>The Times was also in the midst of a leadership transition, and new management tends to want to move on from the old regime’s pet projects, even if they were successful.
Learning about B2B sales over the years, the size of this leadership-change factor has been among the most eye-opening (and among the most disappointing).
It cuts both ways: You can have a successful pilot that doesn't proceed because this-or-that VP was replaced, and to show off their bold new direction, the new VP cancels almost everything novel the previous person started. Or you can reach out just at the moment the new guy or gal comes in, right when they're looking for the pieces of their bold new direction, and you become part of that.
I would love to have later learned that leaders who evaluate opportunities separate from personal attachment are seen as more efficient, better, and selected favorably; that more successful companies are less subject to this sort of political/careerist whimsy. Alas. At least I have been fortunate enough to experience both directions in quantities that roughly balance out.
> I would love to have later learned that leaders who evaluate opportunities separate from personal attachment are seen as more efficient, better, and selected favorably; that more successful companies are less subject to this sort of political/careerist whimsy.
My experience is that it's the opposite: the more successful the company is, the more prone it is to flights of executive whimsy. At more successful companies, it basically doesn't matter what the executives do, because the company's moat is so big that it can tolerate grotesque mismanagement and still make money. (This is the converse of the old aphorism "When a management with a reputation for brilliance tackles a business with a reputation for bad economics, it is the reputation of the business that remains intact."). Executives seem extremely uncomfortable with the idea that they are being paid tens of millions of dollars and yet nothing they do matters, and so they're intent on leaving their mark. Thus, they cancel all the pet projects of the past management, instill their own ideas, and boldly take the company in a new direction. Except not really, because the fundamental parts of the business that make it work are all handled by people 8 levels down in the org chart whose job functions are considered common sense by everybody and never really up for discussion.
At least, this was my experience at Google, which is perhaps the best money-making machine ever invented and yet is grotesquely mismanaged by mid-level VPs that cancel every promising new product that comes out, only to start their own initiatives that themselves get canceled by their successors.
> the more successful the company is, the more prone it is to flights of executive whimsy
Apple's Liquid Glass comes to mind.
The design exec responsible suddenly left Apple for Meta, a company rather less esteemed for design, and Apple still hasn't acknowledged this failure or backtracked.
Apple has strategically retreated a few times but it always puts on a show of doing it in a “forward” direction. Look for much of the annoyances of Liquid Glass to quietly be lost.
My job involves service contracts for the cloud. We get to know workloads and optimize them and learn how to troubleshoot them to reduce mitigation time.
I had a big customer go from "must have, non-negotiable" for my team to a non-renewal in weeks when a new CTO came in. Within a month, they had an outage we could have mitigated quickly and had our yearly contract pay for itself.
Having been on both sides of this: Often, one of the purposes of the leadership change was to start shedding the old regime's pet projects. Even semi-successful pet projects can be a distraction from the direction the company wants to go.
I've been unlucky enough to work under several executives who thought they could resist direction from the CEO and board. They pushed their pet projects and thought leadership would eventually see the light. Instead they got ejected from the company and replaced with someone who knew how to follow orders.
My cynical assumption when I first saw this was that it was all just politics, but I have to admit that life is so much easier when your management chain isn't fighting uphill all the time. If the CEO and board want the company working on some things and not others, you're on thin ice if your manager is assigning you to go against the company's direction. It's scarier when you may not even know what they're doing to you.
For this specific case, completely pulling the content offline feels like a loss across the board. I could see it happening as an overreaction, to send a message that the new management is serious about not repeating the (perceived or otherwise) mistakes of their predecessors with an unmistakable signal
I enjoyed FiveThirtyEight back in the day, but does anyone actually go back and look at the old posts? They were very much of the moment. I'd imagine the vast vast majority of the traffic to them is robots.
I can see why they wouldn't be a priority to keep up. For archival purposes, I'd think everything is still in the internet archive?
Nate seems to try to justify this a touch, saying he personally was looking for a specific article. Kind of a special case there…
At this point in my life I have zero patience or sympathy for the story of a man selling his company to a massive conglomerate and then feeling betrayed or somehow sad/regretful when said conglomerate destroys it or weaponizes it. I'm simply tired of this hindsight virtue signaling. They don't care about us. That means even you, Nate Silver. Btw was a big fan back then! Signal and the Noise was a great book.
There's value in making more people aware of something, even if it appears obvious to you. It's possible that someone who doesn't share your views on Disney, or corporations more broadly, might have been familiar with FiveThirtyEight and will have their views changed by Nate Silver's account of the situation. There's also nothing wrong with someone reflecting on something they worked on for over a decade and identifying things they could have done differently.
Ironically, your comment adds nothing to the discussion other than virtue signaling that you're "in the know" on this subject.
I'll disagree. As an open forum, all responses are allowed, even telling someone to sleep in the bed they made.
But it does bring up a good point. That too many people are trying to have their cake and eat it too. Any reasonable person does, or ought to know, the cycle 538 went through. And we need to stop giving the benefit of the doubt to reasonable people who say "well I'm the one who didn't"
"While this perceived inauthenticity is viewed with scorn and contempt by members of the subculture, the definition of the term and to whom it should be applied is subjective. While the term is most associated with the 1970s- and 1980s-era punk and hardcore subculture, English use of the term originates in the late 19th century."
> I'm simply tired of this hindsight virtue signaling.
Virtue signalling is a funny term. What, exactly, does it mean here? In what way is reminiscing about a venture that lasted 15 years of your life "virtue signalling"? It seems to be that word is trotted out as a meaningless cliche, something in the sense of "I don't like this thing, but I'll sound more sophisticated if I accuse it of this nebulous bad thing rather than just saying I don't like it".
The man is allowed to write a blog post about the final conclusion of a huge phase of his life. You don't have to give him your sympathy, but there's nothing wrong with writing about it.
The "virtue signaling" is signaling being a scrappy creative type who regrets/disliked the path he followed when he actually sold out to a big conglomerate at the first possible opportunity. The virtues being signaled are things like independence and grit.
Perhaps you read a different blog post than I did, but that's not what he signalled at all. He regrets getting involved with ESPN specifically because it was a poor fit for him as a television network that didn't have a suitable business model for 538, and would have preferred if he had taken the competing offers from NYT or Bloomberg in 2013 and then wanted to move to The Athletic in 2018. At no point did he say anything like "I wish I didn't sell 538 and stuck it out alone".
I don't understand the use of the word "actually" in this sentence. The second half does not stand in contrast to the first half. In fact, it explains the first half.
And portraying oneself as having independence and grit when one doesn't actually (which I don't concede happened here) is not what virtue signaling is. "Virtue" here more closely means "morality" than "admirable or sympathetic qualities". Virtue signaling is disingenuously behaving like you are a moral person because it is advantageous, when in fact you lack such morals.
I feel the need to belabor this because accusations of virtue signaling are too often unfounded and amount to a cheap trick to shut down more thoughtful discussion.
“Virtue signaling” has become a thought-terminating cliche.
All it really amounts to is an accusation of insincerity motivated by vanity, which is a two-for-one ad hominem attack that allows the accuser to avoid responding to the actual point.
It is a statement on a culture that values insincere "feelgoodery" over truth. We can decry the downfall of common sense even if it comes at the expense of pointing out the obvious. Imo this is a good trend.
This has literally nothing to do with the article, and really nothing to do with almost any usage of the term I've seen. I pretty much always see it as a kind of incoherent insult that, like this usage here, isn't based in any kind of reality but instead just makes the person writing it feel good about themselves for some reason.
Easy phrase for rude folks to trot out when someone raises ethical/moral/legal concerns. Quick little rationalization:
_other person says they care about thing I don't that admittedly does sound good, so it has to be wrong to have mentioned it - I can't just say I don't care about the good-sounding thing_
(Of course, on the internet, people will end up playing make believe with their values, but it shouldn't be the first assumption. Or maybe it should, but with a hard second look.)
I wrote this exact comment elsewhere on the thread and got downvoted for it. Business is business! It sucks for Nate but he's acting like a sore loser, when this is a totally normal and expected outcome. Businesses acquire other businesses and sunset them all the time. Zero sympathy from me.
they do since Substack was invented because it turns out a digital rehabilitation facility for whiny and overly wordy sore losers is a fantastic subscription business.
Might want to think about selling that one to Disney as well and then writing about your great regrets of selling your substack on substack v2 in ten years, that's gotta be amazing content for another ten posts
What are your criteria for recognizing a useful insightful blog into a poster's previous business ventures?
Few tellers are neutral and objective, many writers get accused of selectively editing things:
Philip Greenspun's account of the demise of Ars Digita springs to mind. Or Jerry Kaplan on Go (mobile startup). Or Joel Spolsky on the last decade of StackOverflow.
I think Nate Silver is off the mark as to what Disney wanted to get out of this. Entertainment companies like Disney make plays where they buy a huge portfolio of entertainment assets and see which ones manage to hit it big. They invest resources and they help quite a lot, but it does come down to the entertainer to take it all the way. In other words, a Disney executive probably bought 538 expecting that it might become the next CNN or Fox - the next big secondary source news analysis platform. Note that Disney doesn't have one of those in their portfolio right now. Instead, 538 continued to produce wonkish articles about esoterica of sports and politics statistics, and did not expand to the grand role that Disney may have imagined. The ad revenue from some wonkish articles isn't going to cover the cost of a number of writers and statisticians, which is why Nate Silver went to a bigger player in the first place.
The core problem here seems to be that the visions of the buyers were not aligned with Nate Silver's vision. He wanted to continue having a blog on esoteric statistics, but with the resources of a news network. They may have wanted to have a news network, and acquire it at the price of a blog on esoteric statistics. This wasn't a loss-leading "feather in the cap" for Disney, but a bet that simply didn't pay off and needed to be put out to pasture.
> I did too much bragging in the media and didn’t anticipate the extent to which public opinion toward FiveThirtyEight would shift once we became a corporate-backed incumbent rather than an eccentric upstart
Can’t speak for everyone else, but it wasn’t this for me. It was about 2016 presidential that lost me.
He tries to justify this later about how theirs was better than other outlets but I don’t care. Call it emotional, naive, unfair or whatever you want, but regardless I had zero interest in reading any of their predictions or analyses after that.
Not even mad, just that to my experience they had one job and they didn’t fulfill it at the most important time. They went from appearing insightful to just one opinion amongst so many others.
I had complaints about 538, especially the early days, but don't understand this critique at all. A 30% chance hitting is completely unremarkable, and it was a perfectly reasonable reading of the evidence at the time. Nate isn't wrong that conventional wisdom was way off, with even supposedly statistical models giving Hillary a 99% chance of winning.
Elections, like many things, have some inherent uncertainty. A several point polling error is normal, so a candidate who is down a couple points on election day has a decent shot of winning.
