SXSW: Nate Silver Discusses Data Bias, the Strangeness of Fame 136
Nerval's Lobster writes "Nate Silver feels a little odd about his fame. That's not to say that he hasn't worked to get to his enviable position. Thanks to his savvy with predictive models, and the huge readership platform provided by The New York Times hosting his FiveThirtyEight blog, he managed to forecast the most recent presidential election results in all 50 states. His accuracy transformed him into a rare breed: a statistician with a household name. But onstage at this year's SXSW conference, Silver termed his fame 'strange' and 'out of proportion,' and described his model as little more than averaging the state and national polls, spiced a bit with his algorithms. "It bothered me that this was such a big deal," he told the audience. In politics, he added, most of the statistical analysis being conducted simply isn't good, which lets someone like him stand out; same as in baseball, where he made his start in predictive modeling. In fields with better analytics, the competition for someone like him would be much fiercer. He also talked about, despite a flood of data (and the tools to analyze it) in the modern world, we still face huge problems when it comes to actually understanding and using that data. 'You have a gap between what we think we know and what we really know,' he said. 'We tend to be oversensitive to random fluctuations in the data and mistake the fluctuations for real relationships.'"
Since when did South by Southwest become.. (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Since when did South by Southwest become.. (Score:4, Informative)
According to Wikipedia, "SXSW Film and Multimedia", now split in separate "SXSW Film" and "SXSW Interactive" started in 1994, seven years after the music festival did.
Re:Science is rare (Score:4, Informative)
Re:silver is honest (Score:3, Informative)
Whenever ether side gets exec/senate/house it goes full on 'spend like drunken sailors'.
Neither side has the balls to do anything unpopular unless their is a crisis driving them. Crisis is the worst possible time to try to 'fix' things.
We've been on pure print money, sell the bonds to ourselves sense the US federal reserve took on the roll of 'buying' all 'leftover' bonds at auction. There is NO market rate for US treasuries because their is no functioning market. That process ends with inflation not default (although inflation will look a lot like default to the chumps that hold the bonds).
Re:not evil...humanity (Score:4, Informative)
What is evil is how to make generally good people collectively manifest "evil" deeds.
Which is exactly what I described in the above post. The War on Drug Users is the perfect example what Thoreau meant when he said "Law never made men a whit more just; and, by means of their respect for it, even the well-disposed are daily made the agents of injustice."
I think we're both right. It is part of human nature, but it's also evil. Jealousy and greed are also part of human nature, but they still make us do evil things. Good people learn to control those urges. Politicians apparently never learned to control theirs.
We are part of the problem. (Score:4, Informative)
The Ds think they don't have a spending problem. The Rs think only the Ds have a spending problem.
It's not solely a problem with either the Ds or the Rs really. It's a problem with the voters who elect them. Their disagreements usually are just a symptom of the problem. WE are the ones who demand all these services (medicare, defense, etc) but WE are the ones who vote people out of office who dare to suggest it will cost something and that we might have to pay taxes for them. WE are the the ones who refuse to acknowledge that we might not actually need 11 aircraft carrier battle groups or perhaps we might be ok with a bit less Medicare. Our leaders are to an alarming degree a reflection of our own dysfunction. It's easy to blame them but collectively if we want to point fingers the mirror is a good place to start.
Valid Criticism (Score:5, Informative)
Cathy O'Neil (Mathbabe) offers a well-argued criticism of Nate Silver when he stepped beyond his area of expertise in his recent, popular book, '"The Signal and the Noise: Why so many predictions fail – but some don’t"
http://mathbabe.org/2012/12/20/nate-silver-confuses-cause-and-effect-ends-up-defending-corruption/ [mathbabe.org]
According to Ms. O'Neil, Mr. Silver fails to recognize situations where bad models are deliberately used to game that system.