I've been watching the War on
Nate Silver with some bemusement. It's very clear that his critics don't get him or where he comes from. Probably none of them are baseball fans, or else they are fans who have no tolerance for modern baseball statistics. There are rather a lot of those.
Silver is one of the pioneers of
Sabermetrics, the modern approach to baseball stats. This movement was and still is focused on using statistical techniques to more accurately describe and predict the results on the field. Little stock is placed in conventional wisdom or traditional stats. Sabermetricians will be happy to discuss the weaknesses of ERA and Batting Average in characterizing player performance, or the importance of luck.
Baseball traditionalists hate Sabermetrics. Yankee fans don't want to believe that over his career, Derek Jeter has been a league average shortstop, which is what modern defensive stats appear to be telling us (consider this
this article, which defends Jeter's defense by bringing up his batting average. Death of Sabermetrics? Try death of logic). Traditional baseball commentators seem to feel threatened (consider the views of former ESPN analyst
Joe Morgan).
Now, what does this have to do with politics and the 2012 election? Pretty much everything. There are two groups who seem to be mad as hell at Nate Silver.
There are the Romney supporters who have persuaded themselves that the polls are skewed. Consider these the "Fans". They don't like what the numbers tell them, and therefore loudly declare that they must be wrong.
And there are the pundits who feel threatened by challenges to the conventional wisdom they peddle on talk shows and in the printed press. Consider these the "Sportscasters". Their positions depend on the illusion of insider access and the further illusion that insider access means something. Silver's results strongly suggest that insider access may not be worth so much.
Silver recently participated in a twitter exchange with Joe Scarborough of MSNBC in which he appeared to challenging Scarborough to a bet on Obama vs Romney. The NY Times public editor
didn't like this. She seems to not understand that Silver was almost certainly betting on his model, not on a candidate (and Scarborough was betting on his pundithood and insider access).
I think that what Nate Silver is about is validating and improving his model, and clearing the woods of worthless and incorrect conventional wisdom. That's pretty much what he's always been about, whether the subject is Baseball or Politics.
