Nate Silver is Probably a Witch

At this point in the election cycle, there is no way you haven't heard about FiveThirtyEight.  Tyler probably followed it religiously, Tony I assume saw it occasionally.  As a huge statistics dork, I have been a long time fan of FiveThirtyEight and Nate Silver.  This time around he got all but one senate race and every single state for president.

I read his book The Signal and the Noise just after it came out, and it was incredible!  While a little on the Freakonomics side (ie a lot of conjecture without hard math to back it up), Nate stayed much truer to cold hard facts.  The most interesting part of the book was the paradigm shift in the way he encouraged people to think about predictions.  The moral of the story was essentially to be extremely skeptical of predictors, because mostly they aren't that good.  The grand irony of course is that he is a predictor and gets things right.

Honestly for me the most important part of this election cycle is that more people will read that book.

He also put a great deal of emphasis on his own success by tackling challenges with low bars -- which is a viewpoint I particularly like.  Nate rose to statistical fame by writing PETCOTA, a sabermetric when he was bored at his day job as an actuary.  He then played online poker, and by his own admission he won hundreds of thousands of dollars not because he was good -- but because everyone else was so bad.  When the online poker craze died down, he stopped winning and stopped playing.

When it looked like online poker was going to get banned (and he was still making money at it), Nate got interested in politics.  He found that the actual analysis of the underlying mechanics of politics was so bad, that he could probably start a blog about it.  And he did.  And now he is selling a crapton of books and drove 20%(!!) of NYT traffic during election day.

Also his models runs using STATA, a piece of software I used in my econometrics class.  Which is pretty cool.

Not only is he a smart son of a gun, he's a rich one now too.

Is Nate Silver a Witch?