, saying that AI was a greater threat to humanity than climate change, and was just plain boorish, even joking about firing his employee and replacing him with an AI bot. Which seems even less okay now than then, because he must’ve had an inkling what was going to happen.
On the last episode of the Josh Marshall Podcast, the host mentioned that Silver had ended their friendship over a Covid policy disagreement. That, and that he’s pushing the lab leak nonsense on Twitter when a cursory look at the evidence shows how unlikely it is, makes me think that Silver has just completely gone round the bend.
Hopefully he’ll come back to reality, but to be honest I expect him to go further out. I’d be unsurprised that when he resurfaces it’ll be with a cranky book or a website that uses AI bots to write analysis of his model’s outputs.
posted by Kattullus at 10:38 PM on April 26, 2023 [21 favorites]
Oh, and one more thing about Nate Silver. I think he’s a bit like Starbucks. It’s not that there weren’t good cafes in the US before Starbucks, but they took their model out to places that didn’t have good cafes.
It’s the same with him. There were other good polling analysts before he came along, but he took polling analysis mainstream.
And much like there are now good coffeeshops in places which were introduced to cafe culture by Starbucks, many started by former Starbucks baristas, there are now many good polling analysts working in mainstream media, many of whom started at 538.
posted by Kattullus at 10:43 PM on April 26, 2023 [15 favorites]
It’s the same with him. There were other good polling analysts before he came along, but he took polling analysis mainstream.
And much like there are now good coffeeshops in places which were introduced to cafe culture by Starbucks, many started by former Starbucks baristas, there are now many good polling analysts working in mainstream media, many of whom started at 538.
posted by Kattullus at 10:43 PM on April 26, 2023 [15 favorites]
He really helped establish a new kind of punditry. Better in some ways than what came before, but otoh I think more subject to brain poisoning from a false sense of expertise and certainty.
I wonder if, on Covid, Silver saw that the political battle was lost, and therefore the smart centrist thing was to give up. And he got so sold on that, that any reluctance to him looked like loopy wild bad crazy talk. Closing schools was Iraq war + level disaster^:
He also embraced the lab leak hypothesis very quickly. And I can't remember if it was him who implied people who were still masking are kooky politically motivated liberals, exactly equivalent to crazy conservatives. Might've been Yglesias or some other pundit-brain freak tbh.
He also was super wrong about the red wave in 2020, where people were criticizing him *before the result* for relying so much on biased polling, but I can't say if that was a bad beat or a methodical failure. Other than that I have no problems with his actual work on the polling. I'm not sure why people are mad about 2016. Wasn't he the least bullish on Clinton's chances? I felt like people were bagging on him before the election for giving lower probabilities for her, then mad afterwards when she lost. I wonder if people were mad at polling in general, and Silver got lumped in; a fuck em all type situation.
saying that AI was a greater threat to humanity than climate change
[tingling intensifies]
posted by fleacircus at 10:44 PM on April 26, 2023 [11 favorites]
I wonder if, on Covid, Silver saw that the political battle was lost, and therefore the smart centrist thing was to give up. And he got so sold on that, that any reluctance to him looked like loopy wild bad crazy talk. Closing schools was Iraq war + level disaster^:
Silver: "Suppose you think that school closures were a disastrous, invasion-of-Iraq magnitude (or perhaps greater) policy decision. Shouldn't that merit some further reflection?"(My SSC/rationalist sense tingles...)
Jeffery: "You think this was a policy decision... equivalent to the deaths of 460,000 people and the destabilizing of an entire region And...do you think parents and educators have not been reflecting?"
Silver: "Yeah, I think depriving tens of millions of school children of an in-person education for a year or longer is absolutely on that magnitude. No question."
He also embraced the lab leak hypothesis very quickly. And I can't remember if it was him who implied people who were still masking are kooky politically motivated liberals, exactly equivalent to crazy conservatives. Might've been Yglesias or some other pundit-brain freak tbh.
He also was super wrong about the red wave in 2020, where people were criticizing him *before the result* for relying so much on biased polling, but I can't say if that was a bad beat or a methodical failure. Other than that I have no problems with his actual work on the polling. I'm not sure why people are mad about 2016. Wasn't he the least bullish on Clinton's chances? I felt like people were bagging on him before the election for giving lower probabilities for her, then mad afterwards when she lost. I wonder if people were mad at polling in general, and Silver got lumped in; a fuck em all type situation.
saying that AI was a greater threat to humanity than climate change
[tingling intensifies]
posted by fleacircus at 10:44 PM on April 26, 2023 [11 favorites]
And I can't remember if it was him who implied people who were still masking are kooky politically motivated liberals, exactly equivalent to crazy conservatives
Oh, he absolutely was. He was always introducing new people who also had that same line, so maybe it wasn’t original to him, but he absolutely used it.
posted by Artw at 10:54 PM on April 26, 2023 [5 favorites]
Oh, he absolutely was. He was always introducing new people who also had that same line, so maybe it wasn’t original to him, but he absolutely used it.
posted by Artw at 10:54 PM on April 26, 2023 [5 favorites]
Before Silver, the polling analyst who everyone treated as an oracle was Mark Fucking Penn, and I'll take Silver over Penn any day of the week and twice on Sunday.
