Happy Election Day everyone! I went out and voted this morning
and hope you all will too. The past few weeks for many of us have been a veritable
bombardment of political ads and polls. It seems like every day there are several
new polls out, sometimes with conflicting results. It has made me think about
how presidential elections have evolved into an incredibly calculated guessing
game and even more about the statisticians behind this evolution.
I am continually amazed by the changing
face of statistics. I can easily look back 30 years ago when I started
recruiting for this industry and remember the stigma that these professionals
carried. Statisticians were back room number crunchers whose brilliance was rarely
recognized. You would be a god in the statistical community if you had a
textbook taught at a university, let alone had a New York Times Bestseller on
the bookshelves.
Needless to say, the script is very different today. Moneyball
has reached pop culture status, Facebook
and Twitter are providing scientists with information about public safety,
and Nate Silver is now a household name.
If you haven’t heard of Silver yet, you’re in the minority. Author
of the widely popular New York Times blog FiveThirtyEight,
Silver is showing the world that statistics is sexy. He rose to fame with his
PECOTA system used to predict the performance of major league baseball players
and over the years has turned to politics. (I’m sure you’ve all read about his
much debated 2012 presidential
picks!)
I for one could not be happier to have Silver in the spotlight.
His new book The
Signal and the Noise is on my holiday reading list and his refreshing
insights are always a nice break from the same old commentary. Silver’s unique
approach to statistics will be highlighted this week as part of the Karla
Scherer Endowed Lecture Series for the University of Chicago. With the
election winding down this week, he is sure to speak about a wide array of
topics, including his first love: baseball.
Tickets are (not surprisingly) sold out, but I can only hope
to see more of Silver and the new face of statistics in the coming months.
1 comment:
Great post! After much of the high profile criticism of Nate Silver and accusations of bias it was very gratifying to hear him state during an interview late into election night, in as humble a tone as possible: "I'm keeping my fingers crossed. We haven't missed one yet tonight." His model has now proven to have accurately predicted 50 out of 50 states. Amazing!
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