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Nate Silver & the “Moneyball” analogy
Forecasting Tuesday
Friday, November 02, 2012
BROOKE GLADSTONE: I don’t know, I think that you yourself, if you weren't affecting this false modesty right now –
- would concede that people following your meta poll would be closer than people who were trying to follow individual polls.
NATE SILVER: Well, I’ll tell you what I’m less modest about though, I think we have a better way of doing things, and the reason I got into this is because I found the horserace coverage extremely vapid, right, where a lot of it was just kind of recycling quotes from the campaigns and, and talking in clichés but didn't really hold up to scrutiny. And I had seen in baseball, a field I was in before covering politics, how you had kind of the “Moneyball” revolution seeped its way into kind of journalism first and then inside the game.
Politics, is kind of the, the reverse almost, where campaigns themselves are quite data driven but I think the people who cover them are not as much. They’re always more allured by what they think is the, quote, unquote, narrative, what - what I think, frankly, is the – is the spin.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: You’re kinda like the Jonah Hill character –
- of politics.
NATE SILVER: I've gotten that comparison more than the Brad Pitt comparison...
http://www.onthemedia.org/2012/nov/02/forecasting-tuesday/transcript/
http://audio.wnyc.org/otm/otm110212c.mp3
Friday, November 02, 2012
BROOKE GLADSTONE: I don’t know, I think that you yourself, if you weren't affecting this false modesty right now –
- would concede that people following your meta poll would be closer than people who were trying to follow individual polls.
NATE SILVER: Well, I’ll tell you what I’m less modest about though, I think we have a better way of doing things, and the reason I got into this is because I found the horserace coverage extremely vapid, right, where a lot of it was just kind of recycling quotes from the campaigns and, and talking in clichés but didn't really hold up to scrutiny. And I had seen in baseball, a field I was in before covering politics, how you had kind of the “Moneyball” revolution seeped its way into kind of journalism first and then inside the game.
Politics, is kind of the, the reverse almost, where campaigns themselves are quite data driven but I think the people who cover them are not as much. They’re always more allured by what they think is the, quote, unquote, narrative, what - what I think, frankly, is the – is the spin.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: You’re kinda like the Jonah Hill character –
- of politics.
NATE SILVER: I've gotten that comparison more than the Brad Pitt comparison...
http://www.onthemedia.org/2012/nov/02/forecasting-tuesday/transcript/
http://audio.wnyc.org/otm/otm110212c.mp3