Maybe the problem is analyst "oracles". Kim Jong-Il being worse than Kim Jong-Un doesn't mean the latter is on any way good, and Mark Penn similarly does not redeem Silver.
posted by Dysk at 11:16 PM on April 26, 2023 [2 favorites]
Maybe the problem is analyst "oracles". Kim Jong-Il being worse than Kim Jong-Un doesn't mean the latter is on any way good, and Mark Penn similarly does not redeem Silver.
posted by Dysk at 11:16 PM on April 26, 2023 [2 favorites]
fleacircus: My SSC/rationalist sense tingles...
He does sound like a LessWronger at times, but if he was, he didn’t engage deeply. I think he came to his Bayesian way of thinking honestly, through studying statistics. However, he seems unable to understand that there’s a whole crowd of fanatics out there who use these terms with little or no understanding of their meaning. When he hears someone say they “update their priors” he seems to take it as a given that they know what priors are in a statistical context. It’s a bit like a theologian expecting a layman to understand the doctrine of the trinity because they use the phrase “father, son and the holy ghost”.
posted by Kattullus at 11:49 PM on April 26, 2023 [6 favorites]
He does sound like a LessWronger at times, but if he was, he didn’t engage deeply. I think he came to his Bayesian way of thinking honestly, through studying statistics. However, he seems unable to understand that there’s a whole crowd of fanatics out there who use these terms with little or no understanding of their meaning. When he hears someone say they “update their priors” he seems to take it as a given that they know what priors are in a statistical context. It’s a bit like a theologian expecting a layman to understand the doctrine of the trinity because they use the phrase “father, son and the holy ghost”.
posted by Kattullus at 11:49 PM on April 26, 2023 [6 favorites]
It can’t be underestimated how badly Silver went off the rails over the course of the Covid pandemic.
I guess I undersold it, is because I was not familiar with the level to which Silver had descended. I thought he'd just become very tedious about public policy but what people are posting in this thread is full-on cooker horseshit.
posted by Merus at 12:30 AM on April 27, 2023 [6 favorites]
I guess I undersold it, is because I was not familiar with the level to which Silver had descended. I thought he'd just become very tedious about public policy but what people are posting in this thread is full-on cooker horseshit.
posted by Merus at 12:30 AM on April 27, 2023 [6 favorites]
Bothsiderism is metastatic credentialism
posted by DeepSeaHaggis at 12:53 AM on April 27, 2023 [3 favorites]
posted by DeepSeaHaggis at 12:53 AM on April 27, 2023 [3 favorites]
I think accurate polling is, in and of itself, detrimental to democracy.
Because it allows cynical politicians to abandon even a pretense of principled approaches to the issues and campaigns based on doing what's best for society as a whole, in favor of playing to the voters basest motives and promising to give them exactly what the politicians know they want from reading the polls, no matter how self contradictory and actually harmful those wants might be.
In short, constant, accurate polling has turned suceesful politicians from leaders into slavish and cynical followers of the polls. And such politicians always seem to have a hidden agenda which cannot stand the light of day.
And perhaps even worse, good polling data can tell dishonest politicians just how much they need to cheat in order to steal an election.
In 2016 Hillary won the popular vote by millions of votes (some 5 million, as I recall?) but lost the election. And as I’ve read in a number of places but never tracked down to an authoritative source, if as few people in total nationwide as would fill a large football stadium had voted for Hillary rather than Trump, the Electoral College vote would have mirrored the popular vote.
That has always struck me as prima facile evidence of fraud, but I haven’t heard of any attempts to investigate how it came about.
posted by jamjam at 1:24 AM on April 27, 2023 [5 favorites]
Because it allows cynical politicians to abandon even a pretense of principled approaches to the issues and campaigns based on doing what's best for society as a whole, in favor of playing to the voters basest motives and promising to give them exactly what the politicians know they want from reading the polls, no matter how self contradictory and actually harmful those wants might be.
In short, constant, accurate polling has turned suceesful politicians from leaders into slavish and cynical followers of the polls. And such politicians always seem to have a hidden agenda which cannot stand the light of day.
And perhaps even worse, good polling data can tell dishonest politicians just how much they need to cheat in order to steal an election.
