| Nate Silver | |
|---|---|
| Born | Nathaniel Read Silver January 13, 1978 [1] East Lansing, Michigan |
| Residence | Brooklyn, New York |
| Nationality | American |
| Education | A.B., Economics (2000) |
| Alma mater | University of Chicago East Lansing High School |
| Occupation | Statistician, journalist |
| Known for | PECOTA, FiveThirtyEight.com |
| Website | |
| fivethirtyeight.blogs.nytimes.com | |
Nathaniel Read "Nate" Silver (born January 13, 1978) is an American statistician, psephologist, and writer. Silver first gained public recognition for developing PECOTA,[2] a system for forecasting the performance and career development of Major League Baseball players, which he sold to and then managed for Baseball Prospectus from 2003 to 2009.[3]
In 2007, writing under the pseudonym "Poblano," Silver began to publish analyses and predictions related to the 2008 United States presidential election. At first this work appeared on the political blog Daily Kos, but in March 2008 Silver established his own website, FiveThirtyEight.com. By summer of that year, after he revealed his identity to his readers, he began to appear as an electoral and political analyst in national print, online, and cable news media.
The accuracy of his November 2008 presidential election predictions—he correctly predicted the winner of 49 of the 50 states—won Silver further attention and commendation. The only state he missed was Indiana, which went for Barack Obama by 0.9%. He also correctly predicted the winner of all 35 Senate races that year.
In April 2009, he was named one of The World's 100 Most Influential People by Time.[4]
In 2010, Silver's FiveThirtyEight blog was licensed for publication by The New York Times.[5][6] The newly renamed blog, FiveThirtyEight: Nate Silver's Political Calculus,[7] first appeared in The Times on August 25, 2010.
Contents |
Silver was born in East Lansing, Michigan. He was an early math wizard.[8] According to journalist William Hageman, "Silver caught the baseball bug when he was 6.... It was 1984, the year the Detroit Tigers won the World Series. The Tigers became his team and baseball his sport. And if there's anything that goes hand in glove with baseball, it's numbers, another of Silver's childhood interests. ("It's always more interesting to apply it to batting averages than algebra class".[9])
As a student at East Lansing High School, in 1996 Silver won first place in the State of Michigan in the 49th annual John S. Knight Scholarship Contest for senior high school debaters.[10]
Silver learned his journalism skills as a writer and opinion page editor for The Portrait, East Lansing High School's student newspaper, from 1993–1996.
In 2000, Silver graduated with Honors with an A.B. degree in economics from the University of Chicago. He also wrote for the Chicago Weekly News and the Chicago Maroon. He spent his third year at the London School of Economics.[11]
After college graduation in 2000, Silver worked for three and a half years as an economic consultant with KPMG in Chicago. When asked in 2009, "Q: What is your biggest regret in life?" Silver responded "A: Spending four years of my life at a job I didn’t like".[12] While employed at KPMG, however, Silver continued to nurture his life-long interest in baseball and statistics, and on the side he began to work on his PECOTA system for projecting player performance and careers. He quit his job at KPMG in April 2004 and for a time earned his living mainly by playing online poker.[13]
In 2003, Silver became a writer for Baseball Prospectus (BP), after having sold PECOTA to BP in return for a partnership interest. After resigning from KPMG in 2004, he took the position of Executive Vice-President, later renamed Managing Partner of BP. In addition to providing executive functions, Silver maintained and further developed PECOTA as well as wrote a weekly feature column under the heading "Lies, Damned Lies". In this column he applied sabermetric techniques to a broad range of topics in baseball research—including, among others, forecasting the performance of individual players, the economics of baseball, metrics for the valuation of players, and developing an Elo rating system for Major League baseball.[14]
Between 2003 and 2009, Silver was a co-author of the Baseball Prospectus (ISBN 0-7611-3995-8) annual book of Major League Baseball analysis and forecasts as well as a co-author of other books published by Baseball Prospectus, including Mind Game: How the Boston Red Sox Got Smart, Won a World Series, and Created a New Blueprint for Winning (New York: Workman Publishers, 2005) (ISBN 0-7611-4018-2), Baseball Between the Numbers (New York: Basic Books, 2006) (ISBN 0-465-00596-9), and It Ain't Over 'til It's Over: The Baseball Prospectus Pennant Race Book (New York: Basic Books, 2007) (ISBN 0-465-00284-6).