Discussion of stats models is always complicated by the fact that a lot of people will read "30%" as a "no" prediction and claim your model is wrong if the thing happens. On the one hand, one strategy is to "hide" the numbers a bit behind a blaring headline that says "we are not sure!!" It's a bit of an art to decide when to be "sure" or not. On the other hand, in research for example you can just say screw it, I care if the correct people are correct, not if a bunch of wrong people are wrong.
I feel like the correct strategy for 538 when it was actually niche was to be precise, but then it went viral and maybe should've hit the IDK button much harder and more often after that.
The real caveat is that 538 was a Monte Carlo model, and is only as good as its inputs. "Here's what the current spread in polling numbers is *given our model and the current polling and their reported uncertainties.*" Polling uncertainties are themselves computed under certain models, and those models are subject to errors. I don't think 538 hid this, but it's a difficult caveat for people to reason about because the sorts of modeling errors that have the most influence usually represent "unknown unknowns".
Building a model for predicting the ultimate winner of a US presidential election is particularly difficult, because you are dealing with noisy input data and nonlinear effects, i.e. just a few thousand votes in a few key states can completely flip the outcome. If you then have poorly calibrated polls with a large margin of error, there is really nothing much you can do.
On the other hand, it does raise the question how valuable the 538 models for something like this really are if the outcome is a coin flip anyway.
Exactly, and correlated errors, where a polling error in one state predicts similar errors across the board.
I disagree that it's all pointless though. Most basically it's smart for campaigns to have a good model and let that inform strategy where appropriate. Since the president is a big deal other people's decisions are also impacted, and in the long run it pays to have good predictions of those chances. Also, the outcome sometimes is fairly certain and that isn't always easy to see.
People don't like seeing a 95% chance of winning and then losing. The game tweaks the odds, so certain thresholds become gimmes (something like "if the displayed odds are better than 75%, treat them as 100%").
Seems weird that it would piss you off, if you were really that invested in the cold hard stats you'd know that if it was fair rng you could still have been the 1 in 100,000 player that got lucky on 75% 40 times in a row.
Fire Emblem does something complex with averaging random numbers to do the same thing - a 95% chance to hit becomes 99.5, and the reverse for low percentages.
> Discussion of stats models is always complicated by the fact that a lot of people will read "30%" as a "no" prediction and claim your model is wrong if the thing happens.
I've even heard things like "70% chance of Hillary winning means she gets 70% of the votes!" (and tangentially, my far-too-long argument with someone on Reddit who insisted "there is no way in hell 50% of the people in this town make above the median income"...)
I don't understand why this is surprising. People didn't go to FiveThirtyEight to marvel the science behind it. The science was just supposed to give you what you came there for: the actual election results.
In the end, it turned out that predicting elections is still very hard, and that for all the fanfare, FiveThirtyEight performed only slightly better than what you could find in any other reputable newspaper, so it kinda lost its appeal.
> FiveThirtyEight performed only slightly better than what you could find in any other reputable newspaper
FiveThirtyEight gave Trump double the odds of the next highest reputable prediction, which was The New York Times Upshot (15%). Princeton Election Consortium gave Trump less than 1%.
That is not "only slightly better" to anyone who's statistically literate.
A FiveThirtyEight reader in 2016 was significantly better calibrated regarding Clinton’s chances than a reader of other reputable newspapers.
This embodies what 538 and its defenders miss about 538's appeal:
People didn't come to 538 for explanations on subtle points of statistical literacy (although those were provided). They came because, for whatever reason, they wanted to know who would win the election.
People not trained in statistics treated like the scoreboard at a football game- it's always better to be winning, but score is a near perfect predictor in the last minute.
Once 538 stopped delivering perfect predictions and started delivering "Actually the difference between 1% and 30% are way bigger than you think" lectures, the appeal disappeared. There are better places to learn math from.
Speak for yourself. That's not why I read FiveThirtyEight.
The purpose of FiveThirtyEight was never to be an oracle for the average person. It was always a deliberately wonky site for a wonky audience. They were very clear about that in the articles they published and topics they covered.
Nov. 1, 2016 — Election Update: Yes, Donald Trump Has A Path To Victory — https://archive.is/kwdab
> Tuesday was another pretty good day of polling for Donald Trump.
> Trump remains an underdog, but no longer really a longshot: His Electoral College chances are 29 percent in our polls-only model — his highest probability since Oct. 2 — and 30 percent in polls-plus.
> This isn’t a secure map for Clinton at all. In a race where the popular vote is roughly tied nationally, Colorado and New Hampshire are toss-ups, and Clinton’s chances are only 60 to 65 percent in Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania.
> If you want to debate a campaign’s geographic planning, Hillary Clinton spending time in Arizona is a much worse decision than Trump hanging out in Michigan or Wisconsin.
----
Sept. 16, 2016 — How Trump Could Win The White House While Losing The Popular Vote — https://archive.is/rxP5l
> Using a prototype of a demographic election calculator that FiveThirtyEight will be unveiling in the next few weeks, I decided to simulate a few election scenarios.
> The result? Clinton would carry the popular vote by 1.5 percentage points. However, Trump would win the Electoral College with 280 votes by holding all 24 Romney states and flipping Florida, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Iowa and Maine’s 2nd Congressional District from blue to red.
----
Jun 29, 2016 — Donald Trump Has A 20 Percent Chance Of Becoming President — https://archive.ph/ryIkP
> A 20 percent or 25 percent chance of Trump winning is an awfully long way from 2 percent, or 0.02 percent. It’s a real chance: about the same chance that the visiting team has when it trails by a run in the top of the eighth inning in a Major League Baseball game. If you’ve been following politics or sports over the past couple of years, I hope it’s been imprinted onto your brain that those purported long shots — sometimes much longer shots than Trump — sometimes come through.
----
FiveThirtyEight was probably the worst reputable source to read if you were looking for maximum assurances that Clinton would win.
> it turned out that predicting elections is still very hard
So maybe we shouldn't be doing it. The value of predicting an election in the large out in public seems kind of dubious, and it's more like gambling than actually being useful. A candidate only runs, and continues running, if they think they can win. All predictions like these do is confuse voters leading up to election day and while they are voting. It keep candidates from making strong cases for their platform, keeps the voters from listening to the candidates' platforms, and encourages team-based partisan politics.
538 was never about magically making polls more reliable, and only people that don't understand what polls are could think that (caveat: lots of people don't understand how polls work).
538 was about analyzing and communicating the information from those polls in an easily accessible form. If you came to the site for that, you weren't mad that they "predicted poorly something that was impossible to predict from the data sources they used" ... you were just mad at Trump for winning (despite polls suggesting otherwise).
Again, I don't think any of this matters. People were not coming there to have "information communicated to them". They were coming there for the satisfaction of knowing the results before everyone else. And FiveThirtyEight couldn't realistically deliver on that.
That makes as much sense as visiting ESPN and expecting them to tell you who will definitely win the Super Bowl next year. Anyone expecting that is going to be disappointed often no matter what.
I thought it went without saying but a good analyst can't predict the future in politics, sports, or anything else. What they can do is make good probabilistic estimates of what is likely to happen. 538 wasn't pretending to do anything more than that.
If people want magic predictions there are plenty of touts and scammers willing to offer them, they don't need to waste time with charts and numbers though.
> a good analyst can't predict the future in politics, sports, or anything else. What they can do is make good probabilistic estimates of what is likely to happen. 538 wasn't pretending to do anything more than that.
Well, sure, but how big is the market for that, really? Particularly for a binary outcome like an election, knowing who's going to win is fun, reading a pundit telling you who's going to win can be fun, but ultimately the man in the street is going to take whatever the pundit said and reduce it to candidate X or candidate Y, and you can only do so much better than replacement level at that.
I think anyone who actually operates that way is very misguided, but it’s a fair point. But either way, 538 was such a nice site for just looking at the data in a fresh way at the time, and it’s a shame that went away.
If people are expecting anyone to have a magic prediction algorithm for things like this… I mean there’s only so much one can say. It’s not realistic.
I'm very curious to see how polymarket fairs, compared to the news agencies. I suspect prediction markets will be the norm, going forward. Polls can't fully capture the element of anonymity that's required for an accurate poll of something controversial.
I can't find the source anymore since 538 is no more, and I recall Nate even describing what could (and did) happen, which was that one swing state moving to the right had a high likelihood of them all moving to the right.
Yeah, Nate has talked a number of times about polling errors being correlated across states. In fact that's probably one of the most common mistakes models can make, treating correlated inputs as independent. There's a long history of that mistake in financial markets as well.
In 2024 the single most likely outcome his model had was trump winning all 7 swing states. The second most likely was Harris winning all 7.
I think this is all true, but it dodges the bigger issue. A presidential election has a binary outcome: yes/no, win/lose. If your statistical model doesn’t contain this single bit in its output, then it doesn’t meet the minimum requirement for being a prediction.
Now you might say that it was on me as a consumer to understand this in 2016, but I remember the look of total shock on Nate Silver’s face when he called the winner on live TV that night, so clearly he didn’t really understand it either. Lesson learned for all of us, I guess.
They had him at 30% at a time when most reputable media had him in single digits at best. You might not remember now, but the result of that election was a real shock.
> "What you’ll find, though, is that our calibration has generally been very, very good. For instance, out of the 5,589 events (between sports and politics combined) that we said had a 70 chance of happening (rounded to the nearest 5 percent), they in fact occurred 71 percent of the time. Or of the 55,853 events that we said had about a 5 percent chance of occurring, they happened 4 percent of the time."
Huh. I first started listening to 538 in the run-up to the 2016 election and started really paying attention to them precisely because their 30% figure was so much higher than all the other polls. It was shocking to me then (and still is now reading your comment) that people didn’t seem to understand that 30% in the context of that particular election and that particular candidate suggested a remarkably high chance of winning, not a really low chance of winning. It’s a strange thing where people seem to think that less than 50% = not happening.
I really think a majority of NYTimes and ABCnews consumers don't know the difference between a 2/3 chance (super close) of winning and 2/3 of the vote (a landslide).
I mean everyone said he had a snowball’s chance in hell and then we ended up with him for two terms because the Democrats can’t stop fighting over the worse possible candidates to back that no one is asking for.
And he won the popular vote if you believe that all U.S. elections are secure and sacrosanct. He is diabolical at getting people to talk about him and think about him constantly.
Joe Biden on the other hand was a senile wrecker for Build Back Better and the party finally made "the switch" to unelected Harris far too late in the process. Even if she was a great candidate, with her odd laughter and fascination with buses, there was not enough time to shape her candidacy. Her VP candidate choice was hobbled by rising anti-semitism in the party against Shapiro and perhaps concerns of being outshined by him. No, the Democrats did not do themselves any favors in the '24 election.
Carter, Clinton and Obama were media creations, vaulting to national prominence out of nowhere. It helped that Clinton and Obama were great, charismatic choices.
