Some personal news

https://natesilver.substack.com/p/some-personal-news

by r721 • 3 years ago

235 227 3 years ago

natesilver.substack.com

Discussion here from last week when this was first "announced" (81 comments): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35707372

ghaff3• 3 years ago

He seems to have done a pretty good job of negotiating his contracts with respect to owning a lot of his model IP moving forward. Still needs to find a platform/pub moving forward of course but far from starting from scratch.

Shank• 3 years ago

Quoting this here for the added context:

Much of FiveThirtyEight’s vital intellectual property — such as the election forecast models — is merely licensed to Disney. The license term for these models expires with my contract this summer. I still own these models, and can license or sell them elsewhere.

This is one hell of an agreement to have with your employer. That was my next question given that most of FiveThirtyEight was Nate's own work, and he had very good insight to have an escape hatch.

I really hope to have the power to do this one day.

JamisonM5• 3 years ago

I wouldn't presume that most of it is Nate's own work. (I suspect that for most sports he is delegating but "owns" the output, he does seem to directly build most of the political stuff.)

Isn't this what the Skype guys pulled off with Microsoft too?

labster4• 3 years ago

What interest would the Mouse have in numerical models? They want entertainment IP, not weird programs that they have no experience marketing or hiring people to run. They’re not just going to transfer it over to Pixar so the guys behind Cars 2 can predict the next election.

Disney wants the talent. It’s just not as valuable to them as keeping Nate happy

the-printer• 3 years ago

Yeah, this is what stood out to me also. It’s likely a lot more than other people in his position could say.

tootie• 3 years ago

There's some reporting that Disney execs didn't fully comprehend the terms he had when they decided to release him and now they're scrambling.

https://www.semafor.com/article/05/01/2023/abc-news-struggle...

scoofy• 3 years ago

Wow... if that's true, it's some real amateur hour idiocy. As much as I like the brand, I'd trivially stick with Nate, especially if he somehow got the old band back together: Harry, Claire, etc.

ehaveman3• 3 years ago

i was struck by that as well. smart long game moves.

threatofrain• 3 years ago

NATE DOT SILVER DOT MEDIA AT GMAIL DOT COM

Artifacts of another age. This stuff won't work anymore.

nighthawk454• 3 years ago

Presumably it's not super serious as there's a mailto link right before it

walrus013• 3 years ago

particularly odd when natesilver.net and natesilver.com are both domains that exist and presumably owned by him (for well known public figure trademark reasons), he can't just point the MX for them at gsuite and then set up an inbox?

Blahah2• 3 years ago

That opens a surprisingly large landscape of possible attacks and failure modes. The jsit obvious subset being things that happen when your paid gsuite gets disabled (not paying, abuse report, etc), or the domain lapses or is taken over.

A basic free gmail account is very stable compared to almost any other option. L

skyyler• 3 years ago

It comes right after a mailto link so I don't think it was intended to stop spam.

At least, I hope not.

labster4• 3 years ago

As someone who has written a lot of regexen, I’m surprised it ever worked.

Hamuko• 3 years ago

Spammers aren't that smart, they will absolutely go where the bar is at its absolutely lowest, if not missing entirely. Just changing your SSH server to operate a port that is not 22 is going to stop most if not all random login attempts.

qup• 3 years ago

I used to scrape craigslist for local offers. Many times I needed to be the first to call, so I wanted my script to get the numbers.

In about five minutes I came up with an algorithm that defeated most of the obfuscation tricks of the time:

Strip whitespace, convert "five" to 5, remove special characters, and look for ten consecutive digits in the body text. Maybe a couple of small tweaks after that like removing text between digits.

Most people, when they invent their little unique scheme, invent one that is already defeated by the algorithm above. At least for phone numbers.

Anyway, all that to say you're right, it never worked.

eyelidlessness2• 3 years ago

As someone who has written a lot of regexen

There are at least \d of us!

dragonwriter10• 3 years ago

> NATE DOT SILVER DOT MEDIA AT GMAIL DOT COM
Artifacts of another age. This stuff won't work anymor

Its not a protection scheme, its repeating the content of the mailto link with emphasis.

(If it was a protection scheme, there wouldn’t be a mailto link.)

haswell• 3 years ago

I wondered if it's for accessibility reasons. Possibly a better experience for screen readers and such.

shusaku3• 3 years ago

https://xkcd.com/1808/

somethoughts• 3 years ago

It feels like a waste to not just figure out how to have the founder buy back the domain name/trademarks.

beerpls7• 3 years ago

I really lost any semblance of respect for Silver after the 2016 election

Analysis after analysis about how Hillary was a sure thing. It was an absolute echo chamber and the election completely lifted the curtain for me

sdfghswe• 3 years ago

Analysis after analysis about how Hillary was a sure thing.