In 2016 Hillary won the popular vote by millions of votes (some 5 million, as I recall?) but lost the election. And as I’ve read in a number of places but never tracked down to an authoritative source, if as few people in total nationwide as would fill a large football stadium had voted for Hillary rather than Trump, the Electoral College vote would have mirrored the popular vote.
That has always struck me as prima facile evidence of fraud, but I haven’t heard of any attempts to investigate how it came about.
posted by jamjam at 1:24 AM on April 27, 2023 [5 favorites]
The 2016 election knocked the halo off 538 even as many other news organizations adopted at least some measure of its quantitative approach to political journalism.
I agree it suffered reputationally, as did its journalistic children (oh, the NYT Needle) but my memory is that in the days leading up to the election, 538 was one of the few places where they were saying there was a real (~1/3) chance of Trump winning. I remember listening to the final election prediction podcast and Silver saying that his big worry around this was Michigan/Wisconsin. It ended up motivating me to go volunteer there in the last week, and my harrowing experiences as a poll watcher watching hours-long lines develop completely unnecessarily as I was largely unable to stop it in turn encouraged me to eventually become a poll worker.
The polling aspect of the site, at its worst, encourages passivity by turning politics into a sporting event for dramatic consumption. At its best, its a helpful tool for people looking to create political change by serving as a quick guide to where seats are most likely to be flipped to the left. I do hope that part of the operation continues.
It also was in the strange and dubious position of presenting itself as politically "neutral" while having a (relatively) lefty audience. When people gain celebrity or power for something they do, there's a tendency to think that makes them an expert in everything, in part because people will listen to them, and I think Silver went down that road. In particular, some STEM-ish people seem to think that there's some profound insight in being more "detached" or "rational" sounding, which often ends up involving just describing whatever political position you take as rational. I haven't listened to the podcast in a while, but I remember that Silver seemed like more of a centrist than the people who use and read his website, and seemed to be pretty self-satisfied about it. I didn't know about the COVID stuff though.
posted by nightcoast at 1:25 AM on April 27, 2023 [10 favorites]
I agree it suffered reputationally, as did its journalistic children (oh, the NYT Needle) but my memory is that in the days leading up to the election, 538 was one of the few places where they were saying there was a real (~1/3) chance of Trump winning. I remember listening to the final election prediction podcast and Silver saying that his big worry around this was Michigan/Wisconsin. It ended up motivating me to go volunteer there in the last week, and my harrowing experiences as a poll watcher watching hours-long lines develop completely unnecessarily as I was largely unable to stop it in turn encouraged me to eventually become a poll worker.
The polling aspect of the site, at its worst, encourages passivity by turning politics into a sporting event for dramatic consumption. At its best, its a helpful tool for people looking to create political change by serving as a quick guide to where seats are most likely to be flipped to the left. I do hope that part of the operation continues.
It also was in the strange and dubious position of presenting itself as politically "neutral" while having a (relatively) lefty audience. When people gain celebrity or power for something they do, there's a tendency to think that makes them an expert in everything, in part because people will listen to them, and I think Silver went down that road. In particular, some STEM-ish people seem to think that there's some profound insight in being more "detached" or "rational" sounding, which often ends up involving just describing whatever political position you take as rational. I haven't listened to the podcast in a while, but I remember that Silver seemed like more of a centrist than the people who use and read his website, and seemed to be pretty self-satisfied about it. I didn't know about the COVID stuff though.
posted by nightcoast at 1:25 AM on April 27, 2023 [10 favorites]
Or, to put that last bit another way, if you think you can truly talk about politics from a place outside politics, that says more about your politics than you might think...
posted by nightcoast at 2:11 AM on April 27, 2023 [13 favorites]
posted by nightcoast at 2:11 AM on April 27, 2023 [13 favorites]
In 2016 Hillary won the popular vote by millions of votes (some 5 million, as I recall?) but lost the election. And as I’ve read in a number of places but never tracked down to an authoritative source, if as few people in total nationwide as would fill a large football stadium had voted for Hillary rather than Trump, the Electoral College vote would have mirrored the popular vote.
That has always struck me as prima facile evidence of fraud, but I haven’t heard of any attempts to investigate how it came about.
What? It's not at all clear that fraud is the most likely explanation. The electoral college system is bound to produce results that are different from the popular vote from time to time, and when it does it will exactly be because a small number of voters in just the right place preferred the nationally less popular candidate.
You can either win the Presidency by being uniformly more popular nationally, or by taking advantage of the way the electoral college works to eke out a narrow victory (or both). And you can do either without resorting to fraud.
What is perhaps more likely is that people outside the US attempted to ensure their preferred result by persuading people in specific locations to vote for a particular candidate. But that's not fraud, and if they weren't outside the US I don't think it would be considered illegal.
posted by plonkee at 3:29 AM on April 27, 2023 [16 favorites]
That has always struck me as prima facile evidence of fraud, but I haven’t heard of any attempts to investigate how it came about.
