Sorting through it all

I was heartened this morning to find that the #1 most emailed article on NYTimes.com was a profile of Nate Silver, founder of FiveThirtyEight.com. I followed 538 religiously this campaign season. As the article today points out, Silver, a 30-year-old numbers whiz, started the website partially out of frustration with the mainstream media's treatment of polling data—i.e., the fact that the media often treat unequal polls equally. At FiveThirtyEight, Silver instituted a poll ranking system, so that trusted polls like Quinnipiac and Rasmussen get the credence they deserve, while obscure polls using faulty sample groups get their come-uppins. When a poll was published that suggested some shifting trend, Silver would delve headfirst into why the poll got the result that it did. (See "Anatomy of a Polling Disaster.") Often, he would find some monumental error with the way the poll was conducted, and he would give that poll a poor ranking. From this kind of astute analysis, Silver made it far easier to make sense of the way public opinion of the presidential election was progressing. Previously, when the media found one of these faulty polls, which Silver calls "outliers," they would trumpet it as a shift in the direction of public opinion (sometimes a self-fulfilling prophecy). Now, such polls are relegated to the scrap heap, and future polls from those organizations are treated with deserved skepticism.

I don't watch much TV anymore, so I didn't realize that Silver had also gained significant attention as a pundit, but it makes sense. I'm happy about this for two reasons. First, he's young, and it's fantastic to see that young people doing creative things get rewarded. Second, and more importantly, we live in a new internet age, in which more and more information is constantly being tossed at us from all directions. Even the most educated people get thrown off by this constant stream of data, thus it's extremely helpful when someone like Nate Silver comes along, with a scientific or mathematical solution to sort through it all. Silver's increasing popularity bodes well for people like him, and for the education of society generally.

Finally, I'm sympathetic to Silver's point about what happens to his website, now that the election's over. He intends to continue using FiveThirtyEight to predict congressional votes on Obama initiatives, but he admits that the popularity of his site will likely dwindle.

“That’s the paradox,” [Silver] said. “You would think that you elect this guy and you want him to effect change, and then he gets elected, and people don’t care about bills being passed.”

Touché, Nate. Isn't a lack of curiosity how we got into this mess in the first place?