Really? I think I remember him giving Trump 30% on the night?

EDIT: Got it - some people struggle with incorporating uncertainty into their reasoning.

cvalka• 3 years ago

Correct. He was right about the 2016 presidential election.

re5i5tor2• 3 years ago

100%. Never trusted him again.

jjoonathan• 3 years ago

You remember incorrectly.

https://www.vox.com/2016/11/3/13147678/nate-silver-fivethirt...

tomrod2• 3 years ago

I question this view. Why? He forecast, and whats more provided the error bounds which gave Trump a chance to win. Outside of a crystal ball, what else could be expected?

walrus013• 3 years ago

I think both hardcore (D) and hardcore MAGA people have a lot to learn that wanting something to be true doesn't make it so.

fullshark• 3 years ago

He was criticized for giving trump too large a chance to win iirc

Here he spikes the football over it: https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/why-fivethirtyeight-gav...

shusaku3• 3 years ago

I think Nate Silver must be some kind of punching bag in right wing media circles, because some variation of this comment is posted basically every time 538 comes up on HackerNews.

the_watcher2• 3 years ago

FiveThirtyEight had about a 1/3 chance of Trump winning, far higher than anyone else was modeling. And he was one of the few pundits openly talking about how it wasn't some insane longshot. I have no idea where this meme came from, but it's annoyingly persistent.

asah• 3 years ago

You mean >50% isn't a lock? /s

I remember this. Tough spot for NS. I remember thinking that 2:1 Hillary and three language around it, came across a useless hedge. In retrospect, I think he'd have gotten more respect if he shouted from the rafters that Hillary doesn't have a lock and Trump could really win. Then, he'd have been heralded as a genius. Strong forecasting, weak marketing.

dboreham• 3 years ago

Wasn't that mainly due to the fact that people lie when they're asked if they'll vote for a highly distasteful candidate?

spookthesunset• 3 years ago

I mean he was getting crap for even suggesting trump had a chance. NYT had Hillary at like 99%

jjtheblunt2• 3 years ago

but NYT has, at times, been straight propaganda (like other obvious news sites for other propaganda), which i guess is your point.

robertoandred• 3 years ago

1% isn’t a chance?

bvinc• 3 years ago

I don’t remember NYT. But I recall the other major poll site Real Clear Politics had an election map with a percentage chance for each state and they had Hillary at 99%.

Their mistake was that they treated each state as an independent event. Treating each state as a separate biased coin toss leads you to put Hillary at 99%.

Nate knew that these are not independent events and if republicans are being under polled in one state, it is more likely they’re being under polled in all of the states.

sidfthec• 3 years ago

Flip two coins. If they're both heads Trump wins.

That's approximately what Silver's team was saying. No idea where this "sure thing" idea of your's comes from.

doctoboggan• 3 years ago

I remember leading up to Election Day his predictions were giving her 66% and Trump 33% (IIRC). Which means if you roll a die and it comes up as 1 or 2 then Trump wins (which isn't all that unlikely)

Many people mistook these numbers to mean Clinton was going to get 66% of the vote and thus were expecting a landslide, but that is not what his numbers meant.

Now I wasn't reading any of the analysis he or his team was putting out, but the modeling seemed reasonable to me.

titzer3• 3 years ago

Turns out when statistics say there is a 5% chance of something happening, there's about a 5% chance of it happening.

Also, for 2020, it turns out the actual vote split between the two US presidential candidates was pretty much exactly in line with polls.

AlbertCory13• 3 years ago

Your two paragraphs have no relationship. How it could possibly "turn out" that there's a 5% chance of Trump winning? Was the election run 100 times?

The accuracy of the polls is another matter entirely. You could estimate the chances that your polling was wrong, given that the selection of the sample is a random variable, people lie, and intentions change, but that's not at all what the general public thinks the number means.

beerpls7• 3 years ago

Now that’s a funny one

With a straight face you’re going to say that in 2016 you saw a bunch of polls coming out showing trump winning?

Absolutely not. Nobody, and I mean nobody, gave him a snowflakes chance. Everyone including Silver mentioned “the greatest election landslide in history”, or some variant.

If there were polls showing trump winning they were hidden from ans downplayed in the msm. And to say anything else is a very poor lie.