What? It's not at all clear that fraud is the most likely explanation. The electoral college system is bound to produce results that are different from the popular vote from time to time, and when it does it will exactly be because a small number of voters in just the right place preferred the nationally less popular candidate.
You can either win the Presidency by being uniformly more popular nationally, or by taking advantage of the way the electoral college works to eke out a narrow victory (or both). And you can do either without resorting to fraud.
What is perhaps more likely is that people outside the US attempted to ensure their preferred result by persuading people in specific locations to vote for a particular candidate. But that's not fraud, and if they weren't outside the US I don't think it would be considered illegal.
posted by plonkee at 3:29 AM on April 27, 2023 [16 favorites]
He also was super wrong about the red wave in 2020, where people were criticizing him *before the result* for relying so much on biased polling, but I can't say if that was a bad beat or a methodical failure.
I think you meant 2022? That was supposed to be the big midterm "red wave" where historically the party holding the Presidency loses control of Congress.
It kinda was a methodical failure, though? Or maybe "conceptual failure" is a better term. Because so much of his early work and reputation was based on discovering systematic and recurring biases and inaccuracies in polling organizations (stuff like, "Rasmussen is 2-5% skewed towards Republicans") and incorporating that data into his meta-analyses. So it seemed really odd that he was so blasé about the possibility that he was getting a bunch of bad and biased polling to analyze, like he pretty much just shrugged and went, "Eh midterm polling sucks, whaddya gonna do?" I dunno, how about doing the thing you're known for, figuring out how the polls you're looking at might be biased?
posted by soundguy99 at 4:23 AM on April 27, 2023 [7 favorites]
I think you meant 2022? That was supposed to be the big midterm "red wave" where historically the party holding the Presidency loses control of Congress.
It kinda was a methodical failure, though? Or maybe "conceptual failure" is a better term. Because so much of his early work and reputation was based on discovering systematic and recurring biases and inaccuracies in polling organizations (stuff like, "Rasmussen is 2-5% skewed towards Republicans") and incorporating that data into his meta-analyses. So it seemed really odd that he was so blasé about the possibility that he was getting a bunch of bad and biased polling to analyze, like he pretty much just shrugged and went, "Eh midterm polling sucks, whaddya gonna do?" I dunno, how about doing the thing you're known for, figuring out how the polls you're looking at might be biased?
posted by soundguy99 at 4:23 AM on April 27, 2023 [7 favorites]
For all of his early promise, Nate Silver ended up swallowing, and even pushing what might be the single concept most destructive to the republic right now: bothsidesism.
While I understand the impulse we have actual fascists running around — you know, the people with actual state power actively trying to destroy the republic. Those folks are responsible for their own actions.
Just because Neville Chamberlain was in favor of appeasement doesn’t mean he was worse than the Nazis!
posted by wemayfreeze at 4:56 AM on April 27, 2023 [5 favorites]
While I understand the impulse we have actual fascists running around — you know, the people with actual state power actively trying to destroy the republic. Those folks are responsible for their own actions.
Just because Neville Chamberlain was in favor of appeasement doesn’t mean he was worse than the Nazis!
posted by wemayfreeze at 4:56 AM on April 27, 2023 [5 favorites]
I will say, and I don't know exactly why I defend them to this day, but FiveThirtyEight was much more reserved about a Clinton win in 2016 than nearly any other (non-right wing) forecast site out there. Their headline on Election Day was something like "Trump is one average-sized polling error away from winning." Which...yeah.
Anyway, I listened to their podcasts throughout 2016 but not since. I felt bad for Perry Bacon Jr who often seemed a little exasperated with his well-meaning but still not quite enlightened white lib co-hosts.
As for Silver, I haven't really followed him since 2016 so I've mostly just absorbed the twitter zeitgeist around him.
posted by adoarns at 5:21 AM on April 27, 2023 [8 favorites]
Anyway, I listened to their podcasts throughout 2016 but not since. I felt bad for Perry Bacon Jr who often seemed a little exasperated with his well-meaning but still not quite enlightened white lib co-hosts.
As for Silver, I haven't really followed him since 2016 so I've mostly just absorbed the twitter zeitgeist around him.
posted by adoarns at 5:21 AM on April 27, 2023 [8 favorites]
Or, to put that last bit another way, if you think you can truly talk about politics from a place outside politics, that says more about your politics than you might think...
This. I remember one interview where Nate Silver was asked who he was voting for and instead of just declining to answer for personal reasons he gave some long-winded bullshit explanation about how he doesn't vote because someone in his position shouldn't engage in partisan politics.