Now the traditional media is fragmented and weak. You're not seeing furtive vaulting attempts for potential phenoms like Newsome gain any traction. Who is the media going to be stuck with next time? Will it be take-two for Harris?
WHEN, not if, Harris loses bigly to Vance, then the Democrats will absolutely be to blame. Where are their all new shiny, beautiful, erudite candidates that would need all four years to gestate and promote? Shouldn't we be getting acquainted with them now? I wager they're not going to appear, and we'll get more flunkies. My theory as to why is that those currently in power in the party do not share; they're aging out and hollowing out the party in the process. We're to the point now of collapse. I'm surprised a third party on the left hasn't yet formed.
Yes and no. It's a two-party system and a lot of people vote for candidate X to stop candidate Y getting in. Indeed IIRC a lot of democrat messaging around the previous election was explicitly about stopping Trump rather than the merits of whoever their guy was.
The Democrats reliably back the color "beige" as a candidate.
Obama was different, and he won back to back.
Biden succeeded, barely, because Trump was fresh in everyone's mind. But for some reason the Democrats have been allergic to charisma for far too long.
Voting in the US, it feels like I am forced to choose between evil and incompetence.
The blame is put on democrats because when they lose its because they don’t turn out and when they win its because they do. It is quite simple really. Republicans are far more reliable voters. You can look at vote totals and see this pattern. Massive delta for democrats election over election and usually half that delta for republicans.
Every politician is to blame for their losses, just as every politician own their wins. The people voted for Trump because the Dems failed to get the people to vote for them.
Democrats will not let people choose candidates because that may be too dangerous for their interests. We'll never get good candidates as long as the current leadership is in control.
Denying that the democrats had two high-profile situations where the “wrong” candidate ended up running is denying the obvious. It’s manifest that Obama wasn’t to win the primary, and that the superdelegates exist for reasons.
When pressed before the election, Silver did not explain where Trump's much higher probability of winning came from. He predicted a Trump loss, Trump won, and he claimed victory because he gave Trump a better chance of winning. There's no way that strategy could have failed.
Nate Silver is not a magician! He can't magically make polls reliable!
All he (or anyone) can do is interpret or analyse poll results, and then surface their findings in a way a larger audience can understand. 538 did that better than any other poll analyst ... but they all got it wrong because the polls themselves were faulty.
TLDR; You can't get water from a stone, and no one (not even Nate Silver) can get perfectly accurate predictions from (inherently flawed) polls!
> All he (or anyone) can do is interpret or analyse poll results, and then surface their findings in a way a larger audience can understand.
He (or anybody) can make adjustments to the data. He was challenged to explain why his predictions were so different, but he wouldn't do it.
> 538 did that better than any other poll analyst
He made a binary prediction, and it was wrong. There's no such thing as "better" when you only have one outcome. Your prediction is either right or wrong. If by "better" you mean he was wrong but assigned a higher probability to a Trump victory, the best forecaster would have been someone that mechanically changed the probability of a Trump victory to slightly less than 50% no matter what the data said.
We should have a drinking game in Nate Silver thread anyone complains about 2016 prediction. Then everyone piles on to point out how probabilities work.
I long ago stopped commenting on threads (in /r/CFB) about the SP+ college football model because it go so, so, so tiring correcting the exact same misunderstandings about things as fundamental as what the model was even purporting to do let alone, how it worked. It is incredibly disheartening to me to see the staggering level of statistical illiteracy on display in any online conversation about a statistical model. I've come to the conclusion that it's not worth my, or any one else's time. I'm glad these things exist, and the communities who want them will self select. It's not use trying to convert haters.
It wasn't even a complaint, just a personal anecdote to help share some context as to why the site may have failed to retain consumer interest post-2016.
But yes I'll join you with the liver damage and drink 17 shots.
538 used the example of Trump having approximately the same chance of winning the 2016 presidential election as the Cavaliers had of winning the NBA championship round vs the Warriors. Both Trump and the Cavaliers won with a ~25% predicted chance.
538 made very clear with this analogy that both Trump and the Cavs were underdogs, and that both had a solid chance of winning.
I think this gets to the core of why a lot of this election prediction stuff doesn't work. People just don't parse the numbers the way the authors intend.
FiveThirtyEight had Trump at a 30% chance of winning, and he won. The model wasn't wrong. The less likely of two outcomes occurred. Even if they'd had him at 1% they still wouldn't technically have been wrong though I think complaints might be more warranted.
If they had Trump at 49% would you have still been angry? What about at 51%? Would it have been okay then?
Technically this is right. But if that is the case (and it seems to be), then a coin flip is better than their models. Because we only care about the current election, not a sequence of 1000 elections (which will not happen, by the way).
> But if that is the case (and it seems to be), then a coin flip is better than their models.
If a coin flip is the necessary mental model to remind you both things can happen, then sure.
People just love horse race coverage. Silver gave us the most accurate horse race coverage. Maybe the lesson is stop following horse race coverage.
But most people went back to the tea leave readers. That way when the election was over, it can justifiably be the charlatan's fault that viewers got over-invested in their predictive capabilities.
I don’t disagree, I think the tea leaf reading is ultimately pretty futile.
But at the same time I do think it’s valid to say it’s more than a coin flip. The polling data over the election cycle showed that Trump had a smaller but still legitimate chance of winning. The data was different in 2020, when he lost.
FiveThirtyEight gave Trump a 30% chance. Their reporting did make clear that with margin was within the range of a normal polling error. And sometimes you get more than a normal polling error.
It doesn't help that the US has a terrible election system that often leads to small margins in some states being decisive.
I know I'm being super conspiratorial here but why wouldn't all forecasters predict just between 30% - 70%? That way if they're "right" they can take the credit for it and if they're wrong they can say "well, we weren't that wrong". That's probably what I'd do anyway...
It implies a close race or a strong reason to believe there's some sort of systemic polling miss, and if it's a blowout you still look pretty bad. Especially if you don't have some kind of good explanation for the miss/you keep making those kinds of misses frequently.
Also there's more going in those forecasts besides just the "% chance to win". There's expected results in terms of %'s of the vote for the candidates, and that's what people tend to focus on for actually analyzing your performance and credibility after the fact.
You getting the outcome correct but being off by 20 points on the margin is a much worse performance than you getting the outcome wrong but being within 0.5 points of the margin. (ex: Results are 49.75/50.25, you predicted 30/70, another outlet predicted 50.25/49.75).
538 claimed that they post-checked thousands of elections and their percentages were pretty close. (E.g., 30% chances happened about 30% of the time, million to one chances happened every single time)
Of course there's more than that. Predicting higher uncertainty than warranted would be a different failure in the model. But that didn't really happen in that election.
> I know I'm being super conspiratorial here but why wouldn't all forecasters predict just between 30% - 70%? That way if they're "right" they can take the credit for it and if they're wrong they can say "well, we weren't that wrong". That's probably what I'd do anyway...
For anyone making many predictions, you can analyze the outcomes to see how accurate those percentages are.
For anyone making few predictions, you should never trust their track record even if it's technically perfect.
You're completely right, although I believe this number was not decided personally. They just happened to pick algorithms that have this "nice" property because it will lead to the same result.
As a younger man I would have been with the commenters mansplaining probability, but I've aged into realizing that thinking of the election like a marble pulled from an urn whose contents we have probed with polling is just as bad as thinking of it as deterministic. The reason people read fivethirtyeight, probability-savvy or not, was almost entirely to be told what was going to happen, which is sort of incompatible with feeling you can do anything about it. In that way it's probably worse than old-fashioned pundit-driven horse race coverage because it has an air of scientific authority.
Nate was a huge outlier in that prediction, he gave trump a better chance than almost anyone else that I can recall, so why are you mad at him about that?
What made me mad is Nate seemed to turn into a MAGA troll himself after that election.
> Founder Nate Silver left in 2023, taking the rights to his forecasting model with him to his website Silver Bulletin.[7][8][9] The site's new owner, Disney, hired G. Elliott Morris to develop a new model.[7][8] On September 18, 2023, the original website domain at fivethirtyeight.com was closed, with web traffic becoming redirected to ABC News pages, and its logo was replaced, with the name 538 used instead of FiveThirtyEight.[2] On March 5, 2025, 538 was shut down by ABC News and its staff were laid off.[10] On May 15, 2026, ABC redirected thousands of archived 538 articles to the politics section of their news website, making them inaccessible.
Yes, but he's failing to see the big picture. Selling any small company to any big company leads to this risk. To hold water, his argument should be: "we shouldn't have sold the business at all," not "we shouldn't have sold to ESPN."
I personally don't love ESPN/Disney/ABC, but basically all major corporations that make acquisitions do this. Google does it all the time. It's very clearly a known risk when you sell a startup. I don't have much sympathy.
It wouldn't have been a business to begin with if he didn't sell it. At the time, it was just a blog driving a modest amount of ad revenue. Partnering with bigger outfits allowed him to hire staff and cover more ground, something that he could never do without outside investment. He has since returned to blogging, which to my understanding drives enough revenue for himself and exactly one assistant.
I replied to your comment, and now you've replied to two other threads I've commented in reiterating that Nate is a sore loser who deserves what he got and he should have expected this. To be honest, it sounds like you have some kind of personal grievance with him. His post doesn't come off like he wasn't expecting this outcome, or that it's devastating him. He mentions that he is significantly happier now having gone back to blogging than he was at Disney. It's just a blog post, about a big era of his life, which is now over with. He's human. He can feel disappointed that 15 years of his work was taken offline, and reminisce about the ways things went wrong, both on his and his employer's end.
The focus of the stories making the rounds about this are not about Nate having made some mistake, they're about big bad Disney deleting someone's work (which yes is also true).
The more I read about how big businesses operate the more I think it resembles the weather. There's no intelligence in there, it's just random fluctuations. FiveThirtyEight never made any sense at Disney and seems to have been passed around there more like a trinket than a decades work of dozens of people.
One of the most frustrating things about getting older — besides all the fun stuff that happens to your knees and hair — is the fact that younger generations just take what has been normal their whole lives and say “yes this is the normal state of affairs.”
We used to have laws and limits regarding media ownership. One company couldn’t own every radio station in most of America. Distributors couldn’t own studios. Etc.
Disney should never have been allowed to buy 538 in the first place. ABC, possibly…? But Disney shouldn't be allowed to own ABC!! (And if you’re left-leaning, you can’t pin this mess on the “corporation-friendly” Republican Party because it was Bill Clinton who put his signature on this mess!)
The state we’re in is not normal and it wasn’t necessary and we don’t have to just live with it if we don’t want to.
In situations like this I always wonder if there's a decision maker somewhere in the pipeline who just has values and a mental model of the world that's entirely foreign to me - for whom the idea of deleting a decade+ of content from the web doesn't strike them as bad in the slightest.