Nition8• 3 years ago

Fivethirtyeight had Trump at a 28.6% chance to win on the night[1], the web page is still up. I recall that being higher than any other polls I saw at the time. A 1 in 3.5 chance isn't that unlikely, it implies they're very close.

[1] https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/2016-election-forecast

bart_spoon• 3 years ago

You clearly don’t understand how probability works

DragonStrength• 3 years ago

What? At the time, people were lambasting him for saying Trump had a 30% chance, and I know people who think he was too smug after getting 2016 right. I mean, I know this is the internet and people can say whatever they want, but come on.

add-sub-mul-div• 3 years ago

These are the people who got their feelings hurt over a culture war and lash out at Silver because he's become vaguely mainstream synonymous with political projections. Nobody with a serious position and serious attention on this would criticize Silver. It was the Buzzfeed types that gave Clinton a much higher chance.

cthalupa2• 3 years ago

I see this repeated all the time and I don't understand how people come to this conclusion.

538 consistently gave Trump a better chance than much of the mainstream media, with him showing a roughly 30% chance for much of the year, including right up at the election. At times it dropped as low as 15% or so, but... that's still not some insanely rare occurrence.

As for what they were actually saying? Silver and 538 never claimed it was a sure thing. Let's look at some actual articles:

https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/election-update-dont-ig...

"At the same time, it shouldn’t be hard to see how Clinton could lose. She’s up by about 3 percentage points nationally, and 3-point polling errors happen fairly often, including in the last two federal elections. Obama beat his polls by about 3 points in 2012, whereas Republicans beat their polls by 3 to 4 points in the 2014 midterms. If such an error were to favor Clinton, she could win in a borderline landslide. If the error favored Trump, however, she’d be in a dicey position, because the error is highly correlated across states.

There’s also reason to think a polling error is more likely than usual this year, because of the high number of undecided voters. In national polls, Clinton averages about 45 percent of the vote and Trump 42 percent; by comparison, Obama led Mitt Romney roughly 49-48 in national polls at the end of the 2012 campaign. That contributes significantly to uncertainty, since neither candidate has enough votes yet to have the election in the bag.

To be honest, I’m kind of confused as to why people think it’s heretical for our model to give Trump a 1-in-3 chance — which does make him a fairly significant underdog, after all. There are a lot of ways to build models, and there are lots of factors that a model based on public polling, like ours, doesn’t consider.3 But the public polls — specifically including the highest-quality public polls — show a tight race in which turnout and late-deciding voters will determine the difference between a clear Clinton win, a narrow Clinton win and Trump finding his way to 270 electoral votes."

https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/clinton-probably-finish... is about as bullish on Clinton as I can find from the archives, and even there Silver does not talk about how Hillary is a sure thing, and instead spend several paragraphs discussing reasons why Trump could still win and what those would look like. And as those things occurred, the model shifted back from being as bullish on Hillary, for the reasons Silver outlines.

I don't know why you would read a 70% chance of victory as being the same thing as a sure victory. I wouldn't want to bet my life on a 70% success rate!

XorNot• 3 years ago

Common problem with % statistics I find is they dissuade people from considering the actual occurrences of something.

70% chance of success is about a 1 out of 3 chance of failure.

AlbertCory13• 3 years ago

Percentage probabilities are meaningless for an event like this.

Can you run the 2016 election 1,000 times and count the times Hillary wins? Of course you can't.

Unlike estimating "what's the chance it rains tomorrow?" you can't even find 1,000 elections in the past with roughly similar conditions.

Unlike a baseball season, you don't have enough samples for the true probabilities to come out.

So, yes, despite all your downvotes, you're right: he pandered to the people who want a percentage number, despite the fact that it's meaningless and they will misunderstand it.

jackmott422• 3 years ago

People do misunderstand it, that is true. Including you, who thinks it is meaningless. Being imperfect is very different from useless or meaningless.

dragonwriter10• 3 years ago

Percentage probabilities are meaningless for an event like this.

No, they aren't.

(They can’t be validated for a single event in isolation, but 538 predicts lots of election events, so their models can, generally, be assessed, and are historically quite accurate.)

kelipso3• 3 years ago

Thank you. It's a non repeatable single event. Percentage probabilities is basically cover for the predictor and cope for the people buying their bs.

maxbond2• 3 years ago

This is a lot like saying, "fractional exponents are meaningless, because you can't multiply something by itself half of a time." This intuitive model has broken down, but the problem is that the model wasn't sufficient to capture the complexity of the problem; it was a pedagogic stepping stone.

