FT
August 2, 2013 2:02 pm
By Andrew Edgecliffe-Johnson
Nate Silver has turned number-crunching into a glamour
profession. Andrew Edgecliffe-Johnson talks to him
Nate Silver was down on Anthony Weiner’s chances long before
the selfie-snapping former congressman’s campaign to become New York’s mayor
had to contend with the publication of a second wave of X-rated messages and
priapic self-portraits.
“I think his favourables were low enough that he had a cap
on his support from the get-go,” says the 35-year-old data-blogger as he
perches, straight-backed, on the edge of a black leather couch in his Manhattan
loft. Huma Abedin, Weiner’s wife and an aide to Hillary Clinton, would have won
in a landslide, he adds. The unfortunately named candidate has been a gift to
the city’s tabloids but a metropolitan mayoral race feels a little small for
Silver: the man who predicted how 49 of America’s 50 states would vote in 2008
and then swept the board in 2012.
The one-time economics student and KPMG consultant looks
every inch the nervy nerd in glasses, brown suit trousers and pale blue shirt,
but the age of “big data” has made numeracy hip. Statisticians have become
stars, from the authors of Freakonomics to Billy Beane, who applied data to
baseball at the Oakland A’s and ended up being portrayed by Brad Pitt in
Moneyball.
Nearly a year after publishing The Signal and the Noise, his
bestseller on how human foibles make most of us poor predictors of anything
from card games to climate change, Silver finds people staring at him in
airports, “not because your zipper’s undone, but because they saw you on TV”.
Characteristically, he has reduced fame to an equation: “You can almost do a
mathematical function, where it’s based on when were you last on TV and how
high-profile is the outlet. The half-life is actually pretty short,” he laughs.
He is still invited to retell the story of how he
consistently foresaw Barack Obama’s victory over Mitt Romney even as
professional pundits weakly dubbed the race too close to call. Yet the biennial
rhythms of US general elections and midterms have left Silver with itchy feet
in the lull of an odd-numbered year. “It’s hard to tell the same story 30 or 40
times,” he says. “I want to have movement and vitality and challenge myself a
little bit.”
Silver correctly called the winner in 49 of 50 states in the
2008 US presidential elections – the prediction that skyrocketed him to fame.
Four years later he managed 50 out of 50 states.
This summer has provided that opportunity. In 2010, he
licensed FiveThirtyEight.com – his political data blog named after the number
of votes in the US electoral college – to The New York Times for three years.
As the clock ticked on the deal, he was courted by other news organisations,
Wall Street firms, sports teams and Hollywood studios. The NYT wheeled out
editors and executives to persuade him to stay but in July he defied
expectations by selling FiveThirtyEight to ESPN. Walt Disney’s deep-pocketed
sports network “was kind of a 9.5 out of 10 or a 9.8 out of 10 or a 10 out of
10,” Silver explained on a conference call announcing his decision, with only
slightly less precision than his readers have come to expect. The deal, “web-focused”
at first but likely to include on-air appearances for coverage of major
sporting events and Disney’s ABC News broadcasts, gives Silver a chance to mix
politics with his original passion for applying overlooked statistics to
forecast baseball players’ performances.
He is still a Detroit Tigers fan, able to enjoy games over a
beer with friends rather than analysing them against his model, but he admits
to having become “disengaged” from baseball as electoral calendars clashed with
the October World Series season climax.
More than a return to sport, though, the former full-time
poker player now plans to create a much more ambitious web property. ESPN, the
wealthiest network on US television, has the budget for him to hire a few dozen
journalists, editors and analysts who can use data to shed new light on
anything from tennis and football to the economy, the weather, teacher
performance, college choices, local restaurants, the Oscars or even foreign
policy.
Silver tackled some of these subjects in his book, which he
stresses had only one chapter on politics. The one-time high-school debate
champion, who makes his points with focused confidence, says it is time to
branch out because he has proved his point in politics “so there are
diminishing returns in terms of intellectual interest for me”.