He was an occasional contributor of articles about baseball to ESPN.com, Sports Illustrated, Slate, the New York Sun and the New York Times.[15]
In November 2007, while still working for Baseball Prospectus, Silver began to write about politics, specifically the 2008 U.S. Presidential race. Until the end of May 2008, this writing was under the pseudonym "Poblano" and appeared on Daily Kos or on his blog FiveThirtyEight.com, which he launched in March 2008. Beginning in June he began to publish political analysis under his own name, including in his blog, newspapers, and The New Republic. He first appeared on national television on CNN's American Morning on June 13, 2008.[16] The success of his FiveThirtyEight.com blog and the accuracy of his detailed forecasts of the 2008 U.S. Presidential race marked the effective end of his career as baseball analyst, though he continued to devote some attention to sports statistics and sports economics.
Shortly after the November 4 election, ESPN writer Jim Caple observed, "Forget Cole Hamels and the Phillies. No one in baseball had a more impressive fall than Nate Silver.... [R]ight now Silver is exhausted. He barely slept the last couple weeks of the campaign – 'By the end, it was full-time plus' – and for that matter, he says he couldn't have kept it up had the campaign lasted two days longer. Plus, he has his Baseball Prospectus duties. 'We write our [Baseball Prospectus 2009] book from now through the first of the year,' [Silver] said. 'I have a week to relax and then it gets just as busy again. In February 2009 I will just have to find an island in the Caribbean and throw my BlackBerry in the ocean'".[17]
Later in November 2008, Silver signed a contract with Penguin Group USA to write two books, reportedly for a $700,000 advance.[18] In an intervew, Silver described his first book-in-progress as about "the value and limitations of predictions, looking at such diverse industries as fashion design, hurricane forecasting, and the search for extraterrestrial life".[19][20][21]
He was invited to be a speaker at TED 2009 in February 2009,[22] and keynote speaker at the 2009 South by Southwest (SXSW) Interactive conference (March 2009).[23]
While maintaining his FiveThirtyEight.com website, in January 2009 Silver began a monthly feature column, "The Data," in Esquire[24] as well as contributed occasional articles to other media such as the New York Times[25] and the Wall Street Journal.[26] He also tried his luck in the 2009 World Series of Poker.[27]
In March 2009, Silver stepped down as Managing Partner of Baseball Prospectus and announced that he had handed over responsibility for producing future PECOTA projections to other Baseball Prospectus staff members, but that he intended to continue as a writer for BP, including for BP's partner, ESPN.com.[3][28] In April 2009, he appeared as an analyst on ESPN's Baseball Tonight. However, after March 2009, he published only two "Lies, Damned Lies" columns on BaseballProspectus.com.
While continuing to write his FiveThirtyEight.com blog, he took on some freelance statistically oriented projects. In November 2009, ESPN introduced a new Soccer Power Index (SPi),[29] developed by Nate Silver, for predicting the outcome of the 2010 FIFA World Cup.[30] He published a post-mortem after the tournament, comparing his predictions to those of alternative rating systems.[31]
In April 2010, Silver took an entirely different assignment for New York Magazine, creating a quantitative index of "The Most Livable Neighborhoods in New York".[32]
In June 2010, it was announced that Silver's FiveThirtyEight.com blog would be moving to the New York Times, a platform from which it would begin to be published online in August 2010. In addition, Silver would be contributing content to the print edition of The Times as well as to the Sunday Magazine.[5] This transition occurred on August 25, 2010, with the online publication of Silver's first FiveThirtyEight column in The Times.[33]
Silver uses a wide variety of research methods and statistical tools in his writings about baseball. However, he has developed three tools that are identified with his name. The best known and most enduring is his forecasting system, PECOTA, which remains a signature product of Baseball Prospectus.
PECOTA (Player Empirical Comparison and Optimization Test Algorithm) is a statistical system that projects the future performance of hitters and pitchers. It is designed primarily for two uses: fans interested in fantasy baseball, and professionals in the baseball business interested in predicting the performance and valuation of major league players. Unlike most other such projection systems, PECOTA relies on matching a given current player to a set of "comparable" players whose past performance can serve as a guide to how the given current player is likely to perform in the future. Unlike most other such systems, PECOTA also calculates a range of probable performance levels rather than a single predicted value on a given measure such as earned run average or batting average.