Similarly, probability is not the result of conducting repeated experiments (though the results of repeated experiments can be used to estimate probability). It's the measure of an event relative to the measure of the set of all events, eg, it's how much of the total volume in the space is taken up by a given event.

cthalupa2• 3 years ago

Can you run the 2016 election 1,000 times and count the times Hillary wins? Of course you can't.

If you think that evaluating their model based on binary outcomes is the best way to do it, then, well, this argument makes sense.

If you want to evaluate the model based on all of the details available, then, well, it stops making nearly as much sense. What explanations were given for potential Trump victories? What information was available at the time? What information was available after? Do we have data around if those explanations did align with Trump's victory?

I've not done a deep dive on this - 538 is entertainment for me. But from what I remembered in 2016, what I read today in digging up some example articles for another comment, and looking at the actual outcomes... yes, those explanations were closely aligned with reality.

Humans have to come up with probabilities and make decisions based off of them all the time, even when we will never get a chance to get 1000 occurrences. These might not be provable in the same way as something we can run 1000 times is, but the idea that they are meaningless and without value is bizarre.

Nition8• 3 years ago

Can you run the 2016 election 1,000 times and count the times Hillary wins?

I assume you mean "in real life", but otherwise this seems to be close to their actual methodology. You can see the outcome frequency charts under "What to expect from the Electoral College."[1]

[1] https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/2016-election-forecast/...

jackmott422• 3 years ago

This is a very strange take since it was Nate Silver who gave trump an order of magnitude higher chance of winning than everyone else. Around 30% chance, same for a batter getting a hit in baseball, which happens all the time.

Agathos• 3 years ago

I think a lot of people looked at his last prediction that Tuesday morning, observed that 70 > 30, and assumed that meant it was a lock. And then spent the last six years blaming Silver for their own innumeracy.

labster4• 3 years ago

Excellent troll, good sir, 10/10

Wowfunhappy3• 3 years ago

It’s not just that I think these models have a lot of journalistic value

...do they, though?

I'm actually not so convinced in the journalistic value of FiveThirtyEight. It's something I've thought about before.

FiveThirtyEight's political forecasts absolutely provide a desirable service! Who doesn't want to know who will win an upcoming election?

But is it good for people to know who is more likely to win an election? Are these predictions beneficial to society or democracy? I sometimes think they may actually be harmful, decreasing voter turnout by convincing people (correctly or incorrectly) that the result is preordained.

That's not to say Nate Silver is doing anything wrong by making FiveThirtyEight available, but he tends to talk about it as a sort of public good. I'm not sure whether that's accurate.

jdm22123• 3 years ago

As opposed to horserace election coverage, which is the single biggest focus of all of American journalism for the year or so leading up to an election... which is of greater journalistic value?

RC_ITR4• 3 years ago

Simply looking at 538 during election cycles makes it hard to argue they aren’t a horse race tracker (they literally started as a sanitized gambling odds site and Nate’s new book is about gambling).

They’re just the guy who went to the stables before to see who was eating the most hay.

Wowfunhappy3• 3 years ago

Horserace election coverage is the larger problem. But FiveThirtyEight is clearly a participant in that.

dragonwriter10• 3 years ago

You seem to be arguing about net social value, which is a distinct and much more complicated issue than journalistic value.

(That said, yes, I think the models clearly have net social value, too.)

dougmwne2• 3 years ago

If anything, I suspect this detailed polling of making elections closer. Millions of voters aren’t reading 538. It’s a distinctly wonky thing to do. But people really into politics, the kind of people who volunteer for campaigns and make large contributions do pay attention and I think it helps rally their support behind realistic candidates for their party so that the candidates put forward for the general elections are as closely matched as possible. Well funded campaigns probably already had their own private polling and statisticians, but 538 helped make sure all highly invested individuals had access to decent data and could deploy their resources more effectively. If you keep that data out of grassroots hands, then you put the parities more firmly under the control of a very small party elite with all the experts.

PaulDavisThe1st3• 3 years ago

Millions of voters aren’t reading 538

True. But millions of them will hear a radio announcer, or TV person, or tiktok video or whatever else say something like "In the latest polling, <X> has pulled ahead of <Y> ..." where "the latest polls" will mean (among other things) 538.

I do believe that this has some effect (if small) on patterns of voting (particular by encouraging or discouraging turnout).

cmdli• 3 years ago

It has been fairly useful to me as an observer and voter in understanding how the elections go down. Understanding what the chances are of each candidate and how certain voting groups can influence the election can (sometimes) reduce being blindsided by an election. It may reduce my impartiality as a voter, but it definitely helps me process politics as a citizen.

alfalfasprout2• 3 years ago

Societal value != journalistic value. And in fact, even if there's a net negative societal value that doesn't mean it shouldn't be around.

