poker and baseball nerd become political forecaster gained fame after predicting the outcome of U.S. elections, with amazing accuracy. And as his star rises so does a whole new generation of "some" leaders of the digital revolution
Nate Silver is a new type of star policy. Someone who really knows what he's talking about. United States, scholarship has always been to have the right kind of hair or teeth or on the right side of the foam. Money has none of these things. It has only numbers. Many of them. And in the night of the U.S. presidential election, proved correct fairly spectacular.
For weeks and months, the election was "very close". Pundit after commenter stated that the election could "go either way". That was "head to head". But this was not the case. In the end, turned out not to be suitable for all. Or simply that Nate Silver had been saying for months. On election day, predicted that Obama was able to win 90.9% in the majority of electoral votes and gnashing of survey data successfully predicted the correct result in 50 of 50 states.
"Do you know who won the election night?" Asked MSNBC TV presenter, Rachel Maddow. "Nate Silver."
Twitter is in crisis. The blogosphere was Nate Silvertastic. Sales of his first book,
signal and noise: The art and science of forecasting
jumped 800% overnight and reached number two on the sales list. And whole sections of the press decided that it was not only a personal triumph for Nate Silver - was the triumph of the nerds. A man and his mathematical model had overcome a political journalists, Spin Doctors, hacks and commentators.
Silvernot much later fame and hottest American television news. Or "The new boyfriend chattering classes", as Washington Post
called. La Plata 34 years is a very convincing Clark Kent before Superman makeover. It is so small, brewing, headlong into the room, looked almost embarrassed by the idea of ??being interviewed. poor Nate. There is a lot to live up to. Pushes glasses up his nose. "It was crazy," he said. But then, it really does not see it. "I became invested with symbolic power. Transcends not really what I do and what they truly deserve. And I would be the first to say I want the diversity of opinions. You do not want to treat a person as an oracle. "
It may be a little late for that, though. The day after the election, he continued
The Daily Show
and Jon Stewart was hailed as "Nate Silver, the Lord, the God of the algorithm."
In other circumstances, if the money had been another type of personality, be more selfish, it could all be a bit much. But it is also a story about the underdog coming out on top. In the weeks before the election, critics of money (especially on the right, angry, he predicted an Obama victory). Attacked not only the methodology, but also
UnSkewedPolls.com Dean Chambers celebrated its "voodoo statistics", said he was "smoking locoweed" and finally declared a "weak and effeminate" man "small "with a" soft-sounding voice. "
There was more than a touch of homophobia criticism (Silver is gay), to say nothing of aversion to scientific rationalism that has come to characterize some areas of the right conservative. (Gawker compared the attack "slap something like jock a mathematics book in the hands of a child saying" NICE NUMBERS, FAG. ")
But anyway, it seems that flattery was more difficult to handle. "It makes me nervous. Because I guarantee you will begin to go wrong," he said. "We" is his blog, FiveThirtyEight (the name of the 538 electoral votes), which was created in 2007 to provide a data-based analysis of the police and, in 2010, moved to the site of the great Cathedral of the new policy and the U.S., the
New York Times
is a fact that reinforces his credentials as Clark Kent. We sit in
Times
of super smooth Manhattan Midtown skyline with its view of millions. And yet, in the days before the election, was rudimentary little blog money, which led to 20% of its traffic. (Is not it a coincidence that DC Comics announced last month that, after 70 odd years, Superman would withdraw from the
Daily Planet
create a blog. ) Silver Because if this is not the Superman of Big Data, it is certainly Supergeek their pin-up boy. And it is clear that learning more about politics without assistance is almost as effective a method of searching for the truth that the stool dodge.
always been a matter of numbers with Silver. "I've always been a bit silly," he said. He grew up in East Lansing, Michigan, the local baseball team, the Detroit Tigers won the World Series when I was six years old, "and had all kinds of statistics and it really was. "
After graduating from the University of Chicago with a degree in economics, he worked for four years as a consultant at KPMG. Then he discovered online poker. "It was the time when there were many people who come on sites that had really no idea," says Silver. He, however, was good enough to take your money, taken in its work "for a time lived the dream of poker. "
Poker is a magnet in the life of the money. He learned about the accident and its role in life. "And I had a better education than anything else I can think of how to weigh the new information, which could be important information that could be lower. Our base instincts tend to be not very proper. Tend to overweight new information. "
Finally, he said, "had this tenuous relationship between skill and luck and ambiguity between the two. Where is this money, I was lucky or was I right? Never can tell. "Estimates made about $ 400,000 (? 252,000) gambling online, simply pursue his other love: baseball. Sport is changing and money has become one of the few People who saw the possibility that it is more objective and information management. has created a website, Pecota, who modeled a system for predicting the career of players in Major League Baseball, then sold the prospectus baseball.
is a battle between the old-school scouts and a new wave of newcomers statistically spirit, a struggle that was said in the bestselling book by Michael Lewis Moneyball
and later a movie with Brad Pitt. In 2007, Silver was casting around for something new.
"I was looking for something like baseball, where a large amount of data and the competition was quite low. It was then that I discovered politics. "It was originally anonymous, calling Poblano, until a few months later, he marginalized.
Silverthought that taking the available data and the application of Bayesian theory to it, you could have "a few perks." There is a wealth of data on American politics and the Bayesian theory, a way to calculate conditional probabilities has been an English clergyman Thomas Bayes, who first made some time in the early 18th century. It was not, as his critics have been quick to point out, exactly rocket science.
But money is the first to agree. It is not even the only one to have done this. Others have been less successful. Basically, it is absolutely bog-standard statistics. He said electoral data. The project or the "secret" of his model is what gives weight to these data. How is it done in the past, which could be biased, what other information can be exerted on it.
But in the rarefied world of American politics, showed significantly more accurate than was there before. Or even in British politics for that matter. We do not have the same abundance of survey data that exist in America, so that its use could be less successful here, but this has not prevented the Daily Telegraph Janet Daley with a weight on the France elections. On election day, said a win for Romney, arguing that the Obama campaign does not "feel" like a winner to her. Others had a "hunch" that Romney would edge. With competition like that, said Silver, it really was not hard to do something a little less medieval.
What is interesting is that campaigns, especially Obama, the importance of data. They hired a "chief scientist" and, according to campaign manager, Jim Messina, set to "measure everything." Numbers says that the approach and how to approach them.
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