Disney is shrinking FiveThirtyEight and Nate Silver (and his models) are leaving

https://www.niemanlab.org/2023/04/disney-is-shrinking-fivethirtyeight-and-nate-silver-and-his-models-are-leaving/

by Amorymeltzer • 3 years ago

71 83 3 years ago

niemanlab.org

greesil5• 3 years ago

Well there goes any somewhat reliable election forecasting for the US

justinsaccount4• 3 years ago

The very idea of election forecasting is harmful to democracy and should be shunned wherever it appears.

t-writescode• 3 years ago

If it's not being done in public, it's absolutely being done in private. Do you believe democratizing that data is a bad thing?

dalyons• 3 years ago

this is an interesting take. why do you say that?

Multicomp• 3 years ago

While I readily admit to feeling like my comment could be seen as sealioning, but could you post some links and/or search terms I could use to try to research why one might hold an opinion like this?

I don't know whether to agree or disagree with this; I'm new enough to not have come across this particular opinion before (that I've noticed).

whakim• 3 years ago

Ironically, FiveThirtyEight actually reviewed the literature on the effects of polling blackouts and concluded that the evidence was complicated and mixed. (See https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/does-knowing-whom-other....)

rhaway847732• 3 years ago

I don’t think reliable forecasting is gone. Nate Silver does not bring any new data to the table. However, he does have good models to translate a whole bunch of raw, often contradictory, data into something more representative of reality.

That being said, it’s not going anywhere. He will either self publish or join another firm. He might rejoin NYTimes for example.

greesil5• 3 years ago

That's heartening. Mainstream media election coverage is infuriating. Nate is the antidote for me.

nwiswell• 3 years ago

https://election.princeton.edu/

akio• 3 years ago

Princeton had Clinton at a >99% chance in their 2016 election forecast.

joshl32532• 3 years ago

Might as well divest FiveThirtyEight or shut it down if Nate Silver is leaving.

Nate Silver is 538.

hackernewds2• 3 years ago

Rephrase title to Nate Silver (and his models) are leaving and Disney is shrinking FiveThirtyEight. Construct is so important in English (even without the And being a Hence)

throw0101b2• 3 years ago

Especially given his Twitter handle:

* https://twitter.com/natesilver538

renewiltord• 3 years ago

This is horrible. Now how will I delude myself with forecasts about the Premier League? I'm going to need to wait for him to get a substack.

henriquez• 3 years ago

I'm surprised to learn that Disney owned FiveThirtyEight and also that they kept Nate Silver afloat for that long. Dude's credibility was shattered after 2016 - a master of proving that getting high on your own fumes makes you high.

schnable• 3 years ago

Seriously? What did he get wrong in 2016? Trump squeaked it out. 528 provides probabilities, and he expressed a very strong possibility of Trump winning with a 28% chance--much higher than almost everyone else including the Clinton campaign.

rhaway847732• 3 years ago

Also, the numbers with which Trump won (he was the only Presidential candidate, or at least one of a couple, to win despite getting fewer overall votes), it’s pretty clear his odds were indeed low.

pbj1968• 3 years ago

May want to rewatch that election night coverage with him in it. He seemed surprised to me.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RaWSe_uij74

Scubabear682• 3 years ago

Incredibly smart of him to hold the rights to his models personally, and only license them to 538 (and hence ABC/Disney).

eshack94• 3 years ago

Absolutely. Good planning and foresight on his part to enable him to retain ownership of his hard work.

hackernewds2• 3 years ago

Unlike W-2 work where EVERYTHING you do on work machine/time belongs to the organization. It's almost a hostage sitt

endisneigh• 3 years ago

I’ve been told all information should be free lol. I’m glad there are some sensible people.

shusaku• 3 years ago

I wonder if TheRinger can afford him. My impression is that sites like 538, Grantland, Andscape, etc don’t make any money for Disney, so this isn’t too surprising.

aardvarkr• 3 years ago

Huh, I had no idea Nate Silver got his start on daily kos.

fullshark• 3 years ago

Ad based media/journalism is hopeless. Stuff behind a paywall maybe can survive if you cater to a specific audience (politics junkies, businesses). The vast majority of journalism though will be explicitly public relations and a defacto wing of an economic entity.

elzbardico• 3 years ago

Commentary and analysis should be fine as professions for the highest levels. You can make a pretty good living out of subscriptions and even multiple millions out of a contract with a streaming service if you are an A-level analyst.