Nate silver didn't exactly invent political polling either. That's doing a disservice to the enormous time and money invested in polling over several decades of elections (and the learnings when things didn't go correctly). Polling will be around regardless.

Wowfunhappy3• 3 years ago

Societal value != journalistic value

That's fair. I was responding to ways I've heard Nate Silver talk about the model and polling in general in e.g. podcasts, which is why I've had the question floating around in my mind. But you're right, that's not quite what he wrote here.

And in fact, even if there's a net negative societal value that doesn't mean it shouldn't be around.

To be clear: I don't mean to imply that FiveThirtyEight shouldn't exist. There's lots of things which serve a human desire but aren't necessarily a social good. Slot machines for example.

Kye2• 3 years ago

The big value of polls is a backup check for discrepancies. A major difference between final polls and polls leading up to the election could be innocent (like unexpected demographics), but it could hint at voter suppression or even completely innocent issues with the voting systems. Paired with exit polling, there's enough information to find answers.

legitster2• 3 years ago

This is something I think about a lot - the actual value of polling in general and public opinion polling in specific.

A lot of public discourse is creeping on several layers of meta, to where we are constantly reacting to how people react to other reactions.

Sometimes I wish we would just let ideas stand on their face instead of constantly engaging in acts of national navel gazing.

drewda• 3 years ago

Those are good, meaty questions.

In an election, the vote is the measure of popular support for a candidate/policy/platform. Democracy doesn't necessarily need polls.

I've found interesting some related essays by Jill Lepore, an American historian, on the advent of polling earlier in the 20th century:

- https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/11/16/politics-and-t... - https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/03/09/the-problems-i...

justinsaccount• 3 years ago

it may even be harmful

It definitely is, I tried to make the same point a week ago :-)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35707786

softwaredoug• 3 years ago

I would think forcing people to better appreciate how probabilities actually work is better than avoiding the topic entirely. Learning that 70% is not certain is important in lots of contexts. 30% probability events happen all the time…

Data illiteracy, not the existence of a forecast, is the core problem.

dkarl• 3 years ago

I think the major parties and other interested organizations will always have forecasts like these available internally, and will leak them (or lies about them) when it's to their advantage. Having a high-quality forecast directly available to the public can't hurt more than that.

I sometimes think they may be harmful, decreasing voter turnout by convincing people (correctly or incorrectly) that the result is preordained.

This is an old tactic that is used to the hilt by both sides whenever it serves them, and media outlets already make forecasts, often without 538's scrupulous emphasis on how often they're wrong. I don't think 538 makes this worse.

parasubvert4• 3 years ago

FiveThirtyEight is beneficial, and it’s fairly simple as to why.

1. People want to know who is winning. It doesn’t matter whether you like it or not. People want to know, and thus there will always be a market for it.

2. Polling is imperfect and it’s a lot of work to understand how to interpret the various polls out or to forecast in lieu of polls. Political journalism before FiveThirtyEight was filled with even more crooks and charlatans coming up with nonsensical ways to forecast elections or interpret polls. There was a lot more noise in the system. FiveThirtyEight shut that stuff down to an incredible degree.

3. FiveThirtyEight has introduced more folks to probability theory than I think any other journalistic collective. What has always made them different is that they provide probabilities, not certainties.

mumblemumble2• 3 years ago

Your #1 is affirming the consequent.

melvinmelih• 3 years ago

FiveThirtyEight's political forecasts absolutely provide a desirable service! Who doesn't want to know who will win an upcoming election?

Does it actually work though? I don’t think they were able to predict the past 3 presidential elections, so not sure where they provide value.

parasubvert4• 3 years ago

FiveThirtyEight has had astonishing accuracy since 2008. They don’t pick winners, they provide data analytics of polls and other factors. People may not appreciate probability theory but this is far more reality based than what passed for political analysis prior to 2008.

mumblemumble2• 3 years ago

We have a word for this: horse race journalism.

It's generally not understood to have positive connotations. In part because there is indeed some evidence to suggest that your concerns about it harming the democratic process are valid. For example: https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/708682

toss12• 3 years ago

In fact, horse race journalism has been observed to have such negative and self-fulling effects that some countries ban polling and/or electoral journalism for hours, days, or weeks before an election. Even in the US, it is illegal to do any "electioneering" within 100ft of a polling place.

