On Wed, Nov 7, 2012 at 2:59 AM, JW <[email protected]> wrote: > > In the weeks and days running up to the election Republicans and TV > Pundits > > in general dumped all over Nate, calling him either a partisan hack or > just > > a narcissistic media whore. It was said that anyone who says they can > tell > > you who is going to win this election, and by a specific amount, is > lying. > > Not surprisingly, I'm familiar with Silver from his work at Baseball > Prospectus, and I remember when he first linked to his 538 stuff. It > made a lot of sense - aggregate state poll numbers weighted by quality > of past predictions, and generate probabilities of electoral votes. I > hadn't followed any of the people who were taking shots at this, so it > comes as a bit of a surprise. I suppose that for most of those > critics, partisanship trumps accuracy. > > I was surprised by how much of the coverage I saw was about how close > the race was supposed to be because the popular vote count looked > close. I'd check 538 occasionally, see that Obama was still more than > 70% likely to win, and chuckle at how much even "experts" were missing > that. > > And I'll leave with something a friend said decades ago: "Every > election, we say it can't get any worse. Four years later, it's > worse."
I also knew Nate from his baseball work, and just followed him into politics. The political people were even more hostile to him than the baseball people, and it was not all partisan (though that was a lot of it). I bet he got more homophobic-based toxic attacks from political junkies than he ever did from macho sports guys. But mostly it was the cult of human intuition over evidenced-based analysis, and as I said above, the need of the media to make the race look closer than it was to serve their own financial interests. As for the politics - for me what was fabulous 4 years ago got even better this time around. -- TV or Not TV .... The Smartest (TV) People! You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "TV or Not TV" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/tvornottv?hl=en