He went out of his way to normalize the kind of absurd and completely unnecessary level of "objectivity" that Republicans coincidentally use to hamstring journalists, federal workers, or anyone they don't like. People who need to be professionally objective can still do their job while keeping their personal opinions personal. By completely abstaining from politics in such a vocal way, he's legitimizing this line of attack where even exercising the constitutional right to vote is an indication of irreconcilable bias.
posted by RonButNotStupid at 6:03 AM on April 27, 2023 [22 favorites]
This. I remember one interview where Nate Silver was asked who he was voting for and instead of just declining to answer for personal reasons he gave some long-winded bullshit explanation about how he doesn't vote because someone in his position shouldn't engage in partisan politics.
He went out of his way to normalize the kind of absurd and completely unnecessary level of "objectivity" that Republicans coincidentally use to hamstring journalists, federal workers, or anyone they don't like. People who need to be professionally objective can still do their job while keeping their personal opinions personal. By completely abstaining from politics in such a vocal way, he's legitimizing this line of attack where even exercising the constitutional right to vote is an indication of irreconcilable bias.
posted by RonButNotStupid at 6:03 AM on April 27, 2023 [22 favorites]
(and of course the same "objectivity" standard doesn't apply to conservatives because they make it clear that they're not even trying to be objective, so it doesn't apply to them)
posted by RonButNotStupid at 6:05 AM on April 27, 2023 [2 favorites]
posted by RonButNotStupid at 6:05 AM on April 27, 2023 [2 favorites]
I don’t care to defend Nate Silver. I generally ignore him—his personal opinions strike me as those of a slightly more sane Bill Maher. Typical smug liberal.
However, I have found FiveThirtyEight to be a very useful publication over the years. Its focus on data, generally superb data visualization, and (I think) consistent position on how data is best used and understood—I’ve appreciated alll these things and found them lacking in other journalism.
I haven’t found Nate’s articles (he doesn’t write many) to include the sort of idiotic takes he seems to have on Twitter. I’m also a podcast listener and I really haven’t heard it there either.
So I guess I’m saying I hope FiveThirtyEight can continue successfully after the layoffs and I don’t really care that Nate won’t be a part of it.
posted by Room 101 at 7:37 AM on April 27, 2023 [3 favorites]
However, I have found FiveThirtyEight to be a very useful publication over the years. Its focus on data, generally superb data visualization, and (I think) consistent position on how data is best used and understood—I’ve appreciated alll these things and found them lacking in other journalism.
I haven’t found Nate’s articles (he doesn’t write many) to include the sort of idiotic takes he seems to have on Twitter. I’m also a podcast listener and I really haven’t heard it there either.
So I guess I’m saying I hope FiveThirtyEight can continue successfully after the layoffs and I don’t really care that Nate won’t be a part of it.
posted by Room 101 at 7:37 AM on April 27, 2023 [3 favorites]
I think you meant 2022?
I did mean that! My brain is bad at years, it is known.
posted by fleacircus at 7:49 AM on April 27, 2023 [1 favorite]
I did mean that! My brain is bad at years, it is known.
posted by fleacircus at 7:49 AM on April 27, 2023 [1 favorite]
Once his trick was widely known it was gamed super hard by big money players. There now isn't a campaign out there that doesn't have multitudes of companies doing polling (or claiming to be doing polling) and there's no way to really vet them anymore and the devastating cuts to journalism have made it hard to even learn which polls are inhouse and which are not.
Because so much of his early work and reputation was based on discovering systematic and recurring biases and inaccuracies in polling organizations (stuff like, "Rasmussen is 2-5% skewed towards Republicans") and incorporating that data into his meta-analyses.
This last fall I was following the polling numbers fairly closely. By September, it was painfully obvious even to casual analysts that the pool of available polling numbers was being contaminated by polls that had more than the usual right-wing house tilt. There were polls being shopped around that were clearly bogus. FiveThirtyEight hoovered them up alongside the longstanding polling agencies without a blink.
When I saw that 538 was listing a clearly biased right-wing poll that was being done as a "school project" by a couple of kids at a northeastern prep school, I lost a lot of respect for the much-vaunted "model".
They still have con-artist orgs like Trafalgar rated as high as "B". One way the right wing was gaming the system for poll aggregators last year: they'd put out relatively legit numbers on races that people didn't care as much about in red states to keep their overall record looking okay, then selectively target individual races that they wanted to tank, like Fetterman or Warnock in the Senate. That way, the bad-faith polling org could keep their overall "rating", while targeting the bogus numbers on only the races that they wanted to spread disinfo about.
posted by gimonca at 10:23 AM on April 27, 2023 [19 favorites]
Because so much of his early work and reputation was based on discovering systematic and recurring biases and inaccuracies in polling organizations (stuff like, "Rasmussen is 2-5% skewed towards Republicans") and incorporating that data into his meta-analyses.