On top of that, while 538 initially provided good and solid insights, it has recently been successfully gamed by right-wing players by standing up bogus polling organizations and getting their bogus results into the aggregator's (like 538) results. The goal of course was to make their candidates seem more popular, and the "reliability" scores did not work, as the aggregators results were significantly off in that direction.

Safe to ignore NS and any of his output (and more reliable). [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Election_silence

culi• 3 years ago

The models are one thing. It's the data that really matter imo. No other organization has created as thorough of a collection of polling firms, their polls, as well as their faults and past records as FTE.

Even if you're building your own model you'll likely be turning to FTE for the latest data.

In addition they're data driven journalism is often paired with amazing data sets that they open-source for free.

JamisonM5• 3 years ago

FiveThirtyEight's political forecasts absolutely provide a desirable service—who doesn't want to know who will an upcoming election?
But is it good for people to know who is more likely to win an election? Are these predictions beneficial to society or democracy?

Two points:

1. The model DO NOT tell you who will win the upcoming election.

2. It is absolutely beneficial to society and democracy, having a poll-free & rigorous-analysis-free democratic society means an environment where even the most apolitical citizen can be bamboozled into thinking that an election was "stolen" simply based on their close associates and news sources. Polling and aggregation, when executed with a modicum of accountability, prevents a devolution into a Soviet-style culture of paranoia particularly among the elites. It has tremendous value, that value will be backfilled by rumour and innuendo and that is very bad for society.

roflyear• 3 years ago

The value is the hype not the journalism.

oatmeal12• 3 years ago

Even if he result appears dead-even there is a cost. Framing the election in terms of who wins instead of which candidate is best increases the tendency of voters to vote for candidates who "have a chance," even though there is no rational reason to vote for candidate that is more likely to win.

scarface74• 3 years ago

There is a very real reason to vote for the candidate during the primary who is most likely to win the general election.

shusaku3• 3 years ago

It’s definitely an interesting discussion.

who doesn't want to know who will an upcoming election?

In particular, politicians want to know. This to me is the interesting upshot. Polls are non binding, so the public could use them to signal to candidates how to tweak their platform.

I’m always curious if there’s any real good data saying turnout patterns change. The thing is, voting because you think your one vote might change the result, is already completely irrational. I always think of voting of being like when you go to a concert and buy the band’s CD even though you already have Spotify: it’s more about find a way to personally participate in an important life moment than practicality.

facet1ous• 3 years ago

The model is only one feature of the site, you realize right? Have you read anything else they put out besides the election forecast?

jasmer• 3 years ago

The science is valid and they are a good aggregator of the various polls, it's perfectly legit and moderately beneficial.

Especially in a world of liars.

bariumbitmap• 3 years ago

But is it good for people to know who is more likely to win an election? Are these predictions beneficial to society or democracy? I sometimes think they may actually be harmful, decreasing voter turnout by convincing people (correctly or incorrectly) that the result is preordained.

For plurality voting (a.k.a. first-past-the-post[0]) with more than two candidates, voters have to cast their ballots strategically[1]. This is especially common in primary elections and non-partisan positions.

Unless all elections switch to a method that is not subject to the spoiler effect (like approval voting or instant runoff voting), voters need more information about which candidates are most likely to win, not less information. Sometimes candidate competitivness can be inferred from things like endorsements or fundraising numbers, but polls -- and aggregated models based on polls -- are an important tool.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First-past-the-post_voting

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategic_voting

MR4D2• 3 years ago

After watching this and the DPReview saga, there is only one takeaway:

Don't sell your company unless you are prepared to walk away and do something else - because at some point you're going to be forced to do so whether you want to or not.

paxys• 3 years ago

Or do exactly what Nate Silver did – negotiate the contract in such a way that you still have control over your IP if they decide to terminate you or sunset your product. Of course chances are that you don't have the kind of leverage that he did, but still...worth a shot.

MR4D2• 3 years ago

I agree completely. I wasn't thinking of addressing my comment to stars like that but more towards mere mortals like me.

Given that we're on HN, I probably should have thought that thru a bit more.

Either way, very glad that Nate was smart enough to license everything. Kudos to him for being a shrewd negotiator.

throw7• 3 years ago

Was 538 journalism? I never followed them. Only on occasions of them being quoted with some type of forecast.

paulcole• 3 years ago

I don’t think anyone can answer this to your satisfaction without knowing your personal definition of journalism. Because I believe the question you’re really asking is, “Was 538 what I consider journalism?”

