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Notes -
Nate Silver left FiveThirtyEight amid layoffs and Elliott Morris, ABC's new hire immediately set about ruining it. A threat he sent to conservative polling company Rasmussen Reports:
As Nate Silver puts it, Why, unless you’re a dyed-in-the-wool left-leaning partisan, would having a “relationship with several right-leaning blogs and online media outlets” lead one to “doubt the ethical operation of the polling firm”?. I agree with Silver's overall attitude on the new direction of his company: hope ABC will stop use of 538 brand so it isn't associated with me.
Some people are probably mad at ABC for being partisan hacks but frankly that's business as usual. I'm mad because FiveThirtyEight was one of the only good analysis sites out there and these vandals are going to turn it into another factory pumping out generic progressive sludge. God damnit! 538 was the best in the business, where am I supposed to go for election forecasts now?
Nate Silver has been one of my favorite commentators for a long time, since well before he was primarily in the politics business due to his clear writing on baseball analytics. Every time he comes up in a controversy of some sort, I'm reminded of why I'm a fan - whether I agree with him or not, I think he really, truly does his best to get things right via careful, non-partisan analysis. Silver has been incredibly consistent on how to use pollsters predictively, part of which is including pollsters that have known house effects and simply correcting for that when incorporating them into the analysis.
As a result of his insistence on avoiding partisan hackery, Silver takes a ton of shit from people on Twitter and other elements of the commentariat that are just less competent at actually analyzing things than him. Amusingly, this used to come largely from the right-wing, who kept making fun of his model for giving Trump a roughly 30% chance to win the 2016 election, because apparently grasping that 2:1 underdogs win pretty often is basically impossible for some people. That Silver is now more controversial on the left than the right is another example of what I view as American progressives dissociating themselves from ground truth, with that phenomenon accelerating aggressively with Covid, Summer of Floyd, and gender ideology.
"Amusingly, this used to come largely from the right-wing, who kept making fun of his model for giving Trump a roughly 30% chance to win the 2016 election, because apparently grasping that 2:1 underdogs win pretty often is basically impossible for some people."
I'm going to push back on this as a mis-recollection of the actual facts.
Trump's rise badly damaged Silver's credibility, but its wasn't Trump's general election win, it was his GOP nomination.
Examples that aged poorly:
https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/donald-trump-is-winning-the-polls-and-losing-the-nomination/
https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/donald-trumps-six-stages-of-doom/
To his credit, Silver has largely fessed up to screwing this up:
https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/how-i-acted-like-a-pundit-and-screwed-up-on-donald-trump/
Another article delving into the details of this:
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2016/01/nate-silver-said-donald-trump-had-no-shot-where-did-he-go-wrong.html
All in all, I'm a Silver fan, in the grand scheme of things, I think he does a pretty good job, but the Trump nomination screw up showed that he's not immune to certain biases.
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