But reporting requires some level of infra-structure that is harder to bootstrap.

WheatMillington• 3 years ago

Nate Silver is a guy who got lucky one year, and managed to convince everyone he's a genius.

saghm4• 3 years ago

Not making a judgment about his methods or not, but he was pretty accurate more than once; in 2008 he predicted 49/50 states correctly in the US presidential election, and in 2012 he predicted all 50 correctly. You might be right that he isn't as smart as people think, but "got lucky one year" is an exaggeration.

keithwinstein• 3 years ago

I'm a big fan of Nate Silver, but I think this idea that he "predicted N/50 states correctly" in 2008 and 2012 is mostly a myth.

(1) The website doesn't "predict" a state when it reports that the probability of (e.g.) an Obama victory in Florida is 50.3%, which I believe is what 538 assessed in 2012. If you think that a state's probability distribution is 50/50 between Candidate X and Y, and the outcome is Candidate X, obviously you don't get any points for a good prediction. You didn't make a prediction. And if you say it's 50.3% probability, it's essentially the same situation. You didn't make (much of) a prediction. Which is okay!

(2) In terms of Brier Scores or entropy scores, which compare the probability with the outcome and give more "points" the stronger the prediction was made (vs. what actually happened), FiveThirtyEight's predictions are generally just middle-of-the-pack compared with other websites and mechanisms of aggregating these polls. (See, e.g., https://web.math.princeton.edu/~sswang/Wang_Origins_of_Presi...) There's no strong evidence that 538's predictions are much better or worse than other reasonable ways to weight and aggregate the recent polls that anybody else might come up with.

(3) And... almost everything that tries to quantify the accuracy of the predictions is talking about the state of the 538 website ON THE MORNING OF THE ELECTION. But that's probably the least useful day to be looking at FiveThirtyEight. By then, you can just wait a few hours and get the actual results. :-) The predictions that are really valuable are the ones that are made some time in advance, e.g. one or two months.

But (a) it's hard to directly measure the "accuracy" of a prediction like that, because... things change and we can't rerun the universe, and (b) it's not like the model is somehow time-invariant to be able to measure the accuracy indirectly by proxy; there are various "time until election" factors included in these model itself, the dynamics of the election itself probably have a "time until election" dependency, AND the website operators, including 538, are generally manually tweaking the model parameters or behavior in ways they don't always disclose as the election evolves.

So basically... it's hard to say. I think 538 has done great work, and in general it's incredibly useful to have a consistent world model that you can rationally update to discuss the effect of recent news. The FiveThirtyEight political models are as good as any for that! But I don't think there's much strong evidence they're better.

test098• 3 years ago

Silver was named one of The World's 100 Most Influential People by Time in 2009 after an election forecasting system he developed successfully predicted the outcomes in forty-nine of the fifty states in the 2008 U.S. presidential election.[2] His subsequent election forecasting systems accurately predicted the outcome of the 2012 and 2020 presidential elections with a high degree of accuracy, and - at the time - gave Presidential candidate Donald Trump the highest chance of success the day of the 2016 presidential election of reputable polls at the time.

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nate_Silver

dragonwriter5• 3 years ago

gave Presidential candidate Donald Trump the highest chance of success the day of the 2016 presidential election of reputable polls at the time

This makes a fundamental error of confusing “polls” (which is not a category Silver’s work falls into) with statistical predictions based on aggregates of polls (which is what it is.)

foxandmouse• 3 years ago

At FiveThirtyEight, their goal is to deliver high-quality quantitative analysis by utilizing record-level data. It's ironic that the type of comment you made is typically found on sports news websites that lacks the rigor and depth of a quality analysis.

dragonwriter5• 3 years ago

Nate Silver is a guy who got lucky one year, and managed to convince everyone he’s a genius.