When I typed “define journalism” into Google, this came back:

the activity or profession of writing for newspapers, magazines, or news websites or preparing news to be broadcast.

So yes, 538 was journalism by at least one definition of journalism.

Here’s one more definition:

Journalism is the activity of gathering, assessing, creating, and presenting news and information. It is also the product of these activities

Another yes! We’re 2 for 2!

slondr• 3 years ago

Was 538 journalism?

Yes, it was, and still "is" until they take the website down: https://fivethirtyeight.com/

pessimizer2• 3 years ago

All fact-based reporting on politics and current events is journalism. I'm sure some of your HN comments have been journalism.

538 is a bunch of opinionated statistics and bad editorial. Squarely in the center of journalism.

Willish42• 3 years ago

There are also some complicated cases — for example, for some of the sports models, I own them, but Disney gets to keep a copy when I leave.

As others have mentioned, he's very wise to have negotiated contracts so he keeps some IP, but those sports models might be what generate the most revenue.

Are there precedents for this in the tech world, where somebody can legally bring IP with them to a new role but the old employer/competitor keeps an exact copy? Seems like an unusual arrangement that'd be hard to sell the upside to somebody competing with Disney/ESPN.

Also, that [poker bluff](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9cVrlVzoh48) was very entertaining to watch. Apparently Nate's quite the poker player (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nate_Silver#Economic_consultan...)

FreakLegion• 3 years ago

Are there precedents for this in the tech world, where somebody can legally bring IP with them to a new role but the old employer/competitor keeps an exact copy?

This is actually the standard arrangement, depending on how you define "tech world". In California for example a Proprietary Information And Inventions Agreement will include a provision along the lines of:

If, in the course of my employment with the Company, I incorporate a Prior Invention into a Company product, process or machine, the Company is hereby granted and shall have a nonexclusive, royalty-free, irrevocable, perpetual, worldwide license (with rights to sublicense through multiple tiers of sublicensees) to make, have made, modify, use and sell such Prior Invention. Notwithstanding the foregoing, I agree that I will not incorporate, or permit to be incorporated, Prior Inventions in any Company Inventions without the Company’s prior written consent.

Meaning anything you created before remains yours, even if, out of the kindness of your heart, you allow your employer to benefit from it.

What's unusual in Silver's case is maintaining that arrangement for a) the founder of a company, and b) through an acquisition.

bee_rider2• 3 years ago

How much value does the model actually have, in and of itself? It’s just a bunch of correlations, right? The value of the model is in the reporting that he does using it (articles, podcasts).

The competition would get value from having him host a show about it on their platform. Disney… I wonder if they even care about the model, or if they just took a license to it/current copy thing because, I dunno, maybe he offered it for really cheap.

I mean can you imagine, 538 but without the main character? It would be incredibly lame.

Kye2• 3 years ago

> "I mean can you imagine, 538 but without the main character? It would be incredibly lame."

I assume Disney keeps 538's fursona, Fivey.

alfalfasprout2• 3 years ago

Disney and WB Discovery seem to have totally lost any vision for their future.

538 has a very clear value proposition outside of exposing nerdy polling and forecasting breakdowns for a small group of wonks. It's the place a lot of other folks source for rigorous tracking+forecasting of elections, sports, etc. It's good.

Disney, however, seems to be putting out a lot of crappy content on their Disney+ platform that rates poorly and is expensive to produce. The Mandalorian + Andor are great but the other recent Star Wars IP is horrible and cost them a fortune.

chucky_z• 3 years ago

This is why they just recently changed CEOs. You're going to see the ship changing direction over the next 2 years back to a more familiar course.

legitster2• 3 years ago

A melancholic development. But in a way, kind of relieving.

I think Nate Silver and his team did an amazing job making statistical analysis interesting and transparent and trustworthy.

On the other hand, 538 was a weirdly sterile website to actually read. On the rest of the internet you have raging and bombastic news designed to elicit feelings and (most importantly) clicks. 538 tried their best to fit in this world, but you were still just reading data analysis about other news or topics.

whyenot• 3 years ago

I take it Disney owns Fivey Fox? That's kind of a bummer.

paulgb• 3 years ago

The last tweet from Fivey Fox's account, just after the second round of layoffs was announced, is ominous https://twitter.com/FiveyFox/status/1651634606272126995

dgdosen• 3 years ago

Nate, I'll work with you...

gnicholas2• 3 years ago

Much of FiveThirtyEight’s vital intellectual property — such as the election forecast models — is merely licensed to Disney. The license term for these models expires with my contract this summer. I still own these models, and can license or sell them elsewhere.