PECOTA projections were first published by Baseball Prospectus in the 2003 edition of its annual book as well as online by BaseballProspectus.com. The formulae have been updated steadily since then. Silver produced the annual PECOTA forecasts for each Major League Baseball season from 2003 through 2009. Beginning in Spring 2009, Baseball Prospectus took responsibility for future editions and products based on the forecasts.[3]
Because of the dependence of earned run average statistics on factors over which a pitcher may have little control, sabermetricians have developed several defense independent pitching statistics, including Defense-Independent ERA. One that Silver has created for quick calculations that do not require detailed adjustments for the park or era in which a pitcher is performing is the "QuikERA" or QERA.[34] It may be useful for early- or mid-season assessments of a pitcher's performance, since it attempts to reduce the effect of luck in summarizing a pitcher's ERA.[35] Silver explains,
I call this toy QuikERA (QERA), which estimates what a pitcher's ERA should be based solely on his strikeout rate, walk rate, and GB/FB ratio. These three components — K rate, BB rate, GB/FB — stabilize very quickly, and they have the strongest predictive relationship with a pitcher’s ERA going forward. What’s more, they are not very dependent on park effects, allowing us to make reasonable comparisons of pitchers across different teams.
The formula for QERA is as follows: QERA =(2.69 + K%*(-3.4) + BB%*3.88 + GB%*(-0.66))2.
Note that everything ends up expressed in terms of percentages: strikeouts per opponent plate appearance, walks per opponent plate appearance, and groundballs as a percentage of all balls hit into play.[36]
Silver has also developed a formula, which he called the "Secret Sauce," to predict whether Major League teams are likely to be successful in the playoffs if they somehow manage to reach them.[37] This formula comes out of research that he initially conducted and published with Dayn Perry.[38] The formula claimed that, although during the regular season having an excellent offense above all else may get a team to the playoffs, once in the playoffs a team's success depends much more on strong defense, including pitching.[39] In other words, teams that prevent the ball from going into play, catch it when it does and preserve late-inning leads are likely to excel in the playoffs".[40]
Notable critics of the "secret sauce" formula include Tom Tango and Mitchel Lichtman, co-authors of The Book: Playing the Percentages in Baseball and the sabermetric blog The Book Blog.[41] Criticism focuses on the formula ignoring logical assumptions and relying too heavily on best-fitting sample data that may not be predictive for out-of-sample data. In September 2010 an analysis by Jesse-Douglas (J-Doug) Mathewson on the website Rational Pastime showed that the "secret sauce" formula had performed considerably worse in predicting postseason outcomes in recent years than in previous years, and that the factors Silver found to be significant do not necessarily fit a different set of postseason data (and that there are major questions about in-sample significance as well).[42]
For a few years Baseball Prospectus published Secret Sauce figures for every Major League team on its statistics page.[43] In the 2010 season, Baseball Prospectus stopped using the Secret Sauce method as an indicator of playoff success because teams that ranked higher in secret sauce than their opponents only won 54% of their playoff series since the formula was put into use.[44]
Silver describes his own partisan orientation as follows in the FAQ on his website: "My state [Illinois] has non-partisan registration, so I am not registered as anything. I vote for Democratic candidates the majority of the time (though by no means always). This year, I have been a supporter of Barack Obama".[45] With respect to the impartiality of his electoral projections, Silver states, "Are [my] results biased toward [my] preferred candidates? I hope not, but that is for you to decide. I have tried to disclose as much about my methodology as possible".[45]
Silver describes his ideological orientation as one of "rational progressivism":
I regard myself as a rational progressive. I believe in intellectual progress – that we, as a species, are gradually becoming smarter. I believe that there are objectively right answers to many political and economic questions.
I believe that economic growth is both a reflection of and a contributor toward societal progress, that economic growth has facilitated a higher standard of living, and that this is empirically indisputable. I also believe, however, that our society is now so exceptionally wealthy – even in the midst of a severe recession – that it has little excuse not to provide for some basic level of dignity for all its citizens.
