Looks like Nate Silver has officially gone nuts.

[DanTex]

Or maybe he's been nuts all along, and it was all hidden by the fact that he's good at analyzing polling data.

And no, not about the 2014 midterms. He's still probably just as good as before at averaging polls, and he's probably right that as of now the Dems are slightly behind. The problem is that apparently he thinks that being good at poll averaging makes him an expert on everything.

First he hires a global warming denier to write climate articles for his new website. Then, when Paul Krugman (along with everyone else) points this out, along with the fact that the new 538 pretty much sucks at everything except for interpreting election polls, he does this truly idiotic "data analysis" trying to argue that Krugman is really just attacking Silver because he moved away from the New York Times. And if that weren't enough, he then goes on to single out Ross Douthat, the right-wing nut, as the one NYT columnist who "shows some originality".

[monmouth3]

1. I thought the same thing. Nate is not handling his new-found fame too well..n/t

[randome]

2. Same thought here, too. It's a shame.

I hope his numbers crunching can still be relied on, whether it points to good or ill.
[hr][font color="blue"][center]You should never stop having childhood dreams.[/center][/font][hr]

[Tommy_Carcetti]

3. And he predicted only 78 wins for the Baltimore Orioles this year!

http://www.baseballprospectus.com/fantasy/dc/

Seriously, what the hell is up with that?

[Bjorn Against]

4. Silver is good at math, horrible at political analysis

It has been this way for a long time, he is very good at analyzing numbers but any time he goes beyond the numbers and analyze politics he says some really dumb things.

[kysrsoze]

10. Yeah, that and both he and the public seem to forget his analysis represents a snapshot in time.

In other words, holding everything equal, at this moment, here are the statistical likelihoods. As campaign season gets under way, MUCH can change, additional polls are cast, etc.

[DanTex]

21. As others have pointed out, it's not clear even how good at math he is.

He's good at averaging polls, that we can say for sure. His climate denying tendencies tell me that he doesn't really have a solid grounding in mathematical science. Election forecasting is pretty easy, and he looked extra-good in 2012 because his competition in the punditry was people like Joe Scaroborough who can barely add and subtract. But he's yet to demonstrate that he can really move past the relatively simple, even his the field of data analysis.

[LynneSin]

5. They guy has skills - I'll give him that. But...

the idea of hiring a global warming climate denier makes me think someone got to him with some big cash. The right wing knows this guy has skills and that he was the darling of the left wing last year.

I'm not ready to toss Nate Silvers to the wayside but I'm also not going to live and die by his predictions.

[The Magistrate]

6. It Was Pretty Obvious, Sir, From His Interview Tour Back In 2012

He is not one of us --- more a Libertarian than otherwise....

[DanTex]

7. This is true, but it's about more than just political ideology.

There was hope that he could be a libertarian and also a good journalist, or at least a good all-around statistician. But at this point, it looks like he is just a guy who came up with a fancy excel spreadsheet for election modeling, and doesn't even really have a firm grasp on the role of data analysis in science or social science.

[VanillaRhapsody]

8. Libertarians...ppfffffft

[Dawgs]

9. I could never understand the adoration he got from so many on the left and in media.

His political predictions of 2008 and 2012 elections were no better than averaging polls together. I think many people are poor at math and are impressed when someone appears to do it really well. Not that Nate Silver isn't good with numbers, just that predicting certain elections is not that hard.

[kysrsoze]

11. Very well said. Any statistician worth his/her salt, can do the same analyses.

[Dawgs]

20. Agree, I think Nate is very talented at presentation.

He got somewhat popular with his predictions and then momentum took over.

[DanTex]

14. Very good point.

A big part if his success was the presentation. Not just the interactive map, but just the fact that he calculated winning percentages, which are much more informative than the raw poll numbers. Of course, there are other people who also computed winning percentages, and they all made roughly the same predictions (certainly there is no statistically significant difference between Nate's accuracy and anyone else's), so I don't know why Nate got chosen as the One.

As Krugman has pointed out, in the field of electoral analysis, he was competing with idiots like Joe Scarborough who said something like the winning probabilities couldn't possibly be better than 50.1% either way. Or even people like Chuck Todd who are supposedly "poll analysts" but barely understand what a margin of error means. But in other fields like climate science, not only is the data analysis problem much more complicated, but there are also actual scientists that really know what they are doing there.