Sounds like he had some good leverage going into this deal. Why would Disney have agreed to a temporary license, as opposed to a purchase of this critical IP? Regardless, good for him.

JamisonM5• 3 years ago

Why would Disney have agreed to a temporary license, as opposed to a purchase of this critical IP?

It was probably a risk hedge from them.. he would have wanted a lot more for the full enchilada and they didn't know how it would perform in the future. And now his work is not hard to reproduce so it wasn't a bad call. Every political data team I have heard reporting on essentially concedes that whatever they do ends up more-or-less matching 538.. so it is hard to extract surplus value but also easy to hit that mark roughly.

I follow the NHL and there are a lot of models, they disagree in certain details but they largely agree and the "winner" at the end of any given season isn't winning by much.. even private data isn't a big boost.

ghaff3• 3 years ago

And who knows how much of this Disney really cares about going forward outside of the Nate Silver Brand--and had they had wanted that they'd have kept Nate Silver.

eclipticplane• 3 years ago

In the meteoric rise of 538, Nate could have easily walked into NYT or any other tech-forward media outlet and negotiated to retain the models. Disney would have lost out then.

gensym• 3 years ago

As a DIS shareholder, I'm livid. Losing the rights to use the best election forecasting models in the business a year before a Presidential election is monumental fuckup.

This is one screwup that can't be placed at the feet of their previous incompetent CEO.

eqmvii• 3 years ago

Do you really think it brought in that much money? I'm sure they had plenty of data when they made this decision.

bee_rider2• 3 years ago

In the grand scheme of Disney stuff, it probably didn’t make much money relatively speaking, but it seems weird to get rid of it right before the season where it’ll make any money.

prepend4• 3 years ago

Was it really any better than NYTimes or CNN? I think it’s pretty unremarkable these days and I don’t think Disney is losing revenue or prestige.

khazhoux7• 3 years ago

Losing the rights to use the best election forecasting models in the business a year before a Presidential election is monumental fuckup.

Here you go: Biden over Trump, 66% to 33%

I just saved Disney millions.

ftxbro2• 3 years ago

Now that Disney owns the FiveThirtyEight trade name I want to see how it's integrated into the Star Wars franchise.

gnicholas2• 3 years ago

"538" can be hidden inside of "BB8", given the shape of the chars.

ftxbro2• 3 years ago

This is now canon for me.

"In July 2013, ESPN (owned by Disney) acquired FiveThirtyEight, hiring Silver as editor-in-chief and a contributor for ESPN.com; the new publication launched on March 17, 2014."
"BB-8 was first seen in the 88-second The Force Awakens teaser trailer released by Lucasfilm (owned by Disney) on November 28, 2014"

ehaveman3• 3 years ago

this is the way.

Steltek• 3 years ago

Never tell me the odds!

khazhoux7• 3 years ago

C-3PO: Sir, the possibility of successfully navigating an asteroid field is approximately 3,720 to 1!

Han Solo: Excellent analysis. Chewie, Leia, prepare for surrender.

prepend4• 3 years ago

Much of FiveThirtyEight’s vital intellectual property — such as the election forecast models — is merely licensed to Disney.

This seems odd that Disney would buy FiveThirtyEight but not its IP. How common is this?

If I were buying a data journalism company known for its models, that seems like something important to purchase. This seems like a curious contract negotiation and seems like a mistake on Disney’s part. Or a future lawsuit if there’s a difference of opinions.

enkid• 3 years ago

Disney is a media company that was dabbling in data science because of its name recognition. It almost certainly didn't have the strategic vision to care much about something as nerdy as the intellectual property being used to generate that name recognition.

netsharc2• 3 years ago

I mean, 538 was under the NYTimes.com domain before that, it's not like Nate had to sell, and when he agreed to move to ESPN/Disney, he surely had more of the bargaining power.

jdlshore• 3 years ago

FiveThirtyEight made a big splash in its 2008 election debut. According to Wikipedia, there were numerous media outlets competing for its content in 2010. That likely gave Silver a lot of leverage. The same is probably true in 2014, when FiveThirtyEight moved from the New York Times to ESPN/Disney.

Interestingly, the deal with the NYT was that the entire blog was licensed. For the deal with Disney, it seems like Silver gave up a lot more, and only kept control of the models.

parekhnish• 3 years ago

Before Disney/ABC get any -ideas-, might be a good chance to get our hands on at least their data[0]!

[0] https://data.fivethirtyeight.com/

ehaveman3• 3 years ago

i'm super curious about the book!

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