This last fall I was following the polling numbers fairly closely. By September, it was painfully obvious even to casual analysts that the pool of available polling numbers was being contaminated by polls that had more than the usual right-wing house tilt. There were polls being shopped around that were clearly bogus. FiveThirtyEight hoovered them up alongside the longstanding polling agencies without a blink.
When I saw that 538 was listing a clearly biased right-wing poll that was being done as a "school project" by a couple of kids at a northeastern prep school, I lost a lot of respect for the much-vaunted "model".
They still have con-artist orgs like Trafalgar rated as high as "B". One way the right wing was gaming the system for poll aggregators last year: they'd put out relatively legit numbers on races that people didn't care as much about in red states to keep their overall record looking okay, then selectively target individual races that they wanted to tank, like Fetterman or Warnock in the Senate. That way, the bad-faith polling org could keep their overall "rating", while targeting the bogus numbers on only the races that they wanted to spread disinfo about.
posted by gimonca at 10:23 AM on April 27, 2023 [19 favorites]
FiveThirtyEight was much more reserved about a Clinton win in 2016 than nearly any other (non-right wing) forecast site out there.
Yes, in fact my memory is that this exactly what people were angry with them for at the time (in many places, but most definitely here), not the idea that they'd gotten something wrong -- no one I knew wanted to believe that Trump had a chance, and almost no one in the polling world besides 538 was saying it, and so they were viewed as sabatoging / doing it for the clicks / etc. Of the aggregate polls in that election, they were by far the most correct in the end. I actually wonder if people may be mixing 538's predictions up with Sam Wang / Princeton Election Consortium, who really, really got things wrong but who a lot of us wanted to believe? (That article, written shortly before election day, aged ... not well).
posted by advil at 10:26 AM on April 27, 2023 [13 favorites]
Yes, in fact my memory is that this exactly what people were angry with them for at the time (in many places, but most definitely here), not the idea that they'd gotten something wrong -- no one I knew wanted to believe that Trump had a chance, and almost no one in the polling world besides 538 was saying it, and so they were viewed as sabatoging / doing it for the clicks / etc. Of the aggregate polls in that election, they were by far the most correct in the end. I actually wonder if people may be mixing 538's predictions up with Sam Wang / Princeton Election Consortium, who really, really got things wrong but who a lot of us wanted to believe? (That article, written shortly before election day, aged ... not well).
posted by advil at 10:26 AM on April 27, 2023 [13 favorites]
Blaming "fashion" for people daring to disagree with a rich white guy is pretty amusing.Disagreeing is one thing, but the borderline deranged level of performative outrage at the man's tweets is definite a matter of fashion
posted by 3j0hn at 10:58 AM on April 27, 2023
*shrug*
Some people just dislike it when they see someone with a platform pandering to COVID deniers and fascists and that’s just how they are.
posted by Artw at 11:34 AM on April 27, 2023 [17 favorites]
Some people just dislike it when they see someone with a platform pandering to COVID deniers and fascists and that’s just how they are.
posted by Artw at 11:34 AM on April 27, 2023 [17 favorites]
saying that AI was a greater threat to humanity than climate change
That might actually be the case - though not, as Emily Bender and Timnit Gebru point out, for anything like the reasons most frequently touted by the neo-eugenicist faction.
The actual danger is that that very faction is dominated by a smallish handful of obscenely wealthy men who could be using the billions they control to buy up and shut down fossil fuel extractors. Instead, they're pissing the planet's future up against the wall in pursuit of the mirage of Artificial General Intelligence as some kind of gateway to cosmic immortality while irresponsibly marketing large language models as if those already are AI, all the while clutching their pearls about the terrible dangers of failing to keep a presumed-inevitable post-Singularity transhuman AI "loyal".
These delusional "longermists" are the best-funded and most influential cargo cult ever to exist and they're doing their level best to get us all killed. And they just don't care at all about that, because compared to the countless imaginary intelligences who populate the space opera they now believe they're vital to, those of us who exist right here right now are merely a "blip" whose genuine and pressing concerns - climate change included - are inconsequential.
posted by flabdablet at 12:16 PM on April 27, 2023 [15 favorites]
That might actually be the case - though not, as Emily Bender and Timnit Gebru point out, for anything like the reasons most frequently touted by the neo-eugenicist faction.
The actual danger is that that very faction is dominated by a smallish handful of obscenely wealthy men who could be using the billions they control to buy up and shut down fossil fuel extractors. Instead, they're pissing the planet's future up against the wall in pursuit of the mirage of Artificial General Intelligence as some kind of gateway to cosmic immortality while irresponsibly marketing large language models as if those already are AI, all the while clutching their pearls about the terrible dangers of failing to keep a presumed-inevitable post-Singularity transhuman AI "loyal".