I believe that answers to questions like these do not always come from the establishment. But I also believe that it is just as important to question one's own assumptions as to question the assumptions of others.[46]
On November 1, 2007, Silver began publishing a diary under the pseudonym "Poblano" on the progressive political blog Daily Kos.[47] Silver set out to analyze quantitative aspects of the political game in a manner that would enlighten a broader audience. Silver reports that "he was stranded in a New Orleans airport when the idea of FiveThirtyEight.com came to him. 'I was just frustrated with the analysis.... I saw a lot of discussion about strategy that was not all that sophisticated, especially when it came to quantitative things like polls and demographics'”.[48] His forecasts of the 2008 United States presidential primary elections drew a lot of attention, including being cited by New York Times Op-Ed columnist William Kristol.[49]
In March 2008, still using the pseudonym "Poblano," Silver established his own blog FiveThirtyEight.com, in which he developed a system for tracking polls and forecasting the outcome of the 2008 general election. At the same time, he continued making forecasts of the 2008 Democratic primary elections. That several of his forecasts based on demographic analysis proved to be substantially more accurate than those of the professional pollsters gained visibility and professional credibility for "Poblano".[50]
After the North Carolina and Indiana primaries on May 6 the popularity of FiveThirtyEight.com "really exploded. Silver recalls the scenario: 'I know the polls show it’s really tight in NC, but we think Obama is going to win by thirteen, fourteen points, and he did.... Any time you make a prediction like that people give you probably too much credit for it.... But after that [Silver's and the website's popularity] started to really take off. It’s pretty nonlinear, once you get one mention in the mainstream media, other people [quickly follow suit]'".[51]
On May 30, 2008, Poblano revealed his identity to FiveThirtyEight.com readers.[52] On June 1, 2008, Silver published a two-page Op-Ed article in the New York Post outlining the rationale underlying his focus on the statistical aspects of politics.
"My fulltime occupation has been as a writer and analyst for a sports media company called Baseball Prospectus. In baseball, statistics are meaningless without context; hitting 30 home runs in the 1930s is a lot different than hitting 30 today. There is a whole industry in baseball dedicated to the proper understanding and interpretation of statistics. In polling and politics, there is nearly as much data as there is for first basemen. In this year's Democratic primaries, there were statistics for every gender, race, age, occupation and geography – reasons why Clinton won older women, or Obama took college students. But the understanding has lagged behind. Polls are cherry-picked based on their brand name or shock value rather than their track record of accuracy. Demographic variables are misrepresented or misunderstood. (Barack Obama, for instance, is reputed to have problems with white working-class voters, when in fact these issues appear to be more dictated by geography – he has major problems among these voters in Kentucky and West Virginia, but did just fine with them in Wisconsin and Oregon)".[53]
As a CNET reporter wrote on election eve, "Even though Silver launched the site as recently as March, its straightforward approach, daring predictions, and short but impressive track record has put it on the map of political sites to follow. The Washington Post featured Silver in its 14th annual election prediction contest this year, and he'll be reporting on Tuesday night's results with Dan Rather on HDNet".[54]
Silver's final 2008 presidential election forecast accurately predicted the winner of 49 of the 50 states as well as the District of Columbia (missing only the prediction for Indiana). As his model predicted, the races in Missouri and North Carolina were particularly close. He also correctly predicted the winners of every U.S. Senate race. The accuracy of his predictions won him further acclaim, including abroad,[55] and added to his reputation as a leading political prognosticator.[56]
On June 3, 2010, Silver announced on FiveThirtyEight.com,
In the near future, the blog will "re-launch" under a NYTimes.com domain. It will retain its own identity (akin to other Times blogs like DealBook), but will be organized under the News:Politics section. Once this occurs, content will no longer be posted at FiveThirtyEight.com on an ongoing basis, and the blog will re-direct to the new URL. In addition, I will be contributing content to the print edition of the New York Times, and to the Sunday Magazine. The partnership agreement, which is structured as a license, has a term of three years.[5]
The transition to the new blog FiveThirtyEight: Nate Silver's Political Calculus sponsored by the New York Times took place on August 25, 2010, with the publication online of Silver's first article, "New Forecast Shows Democrats Losing 6 to 7 Senate Seats".[57] From then until the mid-term elections of 2010 in November, Silver's blog focused almost exclusively on developing forecasts of the outcomes of the 2010 U.S. Senate and U.S. House of Representatives as well as state gubernatorial contests. Silver's Times Sunday Magazine feature first appeared on November 19, 2010, under the heading "Go Figure".[58] It was later titled "Acts of Mild Subversion".[59]
Shortly after 538 relocated to The New York Times, Silver introduced his prediction models for the 2010 elections to the U.S. Senate, the U.S. House of Representatives, and state Governorships. Each of these models relied initially on a combination of electoral history, demographics, and polling. Silver eventually published detailed forecasts and analyses of the results for all three sets of elections.