I can easily see the argument that once an election is over, people don't read the content anymore. Granted, storage is cheap so this is kinda silly, but I bet the old articles weren't getting very much traffic.
I would actually say that for most business people this is all "about numbers" and aren't in the slightest worried about deleting something.
This is why efforts like Internet Archive and others are so important. Whatever you think of 538, it _is_ history, and in this digital world it needs to be preserved.
> The thinking at Disney is presumably that they invested a lot of money in FiveThirtyEight and were left with nothing to show for it. But to my mind, however much they spent on FiveThirtyEight, they never invested a dollar in it. There was never really any effort, or even any pretense of trying, to make it a profitable unit of the company. At one point, other senior staffers and I basically begged Disney to turn on a paywall, figuring this could provide some security, and were told, essentially, that it just wasn’t worth Disney’s bandwidth to figure out the mechanics of one.
I cannot tell you how much of my professional career I have seen this play out again and again and again.
There is an "executive class" in this country that has never had a real job or done real work. They were born to privilege, they went to elite schools, got their first check from a major consultancy, and then spend their whole career bouncing from C-suite to C-suite. They stare at slides all day, occasionally make a meaningful decision, and more or less spend their time insulating themselves from failure.
This may not describe everyone in charge at every major company, but it describes enough to explain why everything in our economy just feels like it's piggybacking off of a handful of actually good businesses.
It's not the full story, but it's certainly a large part of it.
I'll chime in tangentially with another large part: the disproportionate share of both asset and liquid wealth held by people who are some combination of a) Baby Boomers, b) in the top percentiles of wealth/income, c) politically- or socially-connected. As you say, it's not all of them, but enough of them. At the confluence of the two groups is a desire not to invest in potentially risky ventures, or to spend on consumption, but instead to put as much money as possible into a narrow band of low-risk, often passive investments, and to pull every lever possible to protect those investments, even when they become outmoded in some regard and the income stream or economic activity that supports their high (growing) valuation dries up.
Supporting this paradigm (ostensibly so that seniors don't die in poverty, so that strategically-important businesses and ventures are backstopped, etc., but, crucially, to the detriment of all other concerns) means an erosion of a sort of "constructive inefficiency": "wasted" spending on ventures that might not work out, on employees who are not the best and most productive, on niche services and products, which altogether represent a massive share of potential economic activity that is much better at involving and supporting a diverse population with diverse needs and diverse skill sets that perhaps have not yet found the correct outlet to produce maximal value.
Your C-suite goons and my rich, highly networked seniors don't care about the potential of a paradigm shift to support and enable short-term losers, though. They just want to pile into the sure-thing of your "actually good businesses" (which, in many cases, aren't actually that good).
Some of Disney’s most valuable properties—ESPN, Pixar, Marvel, Star Wars—were acquired. FiveThirtyEight may be smaller, but it should be in Disney’s self-interest to set things right and earn a reputation for being a good home for acquisitions.
Berkshire Hathaway has this attitude, with the proviso that the corporate management at the acquired firm must be competent, and the firm be profitable and protected by a "moat."
It's amazing that they trot out Sees Candy every year for the shareholders' meeting when they own GEICO.
It seems that Disney isn't doing this quite right.
For one thing See's Candy is fundamentally a value-added operation and GEICO is a positive cash flow financial structure which remains competitive by trying not to remove as much value from the customer as the next guy.
See's Candy is also what Charlie Munger considered their shift from distressed companies to high quality companies; its sentimental on a company level because it represented a real shift in investment philosophy.
Services & retailing: Ben Bridge Jeweler, Business Wire, Dairy Queen, McLane Company, NetJets, Oriental Trading Company, Pampered Chef, See's Candies, Star Furniture, WPLG
Manufacturing: Benjamin Moore & Co., Clayton Homes, CTB International, Duracell, Fruit of the Loom, Johns Manville, Lubrizol, Precision Castparts Corp, Scott Fetzer Company, Garan Inc
Yeah, Disney, the company that recently tried to bankrupt several novelists by claiming that when they bought Star Wars, they didn't put themselves on the hook for respecting contracts that Lucas signed. https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/business-news/sta...
Disney has never given a single f*ck about that reputation, but the chiefs who agree to these acquisitions never had to care about that.
Disney bought ESPN in 1996, Marvel in 2009 (literally had 2 movies released here and one of them flopped) and Pixar in 2006.
For Pixar, they and Disney were joined at the hip even before acquisition. Besides distribution rights, Disney had full sequel rights to almost all of Pixar's catalogue at the time. Disney could have made a sequel to Finding Nemo, The Incredibles etc even without Pixar's blessing or involvement. There is quite literally no Pixar without Disney.
Marvel? Their most successful years were under Disney. ESPN did not become the media empire you know it as until well after Disney's acquisition either.
I specifically said reputation. Disney has a history of buying properties and squeezing every last dollar out of them until nothing is left but a husk of what they were at their peak. Disney certainly got their money’s worth out of those purchases. I’m not denying that. But the reputation of all of them has been on a steep decline even if there were temporary spikes after the acquisition.
I’ll grant you that “soon after” might have been a stretch for ESPN, but it’s obviously true for the others. Almost all of Pixar’s most enduring films had their start before Disney bought the company. The same is true with Marvel. Sure, Disney’s fanfare might have played before the Avengers films, but those movies were the brainchild of Kevin Fiege, who was already in charge before the Disney purchase. You can maybe claim Disney has a good eye for finding companies on an upward trajectory, but these are all examples of Disney management’s failure to be a long-term steward of their acquisitions.
>Disney has a history of buying properties and squeezing every last dollar out of them until nothing is left but a husk of what they were at their peak
Only if you don't know what you're talking about.
>But the reputation of all of them has been on a steep decline even if there were temporary spikes after the acquisition.
None of these were 'temporary spikes'. Marvel was on an unprecedented high for a decade. If that is a temporary spike then almost every company’s successful era would count as a temporary spike.
>Almost all of Pixar’s most enduring films had their start before Disney bought the company.
Did you not read what I said?
Pixar’s pre-acquisition slate was already deeply tied to Disney. Disney co-produced and distributed those films, and the relationship was so significant that Disney had rights to continue all but one of their properties even without Pixar’s involvement. That's pretty much unheard of.
Any success you can attribute to Pixar pre-acquisition, you can attribute to Disney as well. Moreover, it would be silly to claim Pixar has been mismanaged simply because arguably the most succesfull animation run in history did not go on forever. Pixar has been managed fine.
>Sure, Disney’s fanfare might have played before the Avengers films, but those movies were the brainchild of Kevin Fiege, who was already in charge before the Disney purchase.
Feige was in charge of Marvel Studios, not all of Marvel Entertainment, and his position was not necessarily secure under the old structure. He had well-known conflicts with Ike Perlmutter, who had significant authority over Marvel at the time.
It was Disney who re-structured Marvel Studios to be semi autonomous, answering only to Alan Horn and the Walt Disney Film Studios Division. Regardless, Kevin is still in charge of Marvel Studios and Disney has left the arrangement largely the same, so blaming the current situation on Disney specific mismanagement would be very strange.
it was super interesting. My gut was like, jesus christ, if you don't live in New York City, seriously, absolutely nobody gives a single flying fuck about any of this stuff!
what i miss most about 538: whether it’s elections or the play offs, nothing comes close to how clean and fun the data interaction felt. i would constantly refresh any time a game finished or when a started called a candidate. i wonder who the front end engineer was, and what they’re doing now. would love for them to be building more fun ways to be interacting with data.
A Pew study of a random sample of Internet links conducted in October 2023 found significant “link rot”: almost 40 percent of links that had been active 10 years earlier were broken. And that’s probably an underestimate: the study was based on the Common Crawl web archive (the same one that AI labs use to train their models), which is quite comprehensive but probably contains some bias toward more prominent sites.
"Random sample of Internet links" is going to include a lot of absolute garbage.
If we're talking about news sites, or commentary, or blogs, or magazines, or newspapers, or other publishers, the number of dead links will be far higher. Those are the types of sites that are likely to fail, be acquired, get migrated, or become paywalled.
I worked as a technology journalist for years starting in the late 90s. I did a lot of freelance work as well, and almost nothing survives online. There were media brands that were shut down, content migrated to another site, the CMS was migrated from Drupal to Wordpress to something else, there were two or three acquisitions, and so on. Last week, I checked some articles that I worked on between 3 and 10 years ago and they were either 404s or paywalled.
When I left one of the higher-profile pubs in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis, I knew my articles wouldn't last even though they were migrated to a sister publication. I made PDF copies of every single one. I still have them in a folder somewhere, not sure what to do with them.
My personal blogs are still up, but even those will die at some point.
> "Random sample of Internet links" is going to include a lot of absolute garbage.
It's also likely to include a lot of non-content links, e.g. links to index and navigation pages, interstitials, search results, user profiles, image galleries, etc. These sorts of links don't reliably address specific content, and it's natural that they'll change or die over time. This doesn't necessarily mean that anything valuable has been lost.
(when able, please consider donating to the Internet Archive; they are the durable, long term storage system of last resort)
> Yes, you can still access (for now) Disney-era FiveThirtyEight content via the invaluable Internet Archive, and pre-Disney-era content from The New York Times (which I partnered with from 2010 through 2013). And obviously, we’re trying to recreate some of the most popular parts of FiveThirtyEight at Silver Bulletin. The election models and polling averages are here, and new-and-improved versions of the sports models (PELE, ELWAY, COOPER) are gradually returning too.2 Galen Druke, Clare Malone and I have even been getting the old podcast crew back together for live shows.
With regards to:
> When I left one of the higher-profile pubs in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis, I knew my articles wouldn't last even though they were migrated to a sister publication. I made PDF copies of every single one. I still have them in a folder somewhere, not sure what to do with them.
I agree, and am getting downvoted in other comments for this position. If you sell a small company to a giant one, there's a major risk that they will sunset your work. It's the risk Nate knowingly took on when he sold the company.
No surprises here, no sympathy from me, and his blog post reads like he's a sore loser.
(Disney sucks and isn't blameless, but this is very much a standard business practice.)
Even if you believe Nate Silver's analysis was deeply flawed/inaccurate the layout and presentation of the data itself made it easy for others to understand why it was flawed or innacurate. Modern science is built on thousands and thousands of failed experiments and research that went the wrong path. That makes preservation of this site important, more important than whatever personal grudge you may hold against him.
How so? To me it seems like the exact opposite of what's happened with Star Wars in the last 20 years.
538 was purchased and then left to wither and die where as Disney seems intent on squeezing every last penny from the Star Wars franchise by using the IP as much as possible
Disney removed a lot of the earlier IP from the official Star Wars storyline shortly after acquiring it. That IP was much better than the complete mess and politicization of Star Wars that happened in the sequels. Sure they are trying to squeeze money out of it - and maybe some of the TV shows are tolerable - but they killed the brand and its best content in the process.