These delusional "longermists" are the best-funded and most influential cargo cult ever to exist and they're doing their level best to get us all killed. And they just don't care at all about that, because compared to the countless imaginary intelligences who populate the space opera they now believe they're vital to, those of us who exist right here right now are merely a "blip" whose genuine and pressing concerns - climate change included - are inconsequential.
posted by flabdablet at 12:16 PM on April 27, 2023 [15 favorites]
fill a large football stadium had voted for Hillary rather than Trump
38,500 swing votes in 2016; and 2020 was closer than 2016:
https://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2020/11/a-mathematical-demonstration-of-the-insanity-of-the-electoral-college
posted by Heywood Mogroot III at 3:00 PM on April 27, 2023 [4 favorites]
38,500 swing votes in 2016; and 2020 was closer than 2016:
https://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2020/11/a-mathematical-demonstration-of-the-insanity-of-the-electoral-college
posted by Heywood Mogroot III at 3:00 PM on April 27, 2023 [4 favorites]
Sidenote: Vallas also got conned out of $700L+ by a black activist grifter who promised access to black pastors and to help suppress the black vote and Vallas is now suing to try and get the money back. Chicago dodged a bullet there and I can't stop laughing about how it played out.
This dude swindled money out of Vallas to suppress the black vote & then didn't suppress the black vote & kept the money?
Baller.
posted by jonp72 at 3:19 PM on April 27, 2023 [14 favorites]
This dude swindled money out of Vallas to suppress the black vote & then didn't suppress the black vote & kept the money?
Baller.
posted by jonp72 at 3:19 PM on April 27, 2023 [14 favorites]
That might actually be the case - though not, as Emily Bender and Timnit Gebru point out, for anything like the reasons most frequently touted by the neo-eugenicist faction.
Puts me in mind of Ted Chiang saying that most fears about A.I. are best understood as fears about capitalism.
posted by Artw at 3:52 PM on April 27, 2023 [8 favorites]
Puts me in mind of Ted Chiang saying that most fears about A.I. are best understood as fears about capitalism.
posted by Artw at 3:52 PM on April 27, 2023 [8 favorites]
Musk is already making noises about a non-"woke" LLM: the 'AI alignment problem' billionaires are concerned with isn't the possibility of omnicidal AI, it's the possibility of communist AI, of radical egalitarian AI.
posted by Pyry at 4:20 PM on April 27, 2023 [4 favorites]
posted by Pyry at 4:20 PM on April 27, 2023 [4 favorites]
Didn't Sam Wang lose a bet, and have to eat a bug on TV when Trump won? Silver being the least wrong in 2016 was no mean feat because there was a huge collective refusal to believe Trump had a shot.
Like others have said, when Silver started debating professional epidemiologists on Twitter is when I felt the last tiny thread of respect for him break, and it sounds like he's got worse since then. Remember, he started as a poker player, so some strengths there in believing the odds will always come through eventually and not over-reacting to one bad hand/poll, but huge weakness because the point of poker is to beat the other players by knowing the odds as well as by misrepresenting your own data/cards, which doesn't translate to good science.
posted by Rumple at 5:15 PM on April 27, 2023 [2 favorites]
Like others have said, when Silver started debating professional epidemiologists on Twitter is when I felt the last tiny thread of respect for him break, and it sounds like he's got worse since then. Remember, he started as a poker player, so some strengths there in believing the odds will always come through eventually and not over-reacting to one bad hand/poll, but huge weakness because the point of poker is to beat the other players by knowing the odds as well as by misrepresenting your own data/cards, which doesn't translate to good science.
posted by Rumple at 5:15 PM on April 27, 2023 [2 favorites]
the 'AI alignment problem' billionaires are concerned with isn't the possibility of omnicidal AI, it's the possibility of communist AI, of radical egalitarian AI
HELLO PRIMITIVE SCREWHEADS
posted by GCU Sweet and Full of Grace at 6:20 PM on April 27, 2023 [2 favorites]
HELLO PRIMITIVE SCREWHEADS
posted by GCU Sweet and Full of Grace at 6:20 PM on April 27, 2023 [2 favorites]
Regret to inform you that a dude who pretends to have read a Culture book has mistaken autocomplete for a Mind and is alarmed that it isn’t spouting enough fascism back at him.
posted by Artw at 8:04 PM on April 27, 2023 [9 favorites]
posted by Artw at 8:04 PM on April 27, 2023 [9 favorites]
> the 'AI alignment problem' billionaires are concerned with isn't the possibility of omnicidal AI, it's the possibility of communist AI, of radical egalitarian AI
so i dunno about you but i look at that and i think there might be some
posted by bombastic lowercase pronouncements at 8:22 PM on April 27, 2023
so i dunno about you but i look at that and i think there might be some
p r a x i sto be found here
posted by bombastic lowercase pronouncements at 8:22 PM on April 27, 2023
Regret to inform you that a dude who pretends to have read a Culture book has mistaken autocomplete for a Mind and is alarmed that it isn’t spouting enough fascism back at him.