Although throughout 2011 Silver devoted a lot of attention on his blog to the 2012 Republican party primaries, his first effort to handicap the 2012 Presidential general election appeared as the cover story in The New York Times Magazine a year prior to the election: "Is Obama Toast? Handicapping the 2012 Election".[60] Accompanying the online release of this article, Silver also published "Choose Obama’s Re-Election Adventure," an interactive toy that allowed readers to predict the outcome of the election based on their assumptions about three variables: President Obama's favorability ratings, the rate of GDP growth, and how conservative the Republican opponent would be.[61] This analysis stimulated a lot of critical discussion.[62]
Silver's self-unmasking at the end of May 2008 brought him a lot of publicity, much of it focused on his combined skill as both baseball statistician-forecaster and political statistician-forecaster, including articles about him in the Wall Street Journal,[63] Newsweek,[64] Science News,[65] New York Magazine,[66] and his hometown Lansing State Journal.[67]
In early June he began to cross-post his daily "Today's Polls" updates on "The Plank" in The New Republic.[68] Also, Rasmussen Reports began to use the FiveThirtyEight.com poll averages for its own tracking of the 2008 state-by-state races.[69]
This added exposure provided him with opportunities to appear on CNN's American Morning and D.L. Hughley Breaks the News,[70] MSNBC's Countdown with Keith Olbermann and Hardball with Chris Matthews, CNBC's Fast Money,[71] Comedy Central's The Colbert Report, WNYC's The Brian Lehrer Show, HDNet's Dan Rather Reports, Amy Goodman's Democracy Now!,[72] PBS's The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer, The Charlie Rose Show,[73] and The Rachel Maddow Shows on both Air America Radio and MSNBC, as well as to contribute essays and op ed columns to The New Republic,[74] the New York Post,[75] the Los Angeles Times,[76] and Newsweek.[77]
New York Magazine, on October 12, 2008, referred to Silver as "The Spreadsheet Psychic": "a number-crunching prodigy who went from correctly forecasting baseball games to correctly forecasting presidential primaries".[78] Other commentators drew a parallel between Silver's baseball prognosticatons and his election forecasting in 2008: "The Tampa Bay Rays and Barack Obama have made 2008 the year of the surprise contender, though one man predicted both successes before nearly anyone else – and he sees a general election landslide for Obama over John McCain on Tuesday".[79]
The celebrity that this attention brought to Silver sometimes took a curious form, including articles on Wonkette: The D.C. Gossip[80] and a Facebook group entitled "There's a 97.3 Percent Chance that Nate Silver Is Totally My Boyfriend".[81]
Throughout 2009, 2010, and 2011 Silver appeared several more times as a political analyst on national television, most frequently on MSNBC[82] but also on CNN[83] as well as Bloomberg Television,[84] PBS,[85] NPR,[86] "Democracy Now!,"[87] and ABC News.[88]
Nate Silver is a grandnephew of Leon Silver, geologist.
After residing in Chicago, Illinois for twelve years, Silver moved to New York City in 2009.[107]
Silver has long been interested in fantasy baseball, especially Scoresheet Baseball. While in college he served as an expert on Scoresheet Baseball for BaseballHQ.[108] When he took up political writing, Silver abandoned his blog, The Burrito Bracket,[109] in which he ran a one-and-done competition among the taquerias in his Wicker Park neighborhood in Chicago.[110]
In 2010, Out magazine included Silver among their top 100 GLBT people of the year.[111]
In his spare time, Silver uses his analytical approach at the poker table where he plays semi-professionally.[112]