The politics of the original trilogy Star Wars was essentially “dictators and fascists with big armies are bad”. It was naïve and simplistic; a simple storytelling device, nothing more. There was no conscious choice behind it. If it had been made 40 years earlier, the enemies would have been savage indigenous people, as was the style at the time. The politics of modern Star Wars are… specific. Pointed. Winking at the camera. I suspect they may not age well.
What Viet Cong parallels? Whatever you mean, it can’t have been very visible to the audience, since clear Viet Cong sympathies would not have gone over well (at least not universally) in 1977-1983.
But what George Lucas claims to have thought (now many years later), is essentially irrelevant. What matters is how audiences interpret the movies when watching them, both at the time and now. If, as I strongly suspect, essentially nobody saw clear Viet Cong sympathies in the original trilogy, then the modern Star Wars differs significantly.
And this is my point. The politics of the original trilogy was cookie-cutter, incidental, and unimportant, whereas much of the modern Star Wars has political creeds, obvious symbolism and grandstanding all over the place, front and center. You may (or may not) agree with the politics of the new Star Wars, but you can’t deny that they are different.
You said “There was no conscious choice behind it” and here is the creator telling you the choice was intentional from the start. Some people simply can’t admit they are wrong.
Polling, particularly in US elections, is hard. A lot of people, particularly tech people, got very excited about Nate Silver and 538 after the 2012 presidential elections but they shouldn't have. When you look at any polling or election predictions, the US has voluntary voting so it's not just a question of how people will vote but who will vote. So, if your predictions just guessed an outcome without explaining why (accurately) then it's just astrology, basically.
In polling circles, the voters tend to be segmented into high and low propensity voters. High propensity voters will always vote. Low propensity voters won't. But the differences are often so small the results can flip on unexpected turnout in just one segment of the voters.
As an example, the 2024 election turned on 3 big factors:
1. Millions of Biden voters in 2020 stayed home. Affordability was the biggest factor but there are were other huge factors too, most notably Palestine;
2. Trump retained the white vote while increasing his share of the Hispanic vote; and
3. Trump activated younger, low-propensity voters. You'll often osee this described as the "podcast sphere". We're talking the people who end up in alt-right pipeline on Youtube and in podcasts (eg Andrew Tate).
Most recent presidential elections come down the results in about 7-8 states. The other 42-43 are known before you go in with some rare exceptions. The most recent exception was Obama in 2008 who won Iowa, for example. Other big sweeps were Reagan in 1984 and Nixon in 1972.
So, with a modern election you can just flip a coin 7 times and you have a 1 in 128 chance of just being correct, 50 out of 50. This is why you need to show your work with any prediction modeling and polling. You need to show how you reached your prediction in terms of turnout as well as how major demographics will vote.
Every election cycle complicates this with external factors and per-state issues. Covid loomed large over 2020 but it also made voting easier than ever, with easy access to early voting and mail-in voting. This changes the high and low propensity voter math significantly. Also, the Arizona legislature went on a mission to punish Native Americans for flipping Arizona blue in 2020 by disenfranchising Native Americans in subsequent elections in many, many ways.
So what tends to happen is that results are close enough that it become s abit of a guess. No pollster wants to be an outlier AND wrong so there's a convergence to mean thing that happens where they all tend to make the same prediction because everybody being wrong is way better, optically, than you being wrong and everyone else being right.
Add to all this, population sampling used to be done on landlines decades ago. Now we just don't have an equivalent and if your sampling algorithm is off, your results are off. Garbage in, garbage out.
I guess my point is that Nate Silver got kinda lucky in 2012 and came back to Earth in 2016 so I've never been that impressed and honestly I jus tdon't care if 538 exists or not.
Call me a skeptic, but it's certainly odd all the errors always lean to one side. Maybe this has to do with the leftward trend of the mainstream press.
> What happened in 2024 isn’t something I’d have scripted, though. Basically, their new election model was literally broken, continuing to show Joe Biden virtually tied with Trump even after his disastrous debate. (Evidently because Morris’s design for it had been overcomplicated. These models are hard to design, by the way.)
> Maybe this has to do with the leftward trend of the mainstream press.
What mainstream press outlet has moved leftwards? I can't think of any, and I certainly am interested in knowing which those might be. Inversely, cbs, the ny times, and the washington post have all shifted rather noticeably rightward in the last 10 years.
> What’s an example that you believe highlights NYTimes moving rightward?
Look at their coverage of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's response to a question about Taiwan versus Trump's response to a question about Taiwan. In the first case, their quote included all of the um's and other similar pauses in answering the question. In the second case, their quote of Trump cleaned up all of those artifacts. The end result is that it looks like AOC is flailing to come up with an answer while Trump has a clean, polished answer. But if you compare the actual audio clips of both answers, Trump's answer is the one that involves far more flailing to come up with a response.
There is a general pattern in the more subtle aspects of presentation and framing that generally excuse the behaviors of right-wing politicians compared to the same actions being done by a left-wing politician.
But also consider this article that was published after Trump’s, not even labeled “editorial” or “opinion”: “Trump’s Taiwan Gambit is Already a Gift to China” (https://archive.ph/lwBWD)
NYTimes constantly deletes parts of Trump's comments or outright rephrases them in an attempt to make him seem smarter, or at least, less insane. They rarely to never do that for other people.
>cbs, the ny times, and the washington post have all shifted rather noticeably rightward
As the Overton window or activist left moves further left on issues like identity politics, crime and free speech (1619 Project era at NYT, staff revolts etc), steady coverage can appear "righter" by comparison without actually changing
Remember when Net Nuetrality was the priority of hackernews and slashdot and basically all people in tech. Now it's a "leftist policy". We live in crazy times.
Overton window has definitely shifted to the right. Beign a normal person who values science is now considered "leftist". Its nuts.
There's also a bloc that's been working to try to retroactively redefine what "Net Neutrality" means.
Instead of the usual stuff like "consumers have rights" or "ISP monopolies are bad" or "utilities should just provide the product and not spy and manipulate", they want it to mean something closer to "no online community can moderate itself."
And that's the charitable version. The worse version involves rank hypocrisy and selective enforcement, where large social "networks" must be "neutral" to literal nazis, while somehow it's also OK to permaban for insulting Dear Leader.
The set of people who are "basically all people in tech" has changed a lot since then for a variety of reasons; it's not surprising that any given political issue from a decade ago might not have the same resonance today.
Apparently it's "steady coverage" for CBS to be taken over by a culture warring op-ed writer who singlehandedly spikes investigative journalism if the Trump administration don't want to offer their comments on the story, and for WaPo op-eds writers to tweet that "we're now a conservative opinion section"...
Wait, so your argument is that people being against censorship or discrimination are now considered to be left wing? That's literally the overton window moving to the right, you're contradicting yourself!
Oh yeah, venerable institutions like the Washington Post, New York Times, LA Times, Chicago Tribune, and the like? Or maybe you mean the TV news organizations owned by Sinclair Broadcasting, Nexstar, or Hearst? Or maybe cable news organizations like CNN or Fox News?
The narrative of the "liberal media" is so out of date it makes you look out of touch. The mainstream media is captured by billionaire interests and has been so for years now.
Are you sure you aren’t experiencing selection bias? The article only mentions one modeling error (the one you quoted), so “all the errors” must be the ones you’ve noticed elsewhere.
> Maybe this has to do with the leftward trend of the mainstream press.
What? Media in the USA has staggered to the right over the past ten years. The only reason it was called liberal before that was because one party used facts and data and the other preferred to rig the system against the common people. While Stephen Colbert made the joke "Reality has a well known liberal bias" it's joke only in that the conservative viewpoint today seems focused on imaginary problems and denying the existence of real ones.
It's always pretty depressing to go back and watch this or old Colbert Report episodes and realize how parts are incredibly "evergreen", sometimes you don't even need to change out the names.
Why would a left-leaning press engineer errors predicting the victory of the left? Wouldn't this lull supporters of the Democrats into a false sense of security and enable Republican wins?
its this really what we're left with, people sharing their skepticism? without any dint of rationale, just stories about how these obviously bad people did all this stuff that everyone knows.
I'm not going to defend Silver's predictions, but what was really refreshing about his work was some lovely diagrams, and real intent behind exposing his methodology. it was never 'trust me I'm the expert', but 'wow, this is hard and these are the problems and this is how I tried to deal with them'
Am I the only one who finds this whole blog post to be super unprofessional? I agree it's sad that the content is gone, but airing grievances about your former employer leaves a bad taste in my mouth (assuming you're not a whistleblower talking about illegal activity or something like that). I feel bad for Nate Silver, but business is business. I guess he had to learn that lesson the hard way.
> airing grievances about your former employer leaves a bad taste in my mouth
Absolutely not. Creating a culture where employees are expected to be silent about their (mis)treatment by wealthy owners is only favorable, to, well, wealthy owners. Business is business, so why is it unprofessional to point out they're bad at business?
I view Nate as basically acting like a sore loser here, which is why I find it unprofessional. I'm not arguing that we should clamp down on free speech or anything like that.
If a company wants to buy another company and sunset it, that's a normal business practice. I get that it's disappointing, but in no way is this "mistreatment." At least to me, this is a perfectly normal business situation that doesn't merit this level of complaining. It reads as an ex-employee being petty.
Funny, this story reads as ABC/Disney being petty to me. They were made a business offer to repurchase an IP that is worth nothing to them, and are instead choosing to blackhole any value it has and burn it to the ground because somebody with an ego has a personal grievance over Disney having been criticised for their management of the brand in the past. If that's what professional conduct entails in your eyes, I don't suppose there will be any agreement in our views.
I guess I feel like Nate should have anticipated this situation. By choosing to sell his company to a big conglomerate, this is the type of risk he opened himself up to. ABC/Disney certainly isn't blameless here, but this is the risk that any smaller company takes on when they get acquired. (The exact same thing happens to the startups that Google buys and then sunsets 12 months later.)
I wouldn't say unprofessional, because this isn't a normal employer-employee relationship. Nate Silver is a famous professional, he made a business deal with a large media corporation, he made some money; later that large media corporation used the IP he sold them in arguably-bad ways, and he's upset. I don't blame him for being upset, certainly I don't think he owes Disney anything, but at the same time he's the one who agreed to sell his IP to a corporation and this is the kind of things corporations do with IP.
It feels a little disingenuous to call out your opponent's model failures when Silver's model on Live Election Night also completely bugged out showing Kamala as more favored as she lost state after state: https://web.archive.org/web/20241109030935/https://www.theda...
>The Times was also in the midst of a leadership transition, and new management tends to want to move on from the old regime’s pet projects, even if they were successful.
Learning about B2B sales over the years, the size of this leadership-change factor has been among the most eye-opening (and among the most disappointing).