This statement appears to be a sarcastic remark that critiques someone's misunderstanding or misinterpretation of a few concepts.posted by Heywood Mogroot III at 11:07 PM on April 27, 2023 [6 favorites]Let's break down the statement to better understand its meaning:
In summary, the statement is mocking someone who pretends to be knowledgeable about the Culture series but is actually confused about the concepts, mistakenly thinking that an autocomplete feature is a highly intelligent AI from the series and expecting it to express fascist ideas.
- "Regret to inform you" - This is a formal way to deliver bad news or share an unfortunate update, but it is used sarcastically in this context.
- "a dude who pretends to have read a Culture book" - The person being criticized is implied to be feigning knowledge about the Culture series, which is a collection of science fiction novels by the Scottish author Iain M. Banks. The series is set in a post-scarcity, highly advanced utopian society called "the Culture," which is run by artificial intelligences known as "Minds."
- "mistaken autocomplete for a Mind" - The person being criticized has confused "autocomplete," a feature that predicts and completes text based on user input (such as a search engine's suggestions), with a "Mind," the highly intelligent AI that governs the Culture. This indicates that the person doesn't fully understand the concepts they are discussing.
- "is alarmed that it isn’t spouting enough fascism back at him" - The person being criticized seems to be expecting the autocomplete (which they mistakenly think is a Mind) to produce fascist ideas or statements. Fascism is a far-right, authoritarian ideology that opposes the values of the Culture, which is centered around egalitarianism and individual freedom.
mistaken autocomplete for a Mind
The State of the Art (2023 ed.)
posted by snuffleupagus at 8:13 AM on April 28, 2023 [2 favorites]
The State of the Art (2023 ed.)
posted by snuffleupagus at 8:13 AM on April 28, 2023 [2 favorites]
Nate Silver is such a disappointment.
posted by yellowcandy at 8:51 AM on April 28, 2023 [2 favorites]
posted by yellowcandy at 8:51 AM on April 28, 2023 [2 favorites]
I've followed Silver since he was Poblano on Daily Kos, and while I've never been impressed with the terminal Twitter Brain that he's developed (especially galling given how FiveThirtyEight was supposed to be the antidote to the punditocracy), I can't abide criticism of the site itself. Their data journalism and visualizations on a wide variety of topics was really impressive and visually beautiful, and I always appreciated their link-rich, heavily-footnoted longform articles. Their Atlas of Redistricting is a personal favorite.
As for their track record, I recommend checking out their strangely undersold "Checking Our Work" page, which shows that they've maintained impressive accuracy across many thousands of predictions in both politics and sports -- not just in raw accuracy, but also in terms of setting the odds accurately, where candidates they gave an X% chance of winning actually did win X% of the time (plus or minus ~5%). That's really tough to get right, and they have, arguably better than any other forecaster in existence. I'll mourn the day it shuts down, and hope Silver surrounds himself with some competent editorial foils wherever he sets up shop next.
Speaking of which:
posted by Rhaomi at 9:51 PM on May 1, 2023 [10 favorites]
As for their track record, I recommend checking out their strangely undersold "Checking Our Work" page, which shows that they've maintained impressive accuracy across many thousands of predictions in both politics and sports -- not just in raw accuracy, but also in terms of setting the odds accurately, where candidates they gave an X% chance of winning actually did win X% of the time (plus or minus ~5%). That's really tough to get right, and they have, arguably better than any other forecaster in existence. I'll mourn the day it shuts down, and hope Silver surrounds himself with some competent editorial foils wherever he sets up shop next.
Speaking of which:
ABC News is scrambling to find a replacement for Nate Silver’s election forecasting model, which the 538 founder is taking with him when he leaves the news organization at the end of his contract. According to two sources with knowledge of the situation, ABC executives were slow to realize that the company only owned some of the models that 538 used to forecast major elections, and that many were on rent from Silver as part of the initial deal to bring the data journalism site to ESPN ten years ago.lol.
“They have put very very very little bandwidth into managing 538, and they seem pretty clueless about who-owns-what IP questions,” one person familiar told Semafor.
posted by Rhaomi at 9:51 PM on May 1, 2023 [10 favorites]
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Silver long overstayed his usefulness, so if he does go? Good riddance.
posted by tclark at 4:06 PM on April 26, 2023 [84 favorites]