. . .
Despite his mild-mannered reporter look, Silver has become a
punchy voice in debates over the future of a profession shaken by disrupted
business models and new competitors. Some political journalists may dismiss him
as a mere blogger whose work could not be compared with theirs and Silver’s
sources may be numbers rather than nominees, but he says what he does is
“almost certainly journalism”. Bald men and combs come to mind when shrinking
newsrooms argue over who can define themselves as a journalist, and press-pack
conformity is not for Silver, who told Out magazine last year that being gay
had encouraged his independent-mindedness. (He described himself as “sexually
gay but ethnically straight”.)
Silver predicted four out of the five main category winners
at the 2011 Oscars, including Best Actress (Natalie Portman). This year, three
out of four of his predictions were correct.
“I’m not in the business to make friends,” he says coolly,
explaining that he thinks reporters overrate the value of “quote-unquote inside
information” from their political sources. “You’re being spun by someone. These
people are professional liars, basically,” he says, sounding affronted on the
truth’s behalf. He is equally aggravated by Washington pundits who routinely
get their predictions wrong. Recalling one Twitter feud with a journalist he
called out for his inaccurate projection on the eve of the 2012 vote, he says:
“If you don’t have that instinct for accountability, I don’t know if you can
really think of yourself as a journalist, or at least not a good journalist.”
Reporting both sides’ spin does not make you objective,
Silver adds, but “I think you have a lot of people in DC who are very detached
from reality”. He sees that most clearly in the media’s tendency to focus on
outlying polls and anecdotal pointers. It is one thing to note the number of
Romney signs in front of houses in a swing state, he argues, but quite another
to take them as evidence of the race being closer than most polls indicate.
People are usually too sure of themselves when they make
predictions, his book notes, but general elections are a rare exception. A
desire to be even-handed may help explain why political reporters seem to
preserve the fiction of a close race until the end. “It’s very easy to say it’s
too close to call. You won’t get yourself in trouble for saying that.”
Silver has caused plenty of trouble by stating the opposite.
Republican supporters accused him of bias, with Dean Chambers of Unskewed Polls
calling him “effeminate”. (That prompted Gawker founder Nick Denton, a friend,
to publish a picture of Silver with his ex-boyfriend the day after November’s election,
saying “I hope it drives the homophobes crazy.”) Silver is dismissive of such
attacks, saying: “There are some people who think that if you have a model that
says Obama has an 80 per cent chance of winning, it’s a partisan forecast.”
Politico, the Washington news outlet, has harrumphed
loudest, calling Silver overrated. “Some of his stuff goes on and on, trying to
use numbers to prove stuff that I don’t think can be proved by numbers alone,”
its executive editor said in June. There was similar pushback in parts of The
New York Times. David Brooks, one of its columnists, argued that when polls
move from offering snapshots of the current mood to projecting, “they’re
getting into silly land”. Margaret Sullivan, the NYT public editor, said last
month that some colleagues had found him “disruptive”. Silver says that claims
of tension in a newsroom he calls “a team of rivals” were “a little overblown”.
“It’s not our intention – and when I say ‘our’ I mean me and
my counsel – it’s not our intention to rehash the past,” he says carefully. He
is frustrated by inaccurate accounts of his exit from the NYT, but won’t set
the record straight: “There’s this dilemma where you’re being professional by
being careful and confidential and other people are being less careful and
confidential,” he says.
Capitol Hill
Silver predicted the winner in 35 out of 35 races for the US
Senate in 2008. Four years later, he got 31 out of 33.
The public editor acknowledged Silver’s “unmatched” ability
to bring traffic to the NYT’s website, particularly from elusive young readers.
At the election season’s height, when traffic to FiveThirtyEight peaked at 10
times normal levels, one in five NYT digital readers was visiting the blog.
Silver notes the jump in digital subscriptions the NYT enjoyed that quarter,
saying pointedly: “I can’t say that was all FiveThirtyEight but I think it
brought a lot of value to the paper.” Post-election, his non-politics posts
attracted more traffic than his political pieces, he adds.
