Nate Silver
Nate Silver
Nathaniel Read "Nate" Silveris an American statistician and writer who analyzes baseballand elections. He is currently the editor-in-chief of ESPN's FiveThirtyEight blog and a Special Correspondent for ABC News. Silver first gained public recognition for developing PECOTA, a system for forecasting the performance and career development of Major League Baseball players, which he sold to and then managed for Baseball Prospectus from 2003 to 2009...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionJournalist
Date of Birth13 January 1978
CityEast Lansing, MI
CountryUnited States of America
To my friends, I’m kind of sexually gay but ethnically straight,
I don't play fantasy baseball anymore now because it's too much work, and I feel like I have to hold myself up to such a high standard. I'm pretty serious about my fantasy football, though.
The thing that people associate with expertise, authoritativeness, kind of with a capital 'A,' don't correlate very well with who's actually good at making predictions.
I prefer more to kind of show people different things than tell them 'oh, here's what you should believe' and, over time, you can build up a rapport with your audience.
I've become invested with this symbolic power. It really does transcend what I'm actually doing and what I actually deserve.
If you have reason to think that yesterday's forecast went wrong, there is no glory in sticking to it.
In baseball you have terrific data and you can be a lot more creative with it.
People gravitate toward information that implies a happier outlook for them.
The key to making a good forecast is not in limiting yourself to quantitative information.
Walk rate is probably the area in which a pitcher has the most room to improve, but a rate that high is tough to overcome.
We are living our lives more online and you need to have different ways to capture that.
You get steely nerves playing poker.
The Protestant Reformation had a lot to do with the printing press, where Martin Luther's theses were reproduced about 250,000 times, and so you had widespread dissemination of ideas that hadn't circulated in the mainstream before.
Actually, one of the better indicators historically of how well the stock market will do is just a Gallup poll, when you ask Americans if you think it's a good time to invest in stocks, except it goes the opposite direction of what you would expect. When the markets going up, it in fact makes it more prone toward decline.