Re:How One 19-Year-Old Illinois Man Is Distorting National P...
by brandmeyer on Thursday October 13, 2016 @12:03AM
(#12698332)
Nate Silver's writing quality this cycle has definitely been worse than last cycle. IMO, it has quite a bit to do with running his own website, instead of working as a blog under somebody else. There is much more pressure for fivethirtyeight.com to produce frequent updates than there was for fivethirtyeight.blogs.nytimes.com. I get that a major justification for branching out was to provide more sports coverage and some sparser statistical coverage of other topics. But there just isn't enough daily news on the presidential polls to justify the article publication rate he's running this cycle.
He's not deceptive about this--I will give him that. It's all in the open. But it seems to amplify a kind of narrative fallacy if these mistakes aren't revisited anew (rather than just saying "as predicted, since outcome C actually happened, it was due to voter bloc X doing it as we said."
But I can't complain about a pundit class not giving actionable data--that's not their job. Silver's job is to add data to the discussion, and to stimulate the discussion. And I give him a "B" for that.
That said, this cycle, I've rediscovered Sam Wang at http://election.princeton.edu/ and think he maybe gives a purer approach to analysis, one not so much driven by clicks. He doesn't seem to hedge as much as Silver.