He won’t say what ESPN paid for FiveThirtyEight. He could
perhaps have made more by taking his algorithmic aptitude to a hedge fund, but
the option did not appeal: “It’s not like I’m struggling by any means but I
would find it much more satisfying to make a good to very good income, where
you’re building out the brand in the public eye, than to go and work for a
hedge fund.”
. . .
His 12th-storey apartment, close to Penn Station, is calm and
sparsely decorated but not hedge-fund showy. The self-confessed design snob has
broken up the white walls with a few well-picked pieces of contemporary art.
The windows offer a view of the spires of a Catholic church, a few rooftop
wooden water towers and Madison Square Garden, home of the New York Knicks.
But he is more interested in data than the view. As a child
in Lansing, Michigan – the son of a political scientist father who would
analyse stadium capacity figures for fun and an activist mother with a PhD in
French history – Silver could multiply two-digit numbers in his head: taking 48
and 54 and coming up with 2,592.
An algorithm brought him his first fame. His Pecota model,
which stands for “Player Empirical Comparison and Optimisation Test Algorithm”,
compared baseball players with other similar individuals in major-league
history. Silver’s model looked past the commonly watched stats, such as batting
average, and assigned greater weight to less-quoted ones, such as how often a
batter gets on base, which correlated more to teams winning games.
Similarly, FiveThirtyEight’s model weighs up factors, from
pollsters’ past accuracy to the religious and economic make-up of each state,
then simulates the election 10,000 times to provide a probabilistic assessment
of likely outcomes, based on polls going back to 1952. “We know that we’re
going to get some of them wrong,” Silver cautions. The probability of any
election victory is almost never 100 per cent. “You have a 70-30 bet, you’re
supposed to get that wrong 30 per cent of the time.”
He is frustrated by people who prefer simple blue-or-red
forecasts to such numerate nuance. “In baseball, it’s reached a healthy
equilibrium where numbers-driven analysis is used in an appropriate way.” But
politics is still far behind, he says: “I feel like we’re still fighting the
Moneyball wars of 2003 and it might take another 10 years, if at all.”
The problem with political commentary is that it favours
ideologues. CNN, stuck between Fox News on the right and MSNBC on the left, is
struggling to revive its ratings because “the energy in politics is on the
extremes,” Silver observes.
If most people struggle to interpret simple polls, will
companies fare any better with the “big data” they are excitedly crunching? “I
don’t think we’re on the edge of a singularity in terms of people becoming much
more productive,” he says. In many cases, when he explores a new field and
discovers how people misread the data about it, “it just kind of becomes
depressing”.
Silver says he does not get on well with political reporters
but is friends with media entrepreneurs such as Gawker’s Denton and Andrew
Sullivan, the prominent blogger. His generation shares that entrepreneurial
ambition, he says. “It used to be that you would idolise the guy who graduated
at the top of his class from Harvard, and now you idolise the guy who drops out
of Harvard to run a business,” he smiles. “I think these newspapers have a lot
in common with Ivy League universities.” There is the prestige and the bright
people “but there’s lots of internal politics. There are pockets of amazing things
that are happening, but also pudgy bureaucratic cultures in other respects.”
Silver is not exactly dropping out; ESPN is a corporate
giant with the resources to commercialise FiveThirtyEight more than ever. “I’m
still pretty hungry,” he says, explaining that moving to ESPN was a decision to
work “really, really hard for four more years” instead of coasting. “You could
take a more relaxed route and kind of write now and then and travel a lot.
That’s great, but I can do that in my fifties or sixties or seventies. Right
now I want to build something while I’m still young.”
-------------------------------------------
Andrew Edgecliffe-Johnson is the FT’s media editor
Nate Silver will be at the Edinburgh International Book
Festival on August 13 to talk about ‘The Signal and the Noise: The Art and
Science of Prediction’ (Penguin). www.edbookfest.co.uk
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