Nate Silver is a guy who is very good at applying statistical modelling to a number of domains (including election analysis, where he basically revolutionized the field with everyone else doing poll-aggregate-based-prediction – which no one was previously – following in his footsteps, but mostly doing a worse job), but who morphed into another generic center-right Democratic political talking head. Whether that’s a structural demand of Disney that will go away now that he is leaving Disney or whether its what he feels his groove is now…will be interesting to see.

mardifoufs• 3 years ago

Genuine question, since I dont really follow him outside of elections, but in what way is he center right? I'm not american and I'm an immigrant/poc so I'm not especially biaised to the right but he always came off to me as pretty centrist and "liberal". When did that change?

(The 2020 election was the last time I really heard about him, and the most controversial takes he had was some very mild reservations on lockdowns and school closures... at a time when the entire world reopened schools except for the USA, which is why it didn't register like a hot/right wing take at all to me.)

cyanydeez2• 3 years ago

He didn't get lucky.

He found a trend and published it widely.

He changed the very thing he was studying. Because politics was already a statistical game, his original models failed to reproduce.

He clearly published a single result.

greesil5• 3 years ago

His approach is pretty sound, and straightforward if you listen to his podcast. Proper treatment of fat tails via student t distributions and correlated variables with good (subjective) judgement on polling quality.

I find that most people with negative views of Nate's approach are innumerate with regards to statistics. They don't criticize the model because they can't be bothered to understand it, or even basic probability, and certainly don't rank his performance vs other modelers which wouldn't require understanding the model.

petulla• 3 years ago

No: https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2020/10/24/reverse-en...

trc001• 3 years ago

I’ve been saying some version of this to people for years.

But in his defense, I think he’s been more the victim of the secular decline in polling quality than anything else.

crazygringo2• 3 years ago

Very curious where he goes, if it'll be back somewhere mainstream like NYT, or if it'll be independent on Substack, or somewhere else more alternative/indie like Vox.

Also a shame he can't take the FiveThirtyEight trademark with him. He can take his models, but not the brand. Still, his own name "Nate Silver" seems to have just as much recognition as "FiveThirtyEight" so he'll do just fine.

timbit42• 3 years ago

When will the size of the electoral college change again?

votepaunchy• 3 years ago

When Puerto Rico or DC become states. Each would add two Senators and draw from the pool of Representatives (replacing DC’s third elector).

dragonwriter5• 3 years ago

When will the size of the electoral college change again?

When:

(1) One or more new states are added, or (2) The law fixing the size of the House is amended/replaced.

I wouldn’t be surprised if those happen together, so that adding the new state adds on rather than redistributes seats in the House initially.

Note that D.C. being added (with no change to the fixed size of the House) as a state would actually shrink the electoral college by one, since it would add two Senators and zero reps, but D.C. already has three electors; any other state being added (with no change to the fixed size of the House) would add two electors for the two additional Senators added.

crazygringo2• 3 years ago

Ha!

Now you've got me genuinely curious as to whether launching e.g. FiveForty would be considered trademark infringement by the courts.

My hunch is it would still be infringement, since it's similar enough. In the same way Pepsi wouldn't be allowed to launch a cola called Coky.

mempko• 3 years ago

Somewhat related: The problem with Nate Silver and most others in this game is they don't treat the statistics they show as random variables. I want to see confidence intervals for all statistics. They just show 'Chance of winning is X" instead what they need to so is 'Change of winning is between X and Y'. It's such a simple change I'm shocked nobody does it including Nate Silver.

It's all what I call 'pop statistics' at this point and IMO hurts the public and democracy.

kadoban2• 3 years ago

You do not have to dig far _at all_ on 538 to find that info. They prominently display the distribution of their results.

Disney is shrinking FiveThirtyEight and Nate Silver (and his models) are leaving

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