Nate Silver’s genius isn’t math. It’s journalism.
By Ezra Klein, WashPost, Updated: July 23, 2013
The news that Nate Silver is leaving the New York Times for a role at ESPN and ABC News (corporate synergies! They’re a thing!) has occasioned some interesting posts on what he got right during the election.
The typical answer to this is, well, “the election.” But getting the election right was no great feat. The betting markets got the election right. The pollsters got the election right. The polling aggregators, like Real Clear Politics, got the election right. The modelers — which included Silver, but also included Sam Wang and Drew Linzer, among others — got the election right. Wonkblog’s election model called the election right — and it did it in June.
The truth is that 2012 just wasn’t a very hard election to call. The polling data all pointed in the same direction, even if many pundits refused to believe what it told them. The secret of the modelers — and it’s not much of a secret — is that they listened to the polling data. Silver et al got the credit for calling the election right, but the bulk of that credit should really go to the pollsters, without whom none of the modelers could have made any calls at all.
Indeed, one of Silver’s incorrect calls came in the North Dakota race, which Wang called correctly. Why did Wang get it right and Silver get it wrong? Because Wang’s model stuck even closer to the polls than Silver’s model did.
(More here.)
The news that Nate Silver is leaving the New York Times for a role at ESPN and ABC News (corporate synergies! They’re a thing!) has occasioned some interesting posts on what he got right during the election.
The typical answer to this is, well, “the election.” But getting the election right was no great feat. The betting markets got the election right. The pollsters got the election right. The polling aggregators, like Real Clear Politics, got the election right. The modelers — which included Silver, but also included Sam Wang and Drew Linzer, among others — got the election right. Wonkblog’s election model called the election right — and it did it in June.
The truth is that 2012 just wasn’t a very hard election to call. The polling data all pointed in the same direction, even if many pundits refused to believe what it told them. The secret of the modelers — and it’s not much of a secret — is that they listened to the polling data. Silver et al got the credit for calling the election right, but the bulk of that credit should really go to the pollsters, without whom none of the modelers could have made any calls at all.
Indeed, one of Silver’s incorrect calls came in the North Dakota race, which Wang called correctly. Why did Wang get it right and Silver get it wrong? Because Wang’s model stuck even closer to the polls than Silver’s model did.
(More here.)
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