It cuts both ways: You can have a successful pilot that doesn't proceed because this-or-that VP was replaced, and to show off their bold new direction, the new VP cancels almost everything novel the previous person started. Or you can reach out just at the moment the new guy or gal comes in, right when they're looking for the pieces of their bold new direction, and you become part of that.
I would love to have later learned that leaders who evaluate opportunities separate from personal attachment are seen as more efficient, better, and selected favorably; that more successful companies are less subject to this sort of political/careerist whimsy. Alas. At least I have been fortunate enough to experience both directions in quantities that roughly balance out.
> I would love to have later learned that leaders who evaluate opportunities separate from personal attachment are seen as more efficient, better, and selected favorably; that more successful companies are less subject to this sort of political/careerist whimsy.
My experience is that it's the opposite: the more successful the company is, the more prone it is to flights of executive whimsy. At more successful companies, it basically doesn't matter what the executives do, because the company's moat is so big that it can tolerate grotesque mismanagement and still make money. (This is the converse of the old aphorism "When a management with a reputation for brilliance tackles a business with a reputation for bad economics, it is the reputation of the business that remains intact."). Executives seem extremely uncomfortable with the idea that they are being paid tens of millions of dollars and yet nothing they do matters, and so they're intent on leaving their mark. Thus, they cancel all the pet projects of the past management, instill their own ideas, and boldly take the company in a new direction. Except not really, because the fundamental parts of the business that make it work are all handled by people 8 levels down in the org chart whose job functions are considered common sense by everybody and never really up for discussion.
At least, this was my experience at Google, which is perhaps the best money-making machine ever invented and yet is grotesquely mismanaged by mid-level VPs that cancel every promising new product that comes out, only to start their own initiatives that themselves get canceled by their successors.
> the more successful the company is, the more prone it is to flights of executive whimsy
Apple's Liquid Glass comes to mind.
The design exec responsible suddenly left Apple for Meta, a company rather less esteemed for design, and Apple still hasn't acknowledged this failure or backtracked.
Admit wrong, from Apple? Was there acknowledgement of say butterfly keyboards? Seems on brand to quietly walk back an unpopular decision.
Took them years to move on from their terrible keyboard design without a proper acknowledgement
Unlikely they’ll be walking back the UX and UI changes specifically for their push into spatial and convergent computing.
Apple has strategically retreated a few times but it always puts on a show of doing it in a “forward” direction. Look for much of the annoyances of Liquid Glass to quietly be lost.
partial backtrack in some ways.
I saw this up close once.
My job involves service contracts for the cloud. We get to know workloads and optimize them and learn how to troubleshoot them to reduce mitigation time.
I had a big customer go from "must have, non-negotiable" for my team to a non-renewal in weeks when a new CTO came in. Within a month, they had an outage we could have mitigated quickly and had our yearly contract pay for itself.
Having been on both sides of this: Often, one of the purposes of the leadership change was to start shedding the old regime's pet projects. Even semi-successful pet projects can be a distraction from the direction the company wants to go.
I've been unlucky enough to work under several executives who thought they could resist direction from the CEO and board. They pushed their pet projects and thought leadership would eventually see the light. Instead they got ejected from the company and replaced with someone who knew how to follow orders.
My cynical assumption when I first saw this was that it was all just politics, but I have to admit that life is so much easier when your management chain isn't fighting uphill all the time. If the CEO and board want the company working on some things and not others, you're on thin ice if your manager is assigning you to go against the company's direction. It's scarier when you may not even know what they're doing to you.
For this specific case, completely pulling the content offline feels like a loss across the board. I could see it happening as an overreaction, to send a message that the new management is serious about not repeating the (perceived or otherwise) mistakes of their predecessors with an unmistakable signal
"Sometimes you have to change things that are perfectly good just to make them your own." --Jack Donaghy, 30 Rock
Once you look, you see this all the time when new CEOs join large companies, they feel the need to mark their territory by taking a dump on it.
I enjoyed FiveThirtyEight back in the day, but does anyone actually go back and look at the old posts? They were very much of the moment. I'd imagine the vast vast majority of the traffic to them is robots.
I can see why they wouldn't be a priority to keep up. For archival purposes, I'd think everything is still in the internet archive?
Nate seems to try to justify this a touch, saying he personally was looking for a specific article. Kind of a special case there…
At this point in my life I have zero patience or sympathy for the story of a man selling his company to a massive conglomerate and then feeling betrayed or somehow sad/regretful when said conglomerate destroys it or weaponizes it. I'm simply tired of this hindsight virtue signaling. They don't care about us. That means even you, Nate Silver. Btw was a big fan back then! Signal and the Noise was a great book.
There's value in making more people aware of something, even if it appears obvious to you. It's possible that someone who doesn't share your views on Disney, or corporations more broadly, might have been familiar with FiveThirtyEight and will have their views changed by Nate Silver's account of the situation. There's also nothing wrong with someone reflecting on something they worked on for over a decade and identifying things they could have done differently.
Ironically, your comment adds nothing to the discussion other than virtue signaling that you're "in the know" on this subject.
I'll disagree. As an open forum, all responses are allowed, even telling someone to sleep in the bed they made.
But it does bring up a good point. That too many people are trying to have their cake and eat it too. Any reasonable person does, or ought to know, the cycle 538 went through. And we need to stop giving the benefit of the doubt to reasonable people who say "well I'm the one who didn't"
Maybe I'm old but this smells like a new generation coming to terms with the concept of a sellout. It's not new.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Selling_out
"While this perceived inauthenticity is viewed with scorn and contempt by members of the subculture, the definition of the term and to whom it should be applied is subjective. While the term is most associated with the 1970s- and 1980s-era punk and hardcore subculture, English use of the term originates in the late 19th century."
Cue the Mad Men meme: "THAT'S WHAT THE MONEY'S FOR!"
> I'm simply tired of this hindsight virtue signaling.
Virtue signalling is a funny term. What, exactly, does it mean here? In what way is reminiscing about a venture that lasted 15 years of your life "virtue signalling"? It seems to be that word is trotted out as a meaningless cliche, something in the sense of "I don't like this thing, but I'll sound more sophisticated if I accuse it of this nebulous bad thing rather than just saying I don't like it".
The man is allowed to write a blog post about the final conclusion of a huge phase of his life. You don't have to give him your sympathy, but there's nothing wrong with writing about it.
The "virtue signaling" is signaling being a scrappy creative type who regrets/disliked the path he followed when he actually sold out to a big conglomerate at the first possible opportunity. The virtues being signaled are things like independence and grit.
Perhaps you read a different blog post than I did, but that's not what he signalled at all. He regrets getting involved with ESPN specifically because it was a poor fit for him as a television network that didn't have a suitable business model for 538, and would have preferred if he had taken the competing offers from NYT or Bloomberg in 2013 and then wanted to move to The Athletic in 2018. At no point did he say anything like "I wish I didn't sell 538 and stuck it out alone".
I don't understand the use of the word "actually" in this sentence. The second half does not stand in contrast to the first half. In fact, it explains the first half.
And portraying oneself as having independence and grit when one doesn't actually (which I don't concede happened here) is not what virtue signaling is. "Virtue" here more closely means "morality" than "admirable or sympathetic qualities". Virtue signaling is disingenuously behaving like you are a moral person because it is advantageous, when in fact you lack such morals.
I feel the need to belabor this because accusations of virtue signaling are too often unfounded and amount to a cheap trick to shut down more thoughtful discussion.
[dead]
“Virtue signaling” has become a thought-terminating cliche.
All it really amounts to is an accusation of insincerity motivated by vanity, which is a two-for-one ad hominem attack that allows the accuser to avoid responding to the actual point.
It is a statement on a culture that values insincere "feelgoodery" over truth. We can decry the downfall of common sense even if it comes at the expense of pointing out the obvious. Imo this is a good trend.
> insincere "feelgoodery" over truth
This has literally nothing to do with the article, and really nothing to do with almost any usage of the term I've seen. I pretty much always see it as a kind of incoherent insult that, like this usage here, isn't based in any kind of reality but instead just makes the person writing it feel good about themselves for some reason.
Easy phrase for rude folks to trot out when someone raises ethical/moral/legal concerns. Quick little rationalization:
_other person says they care about thing I don't that admittedly does sound good, so it has to be wrong to have mentioned it - I can't just say I don't care about the good-sounding thing_
(Of course, on the internet, people will end up playing make believe with their values, but it shouldn't be the first assumption. Or maybe it should, but with a hard second look.)
I think you can both be sad that something you built was destroyed, and also aware that you already sold it and are not somehow personally a victim.
I wrote this exact comment elsewhere on the thread and got downvoted for it. Business is business! It sucks for Nate but he's acting like a sore loser, when this is a totally normal and expected outcome. Businesses acquire other businesses and sunset them all the time. Zero sympathy from me.
Sore losers don’t generally write at length about their own mistakes and poor decisions that led to the ultimate demise of their baby.
they do since Substack was invented because it turns out a digital rehabilitation facility for whiny and overly wordy sore losers is a fantastic subscription business.
Might want to think about selling that one to Disney as well and then writing about your great regrets of selling your substack on substack v2 in ten years, that's gotta be amazing content for another ten posts
What are your criteria for recognizing a useful insightful blog into a poster's previous business ventures?
Few tellers are neutral and objective, many writers get accused of selectively editing things: Philip Greenspun's account of the demise of Ars Digita springs to mind. Or Jerry Kaplan on Go (mobile startup). Or Joel Spolsky on the last decade of StackOverflow.
You don't need to have sympathy to accept that these chimp outs are virtuous for entirely pedagogical reasons.
I think Nate Silver is off the mark as to what Disney wanted to get out of this. Entertainment companies like Disney make plays where they buy a huge portfolio of entertainment assets and see which ones manage to hit it big. They invest resources and they help quite a lot, but it does come down to the entertainer to take it all the way. In other words, a Disney executive probably bought 538 expecting that it might become the next CNN or Fox - the next big secondary source news analysis platform. Note that Disney doesn't have one of those in their portfolio right now. Instead, 538 continued to produce wonkish articles about esoterica of sports and politics statistics, and did not expand to the grand role that Disney may have imagined. The ad revenue from some wonkish articles isn't going to cover the cost of a number of writers and statisticians, which is why Nate Silver went to a bigger player in the first place.
The core problem here seems to be that the visions of the buyers were not aligned with Nate Silver's vision. He wanted to continue having a blog on esoteric statistics, but with the resources of a news network. They may have wanted to have a news network, and acquire it at the price of a blog on esoteric statistics. This wasn't a loss-leading "feather in the cap" for Disney, but a bet that simply didn't pay off and needed to be put out to pasture.
This is the wrong level of analysis. Disney owns ABC, ABC owned 538. The relevant decisions were made by ABC’s leadership.
