Do you follow the blog “FiveThirtyEight”?
It’s a blog on The New York Times’ website, and it’s run by Nate Silver.
At first glance, it appears to be a lot of charts and graphs that are probably really confusing.
Silver’s job is to analyze a bunch of data and then report to his readers what the data says.
Recently, he’s come under attack by, you guessed it, the Republicans.
“Every major political betting market and every major forecasting tool is predicting an Obama victory right now, and for the same reason: Obama remains ahead in enough states that, unless the polls are systematically wrong, or they undergo a change unlike any we’ve yet seen in the race, Obama will win the election,” said Ezra Klein in a blog for The Washington Post.
He also notes that all of the criticisms of Silver’s work do not encompass his accuracy. Most complaints are that he’s “repackaging” the poll results that are already out there, and that he won’t release his “code.”
Though some people argue Silver’s liberal alliance could sway the results, because almost everything points toward an Obama victory, his analysis must be skewed.
“Silver is currently saying that in some scenarios, Obama will win and in some scenarios Romney will win, and the first batch of scenarios outnumber the second batch of scenarios by about 3 to 1,” said Joel Achenbach, also of The Washington Post.
However, Silver’s “FiveThirtyEight” blog leaves a market for someone on the other side. Why not create a conservative-leaning blog that interprets the same polls? People on the other side of the aisle could feel secure hearing information from a source they trust.
A popular definition of insanity, however, is trying the same thing repeatedly and expecting different results. If you analyze the same polls, you’re still working with the same numbers.
Silver runs his data analysis based on his work with baseball’s sabermetrics (like the movie “Moneyball”). Silver wrote “Baseball and politics are data-driven,” according to a 2008 Newsweek article before that year’s presidential election. “But a lot of the time, that data might be used badly. In baseball, that may mean looking at a statistic like batting average when things like on-base percentage and slugging percentage are far more correlated with winning ballgames. In politics, that might mean cherry-picking a certain polling result.”
People, essentially, need to calm down and accept what service Silver is providing.
“If the bookies in Vegas keeping giving the Falcons better odds at winning the NFC than the Bears, do Bears fans go ballistic on the bookies and try to blame them if it turns out that Atlanta does win the NFC? Of course not,” said Michael Tomasky of The Daily Beast. “That would be totally preposterous, just as this Silver-bashing is totally preposterous now.”
“CAN’T BELIEVE METOROLOGISTS USED MATH AND SCIENCE TO PREDICT THIS STORM. THEY MUST BE MAGIC WIZARDS,” read one of Silver’s tweets Monday.