[Chathamization]

18. Excellent point. Others made more accurate predictions for 2012.

But they didn’t have a spot at The Times and didn’t play the pundit game as well. If you’re following someone who’s less accurate (not bad, but less accurate) because they’re more entertaining or more like a pundit, you may get worse results.

[L0oniX]

23. No wonder I got attacked for saying "fuck Nate Silver".

[octoberlib]

12. I don't know if any of you were following him on Twitter during the 2012 election but

he'd get very upset when the Republicans were giving him hell about liberal bias. He's very thin-skinned and doesn't handle criticism well.

[frazzled]

13. These young ingenues are not ready to be running their own media outlets

Silver, Ezra Klein--both are talented in certain areas and have had meteoric rises. It doesn't mean they're smart enough to run their own empires.

This generation needs to learn that it takes a village--that it takes editors, and boards, and judicious personnel decisions and a range of tempering advisors to run a journalistic enterprise. People should be careful with the stardom they achieve at a young age, because without the proper nurturing, it can fizzle right out.

[DanTex]

16. I wouldn't lump Ezra Klein in there quite yet.

Klein has already proven to be a very good analyst on a number of issues, and he also ran a team successfully at the Washington Post. Nate Silver, on the other hand, had only proved that he was good at averaging election polls. I still expect good thing from Ezra Klein's new venture. He has always been more well rounded and more generally insightful than Nate Silver. Of course, we'll have to wait and see how Vox does, but I don't think there's a parallel there.

[frazzled]

17. He's already hit his first imbroglio

before getting off the ground.

Ezra Klein Defends Hiring Anti-Gay Apologist He Didn't Vet
Vox.com Editor-In-Chief Touts "Ideological Diversity" In Hiring


Vox.com editor-in-chief Ezra Klein defended his decision to hire anti-gay apologist Brandon Ambrosino as a writing fellow but admitted he had not reviewed Ambrosino's body of problematic LGBT commentary before hiring him.

On March 12, the forthcoming news and policy site Vox.com announced that it had hired Brandon Ambrosino -- a gay man who has earned a reputation for defending homophobes and peddling misinformation about LGBT people -- as a writing fellow. The announcement was met with widespread condemnation from LGBT activists and writers who called his hiring an "embarrassment" and a "major mistake."

...

Ambrosino's contribution to Vox's ideological diversity includes asserting that being gay is a choice and accusing gay activists of being bigoted against people who oppose LGBT equality.

http://mediamatters.org/blog/2014/03/13/ezra-klein-defends-hiring-anti-gay-apologist-he/198482

Look, I was a regular reader of Wonkblog during Ezra's tenure, but I was frustrated at many junctures at his seeming desire to find the "reasonable Republican" (remember the love-affair with Paul Ryan, and the touting of his (non-existent) "serious" economic creds? This is how you get invited to the right parties in DC and get access. It's not necessarily how you make for good policy discussion. I'm not asking for partisanship. I'm just asking for non-stupid pandering for the sake of "ideological diversity." How can he be claiming to do this and at the same time be having trouble finding racial minorities to hire? There are brilliant black, Asian-American, and Latino writers out there.

Klein told me he found Ambrosino's background as a gay Christian compelling and is trying to cultivate "ideological diversity" as well as gender and racial diversity at Vox. While he has a number of female hires in the pipeline, Klein said he is struggling to find racial minorities for the venture, adding: "I also want to say, other kinds of diversity are important--ideological diversity." I asked Klein what he meant by ideological diversity. "It's not that I have a quota that I need Republicans," he said; he just doesn't want a staff where "everybody thinks the same way."

[DanTex]

19. Hmm, that doesn't look good.

Yeah, the praise for Paul Ryan's intellect and mastery of economics was pretty bad too. I guess we'll see. I still hold out hope for Vox, and I honestly don't think it will be as bad as 538's launch, but who knows.

[Chathamization]

22. I also recall Klein going along with the fake IRS “scandal” without

bothering to read the actual report (which said that the list also included groups that weren’t Conservative). Sure, just about everyone in the media and most observers did that as well. I suppose “Only sometimes as bad as the other pundits” is an improvement, but not enough for me to get excited.

[krawhitham]

15. Nate Silver is now owned by ESPN, the have told him to be more center and less left