And the firing of the staff happened years ago and people broadly understood even if they did not agree with it.
The recent decision was to take down an archive that cost $8 in server resources and was still bringing in page views and ad revenue.
Same effect as Killed By Google.
> I did too much bragging in the media and didn’t anticipate the extent to which public opinion toward FiveThirtyEight would shift once we became a corporate-backed incumbent rather than an eccentric upstart
Can’t speak for everyone else, but it wasn’t this for me. It was about 2016 presidential that lost me.
He tries to justify this later about how theirs was better than other outlets but I don’t care. Call it emotional, naive, unfair or whatever you want, but regardless I had zero interest in reading any of their predictions or analyses after that.
Not even mad, just that to my experience they had one job and they didn’t fulfill it at the most important time. They went from appearing insightful to just one opinion amongst so many others.
I had complaints about 538, especially the early days, but don't understand this critique at all. A 30% chance hitting is completely unremarkable, and it was a perfectly reasonable reading of the evidence at the time. Nate isn't wrong that conventional wisdom was way off, with even supposedly statistical models giving Hillary a 99% chance of winning.
Elections, like many things, have some inherent uncertainty. A several point polling error is normal, so a candidate who is down a couple points on election day has a decent shot of winning.
Discussion of stats models is always complicated by the fact that a lot of people will read "30%" as a "no" prediction and claim your model is wrong if the thing happens. On the one hand, one strategy is to "hide" the numbers a bit behind a blaring headline that says "we are not sure!!" It's a bit of an art to decide when to be "sure" or not. On the other hand, in research for example you can just say screw it, I care if the correct people are correct, not if a bunch of wrong people are wrong.
I feel like the correct strategy for 538 when it was actually niche was to be precise, but then it went viral and maybe should've hit the IDK button much harder and more often after that.
The real caveat is that 538 was a Monte Carlo model, and is only as good as its inputs. "Here's what the current spread in polling numbers is *given our model and the current polling and their reported uncertainties.*" Polling uncertainties are themselves computed under certain models, and those models are subject to errors. I don't think 538 hid this, but it's a difficult caveat for people to reason about because the sorts of modeling errors that have the most influence usually represent "unknown unknowns".
Building a model for predicting the ultimate winner of a US presidential election is particularly difficult, because you are dealing with noisy input data and nonlinear effects, i.e. just a few thousand votes in a few key states can completely flip the outcome. If you then have poorly calibrated polls with a large margin of error, there is really nothing much you can do.
On the other hand, it does raise the question how valuable the 538 models for something like this really are if the outcome is a coin flip anyway.
Exactly, and correlated errors, where a polling error in one state predicts similar errors across the board.
I disagree that it's all pointless though. Most basically it's smart for campaigns to have a good model and let that inform strategy where appropriate. Since the president is a big deal other people's decisions are also impacted, and in the long run it pays to have good predictions of those chances. Also, the outcome sometimes is fairly certain and that isn't always easy to see.
Regularly referring to that ~30% spread as "one polling error" made this a lot more understandable than most statistics for many people.
That's a core mechanic in games like Dispatch.
People don't like seeing a 95% chance of winning and then losing. The game tweaks the odds, so certain thresholds become gimmes (something like "if the displayed odds are better than 75%, treat them as 100%").
That's stupid. That would piss me off.
Seems weird that it would piss you off, if you were really that invested in the cold hard stats you'd know that if it was fair rng you could still have been the 1 in 100,000 player that got lucky on 75% 40 times in a row.
Fire Emblem does something complex with averaging random numbers to do the same thing - a 95% chance to hit becomes 99.5, and the reverse for low percentages.
Conversely weather forecasters report a 40% chance of rain when the actual chance is 10% or similar.
So I have a bit of sympathy for people who don't have a good intuition for probabilities, given that the world is constantly gaslighting them.
> Discussion of stats models is always complicated by the fact that a lot of people will read "30%" as a "no" prediction and claim your model is wrong if the thing happens.
I've even heard things like "70% chance of Hillary winning means she gets 70% of the votes!" (and tangentially, my far-too-long argument with someone on Reddit who insisted "there is no way in hell 50% of the people in this town make above the median income"...)
I don't understand why this is surprising. People didn't go to FiveThirtyEight to marvel the science behind it. The science was just supposed to give you what you came there for: the actual election results.
In the end, it turned out that predicting elections is still very hard, and that for all the fanfare, FiveThirtyEight performed only slightly better than what you could find in any other reputable newspaper, so it kinda lost its appeal.
> FiveThirtyEight performed only slightly better than what you could find in any other reputable newspaper
FiveThirtyEight gave Trump double the odds of the next highest reputable prediction, which was The New York Times Upshot (15%). Princeton Election Consortium gave Trump less than 1%.
That is not "only slightly better" to anyone who's statistically literate.
A FiveThirtyEight reader in 2016 was significantly better calibrated regarding Clinton’s chances than a reader of other reputable newspapers.
This embodies what 538 and its defenders miss about 538's appeal:
People didn't come to 538 for explanations on subtle points of statistical literacy (although those were provided). They came because, for whatever reason, they wanted to know who would win the election.
People not trained in statistics treated like the scoreboard at a football game- it's always better to be winning, but score is a near perfect predictor in the last minute.
Once 538 stopped delivering perfect predictions and started delivering "Actually the difference between 1% and 30% are way bigger than you think" lectures, the appeal disappeared. There are better places to learn math from.
Speak for yourself. That's not why I read FiveThirtyEight.
The purpose of FiveThirtyEight was never to be an oracle for the average person. It was always a deliberately wonky site for a wonky audience. They were very clear about that in the articles they published and topics they covered.
If we’re brutally honest the vast majority of 538 readers read it to be assured that the right outcome was outcoming.
They went to the wrong place then.
----
Nov. 1, 2016 — Election Update: Yes, Donald Trump Has A Path To Victory — https://archive.is/kwdab
> Tuesday was another pretty good day of polling for Donald Trump.
> Trump remains an underdog, but no longer really a longshot: His Electoral College chances are 29 percent in our polls-only model — his highest probability since Oct. 2 — and 30 percent in polls-plus.
> This isn’t a secure map for Clinton at all. In a race where the popular vote is roughly tied nationally, Colorado and New Hampshire are toss-ups, and Clinton’s chances are only 60 to 65 percent in Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania.
> If you want to debate a campaign’s geographic planning, Hillary Clinton spending time in Arizona is a much worse decision than Trump hanging out in Michigan or Wisconsin.
----
Sept. 16, 2016 — How Trump Could Win The White House While Losing The Popular Vote — https://archive.is/rxP5l
> Using a prototype of a demographic election calculator that FiveThirtyEight will be unveiling in the next few weeks, I decided to simulate a few election scenarios.
> The result? Clinton would carry the popular vote by 1.5 percentage points. However, Trump would win the Electoral College with 280 votes by holding all 24 Romney states and flipping Florida, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Iowa and Maine’s 2nd Congressional District from blue to red.
----
Jun 29, 2016 — Donald Trump Has A 20 Percent Chance Of Becoming President — https://archive.ph/ryIkP
> A 20 percent or 25 percent chance of Trump winning is an awfully long way from 2 percent, or 0.02 percent. It’s a real chance: about the same chance that the visiting team has when it trails by a run in the top of the eighth inning in a Major League Baseball game. If you’ve been following politics or sports over the past couple of years, I hope it’s been imprinted onto your brain that those purported long shots — sometimes much longer shots than Trump — sometimes come through.
----
FiveThirtyEight was probably the worst reputable source to read if you were looking for maximum assurances that Clinton would win.
> it turned out that predicting elections is still very hard
So maybe we shouldn't be doing it. The value of predicting an election in the large out in public seems kind of dubious, and it's more like gambling than actually being useful. A candidate only runs, and continues running, if they think they can win. All predictions like these do is confuse voters leading up to election day and while they are voting. It keep candidates from making strong cases for their platform, keeps the voters from listening to the candidates' platforms, and encourages team-based partisan politics.
Predictions are like exit polls, aren't they, in that they're both able to provide a check on official election results?
Think that's outweighed by the negatives?
538 was never about magically making polls more reliable, and only people that don't understand what polls are could think that (caveat: lots of people don't understand how polls work).
538 was about analyzing and communicating the information from those polls in an easily accessible form. If you came to the site for that, you weren't mad that they "predicted poorly something that was impossible to predict from the data sources they used" ... you were just mad at Trump for winning (despite polls suggesting otherwise).
Again, I don't think any of this matters. People were not coming there to have "information communicated to them". They were coming there for the satisfaction of knowing the results before everyone else. And FiveThirtyEight couldn't realistically deliver on that.
That makes as much sense as visiting ESPN and expecting them to tell you who will definitely win the Super Bowl next year. Anyone expecting that is going to be disappointed often no matter what.
I thought it went without saying but a good analyst can't predict the future in politics, sports, or anything else. What they can do is make good probabilistic estimates of what is likely to happen. 538 wasn't pretending to do anything more than that.
If people want magic predictions there are plenty of touts and scammers willing to offer them, they don't need to waste time with charts and numbers though.
> a good analyst can't predict the future in politics, sports, or anything else. What they can do is make good probabilistic estimates of what is likely to happen. 538 wasn't pretending to do anything more than that.
Well, sure, but how big is the market for that, really? Particularly for a binary outcome like an election, knowing who's going to win is fun, reading a pundit telling you who's going to win can be fun, but ultimately the man in the street is going to take whatever the pundit said and reduce it to candidate X or candidate Y, and you can only do so much better than replacement level at that.
I think anyone who actually operates that way is very misguided, but it’s a fair point. But either way, 538 was such a nice site for just looking at the data in a fresh way at the time, and it’s a shame that went away.
If people are expecting anyone to have a magic prediction algorithm for things like this… I mean there’s only so much one can say. It’s not realistic.
I'm very curious to see how polymarket fairs, compared to the news agencies. I suspect prediction markets will be the norm, going forward. Polls can't fully capture the element of anonymity that's required for an accurate poll of something controversial.
My experience was that prediction markets were lagging indicators and basically followed something akin to an aggregate opinion of polls.
This is especially viewable if you watch them during the 2020 election.
Polls became much less interesting as an Entertainment category once we all had experience with how unreliable they are.
I can't find the source anymore since 538 is no more, and I recall Nate even describing what could (and did) happen, which was that one swing state moving to the right had a high likelihood of them all moving to the right.
Yeah, Nate has talked a number of times about polling errors being correlated across states. In fact that's probably one of the most common mistakes models can make, treating correlated inputs as independent. There's a long history of that mistake in financial markets as well.
In 2024 the single most likely outcome his model had was trump winning all 7 swing states. The second most likely was Harris winning all 7.
Not just that, predictions also impact voter participation.
