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
Any one game in baseball doesn't tell you that much, just as any one poll doesn't tell you that much.
Economy is not baseball, where the game is always played by the same rules.
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.
In baseball you have terrific data and you can be a lot more creative with it.
I was looking for something like baseball, where there's a lot of data and the competition was pretty low. That's when I discovered politics.
When you try to predict future E.R.A.'s with past E.R.A.'s, you're making a mistake.
Well, you know, you're not going to have 86 percent of Congress voted out of office.
Data-driven predictions can succeed-and they can fail. It is when we deny our role in the process that the odds of failure rise. Before we demand more of our data, we need to demand more of ourselves.
It's a little strange to become a kind of symbol of a whole type of analysis.
A lot of the time nothing happens in a day.
To the extent that you can find ways where you're making predictions, there's no substitute for testing yourself on real-world situations that you don't know the answer to in advance.
To be a very, very minor, eighth-tier celebrity, you realize, 'Hey, celebrities are just like us.'
I think punditry serves no purpose.
The problem is that when polls are wrong, they tend to be wrong in the same direction. If they miss in New Hampshire, for instance, they all miss on the same mistake.