Wednesday, November 14, 2012
Nate Silver and His Magic Numbers
As we are all well aware, Nate Silver of the NYT blog FiveThirtyEight, made history by successfully predicting the fate of each of the 50 states during the presidential election, correct in many cases down to the margin of victory. The question this article asks is what kind of things will change in coming years as a result. Mainly what will become of the political punditry from both sides of the aisle with the development of hyper accurate political predictions? This article argues that in the US, and in the UK where this is also prevalent, the provision of an example of strong and accurate predictions will help to stem the tide of media outlets using sub-par or biased support for their "I-have-my-own-reality" claims. Do you believe this shift will actually occur in the U.S? Personally I don't see the cash-cow that is political punditry going away anytime soon, either way though, I will be returning to FiveThirtyEight four years from now for my political projections.
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I first learned about Nate Silver in High School stats class before the 2008 Presidential election. In class we looked at the numbers leading up to the election and then the morning after and they were astoundingly accurate. I think it was basically my stats teacher's dream playing out; maybe statisticians were becoming cooler. I know I was definitely one of those people mentioned in the article whom helped to increase traffic to the NY Times blog site during the month leading up to the election. About political pundits; some people do not know anything about how stats work and may be more apt to side with a familiar face who has been giving their opinion for years. I think especially in this day and age people have so many ways of sharing their opinion via social media that it might even be hard to stop political pundits.
ReplyDeleteHonestly its about time somebody got it all right. With the ease of technology and the frequency of data that can be analyzed, this really isn't surprising to me. It's a numbers game, and more and more people are able to be counted ahead of time. The impact this will have to me, is that political races will have to begin sooner. By the end of the race, people have already decided for the most part clearly.
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