I think this is all true, but it dodges the bigger issue. A presidential election has a binary outcome: yes/no, win/lose. If your statistical model doesn’t contain this single bit in its output, then it doesn’t meet the minimum requirement for being a prediction.
Now you might say that it was on me as a consumer to understand this in 2016, but I remember the look of total shock on Nate Silver’s face when he called the winner on live TV that night, so clearly he didn’t really understand it either. Lesson learned for all of us, I guess.
It was 30% in the end, before the nomination it famously gave him a 2% chance of getting nominated. All the talk about 30% is disingenuous
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FiveThirtyEight#2016_U.S._elec...
They had him at 30% at a time when most reputable media had him in single digits at best. You might not remember now, but the result of that election was a real shock.
If I say you have a 50% chance to win a coin flip and you lose it, that doesn't mean I'm wrong.
A key thing though is 538 did regularly test the calibration their models: https://web.archive.org/web/20190410030104/https://fivethirt...
> "What you’ll find, though, is that our calibration has generally been very, very good. For instance, out of the 5,589 events (between sports and politics combined) that we said had a 70 chance of happening (rounded to the nearest 5 percent), they in fact occurred 71 percent of the time. Or of the 55,853 events that we said had about a 5 percent chance of occurring, they happened 4 percent of the time."
Huh. I first started listening to 538 in the run-up to the 2016 election and started really paying attention to them precisely because their 30% figure was so much higher than all the other polls. It was shocking to me then (and still is now reading your comment) that people didn’t seem to understand that 30% in the context of that particular election and that particular candidate suggested a remarkably high chance of winning, not a really low chance of winning. It’s a strange thing where people seem to think that less than 50% = not happening.
I really think a majority of NYTimes and ABCnews consumers don't know the difference between a 2/3 chance (super close) of winning and 2/3 of the vote (a landslide).
Apparently neither do a big chunk of HN readers.
That’s like saying “there was only a 30 percent chance of rain today and it rained, so I will never look at the weather forecast again.”
Because they said trump only had a 30% chance to win?
What if they had said 49%? Would that have made their prediction worthless?
I mean everyone said he had a snowball’s chance in hell and then we ended up with him for two terms because the Democrats can’t stop fighting over the worse possible candidates to back that no one is asking for.
Everyone said that except for 538. That's why 538 was worth reading.
I find it interesting to blame it on the democrats. We ended up with him because enough people voted for him.
And he won the popular vote if you believe that all U.S. elections are secure and sacrosanct. He is diabolical at getting people to talk about him and think about him constantly.
Joe Biden on the other hand was a senile wrecker for Build Back Better and the party finally made "the switch" to unelected Harris far too late in the process. Even if she was a great candidate, with her odd laughter and fascination with buses, there was not enough time to shape her candidacy. Her VP candidate choice was hobbled by rising anti-semitism in the party against Shapiro and perhaps concerns of being outshined by him. No, the Democrats did not do themselves any favors in the '24 election.
Carter, Clinton and Obama were media creations, vaulting to national prominence out of nowhere. It helped that Clinton and Obama were great, charismatic choices.
Now the traditional media is fragmented and weak. You're not seeing furtive vaulting attempts for potential phenoms like Newsome gain any traction. Who is the media going to be stuck with next time? Will it be take-two for Harris?
WHEN, not if, Harris loses bigly to Vance, then the Democrats will absolutely be to blame. Where are their all new shiny, beautiful, erudite candidates that would need all four years to gestate and promote? Shouldn't we be getting acquainted with them now? I wager they're not going to appear, and we'll get more flunkies. My theory as to why is that those currently in power in the party do not share; they're aging out and hollowing out the party in the process. We're to the point now of collapse. I'm surprised a third party on the left hasn't yet formed.
Yes and no. It's a two-party system and a lot of people vote for candidate X to stop candidate Y getting in. Indeed IIRC a lot of democrat messaging around the previous election was explicitly about stopping Trump rather than the merits of whoever their guy was.
The Democrats reliably back the color "beige" as a candidate. Obama was different, and he won back to back. Biden succeeded, barely, because Trump was fresh in everyone's mind. But for some reason the Democrats have been allergic to charisma for far too long.
Voting in the US, it feels like I am forced to choose between evil and incompetence.
Your description sounds more like evil vs boring, which is an easy choice for me.
And frankly I’ll vote for incompetence over evil too. Because, y’know, evil.
The blame is put on democrats because when they lose its because they don’t turn out and when they win its because they do. It is quite simple really. Republicans are far more reliable voters. You can look at vote totals and see this pattern. Massive delta for democrats election over election and usually half that delta for republicans.
Every politician is to blame for their losses, just as every politician own their wins. The people voted for Trump because the Dems failed to get the people to vote for them.
do you think nate silver is part of the problem or part of the solution?
the turnout-of-demographic-groups-based election model is surely the underlying intelligence failure here.
Democrats will not let people choose candidates because that may be too dangerous for their interests. We'll never get good candidates as long as the current leadership is in control.
Do you not have primaries where you are?
What position was Kamala Harris in the DNC Primaries before she was appointed as the General Election Candidate? First place? Second Place?
Surely she must have been in the top 3?
Not sure what you think they should have done? There is no way to reorganize primaries that late in the year.
It totally sucks that nobody tried to convince Biden not to run again before the primaries started though.
Denying that the democrats had two high-profile situations where the “wrong” candidate ended up running is denying the obvious. It’s manifest that Obama wasn’t to win the primary, and that the superdelegates exist for reasons.
When pressed before the election, Silver did not explain where Trump's much higher probability of winning came from. He predicted a Trump loss, Trump won, and he claimed victory because he gave Trump a better chance of winning. There's no way that strategy could have failed.
Silver claimed that his model was better because it predicted a high correlation between PA/MI/WI.
A model that predicts a 30% chance of winning the election will be wrong 1 out of 3 times, which is not quite a coin flip but close enough.
Nate Silver is not a magician! He can't magically make polls reliable!
All he (or anyone) can do is interpret or analyse poll results, and then surface their findings in a way a larger audience can understand. 538 did that better than any other poll analyst ... but they all got it wrong because the polls themselves were faulty.
TLDR; You can't get water from a stone, and no one (not even Nate Silver) can get perfectly accurate predictions from (inherently flawed) polls!
> All he (or anyone) can do is interpret or analyse poll results, and then surface their findings in a way a larger audience can understand.
He (or anybody) can make adjustments to the data. He was challenged to explain why his predictions were so different, but he wouldn't do it.
> 538 did that better than any other poll analyst
He made a binary prediction, and it was wrong. There's no such thing as "better" when you only have one outcome. Your prediction is either right or wrong. If by "better" you mean he was wrong but assigned a higher probability to a Trump victory, the best forecaster would have been someone that mechanically changed the probability of a Trump victory to slightly less than 50% no matter what the data said.
We should have a drinking game in Nate Silver thread anyone complains about 2016 prediction. Then everyone piles on to point out how probabilities work.
I long ago stopped commenting on threads (in /r/CFB) about the SP+ college football model because it go so, so, so tiring correcting the exact same misunderstandings about things as fundamental as what the model was even purporting to do let alone, how it worked. It is incredibly disheartening to me to see the staggering level of statistical illiteracy on display in any online conversation about a statistical model. I've come to the conclusion that it's not worth my, or any one else's time. I'm glad these things exist, and the communities who want them will self select. It's not use trying to convert haters.
It wasn't even a complaint, just a personal anecdote to help share some context as to why the site may have failed to retain consumer interest post-2016.
But yes I'll join you with the liver damage and drink 17 shots.
538 used the example of Trump having approximately the same chance of winning the 2016 presidential election as the Cavaliers had of winning the NBA championship round vs the Warriors. Both Trump and the Cavaliers won with a ~25% predicted chance.
538 made very clear with this analogy that both Trump and the Cavs were underdogs, and that both had a solid chance of winning.
A dice roll has a 16.6% chance of landing on any given side, meaning an 83% chance of not landing on that side.
If you guessed a "two", and it landed on "two, I wouldn't really be that impressed, even though there was an 83% probability going against you.
I think this gets to the core of why a lot of this election prediction stuff doesn't work. People just don't parse the numbers the way the authors intend.
FiveThirtyEight had Trump at a 30% chance of winning, and he won. The model wasn't wrong. The less likely of two outcomes occurred. Even if they'd had him at 1% they still wouldn't technically have been wrong though I think complaints might be more warranted.
If they had Trump at 49% would you have still been angry? What about at 51%? Would it have been okay then?
Technically this is right. But if that is the case (and it seems to be), then a coin flip is better than their models. Because we only care about the current election, not a sequence of 1000 elections (which will not happen, by the way).
So use a coin flip to predict the weather then
We already do that in Denver.
> But if that is the case (and it seems to be), then a coin flip is better than their models.
If a coin flip is the necessary mental model to remind you both things can happen, then sure.
People just love horse race coverage. Silver gave us the most accurate horse race coverage. Maybe the lesson is stop following horse race coverage.
But most people went back to the tea leave readers. That way when the election was over, it can justifiably be the charlatan's fault that viewers got over-invested in their predictive capabilities.
I don’t disagree, I think the tea leaf reading is ultimately pretty futile.
But at the same time I do think it’s valid to say it’s more than a coin flip. The polling data over the election cycle showed that Trump had a smaller but still legitimate chance of winning. The data was different in 2020, when he lost.
FiveThirtyEight gave Trump a 30% chance. Their reporting did make clear that with margin was within the range of a normal polling error. And sometimes you get more than a normal polling error.
It doesn't help that the US has a terrible election system that often leads to small margins in some states being decisive.
> FiveThirtyEight gave Trump a 30% chance.
I know I'm being super conspiratorial here but why wouldn't all forecasters predict just between 30% - 70%? That way if they're "right" they can take the credit for it and if they're wrong they can say "well, we weren't that wrong". That's probably what I'd do anyway...
It implies a close race or a strong reason to believe there's some sort of systemic polling miss, and if it's a blowout you still look pretty bad. Especially if you don't have some kind of good explanation for the miss/you keep making those kinds of misses frequently.
Also there's more going in those forecasts besides just the "% chance to win". There's expected results in terms of %'s of the vote for the candidates, and that's what people tend to focus on for actually analyzing your performance and credibility after the fact.
You getting the outcome correct but being off by 20 points on the margin is a much worse performance than you getting the outcome wrong but being within 0.5 points of the margin. (ex: Results are 49.75/50.25, you predicted 30/70, another outlet predicted 50.25/49.75).
538 claimed that they post-checked thousands of elections and their percentages were pretty close. (E.g., 30% chances happened about 30% of the time, million to one chances happened every single time)
Of course there's more than that. Predicting higher uncertainty than warranted would be a different failure in the model. But that didn't really happen in that election.
> I know I'm being super conspiratorial here but why wouldn't all forecasters predict just between 30% - 70%? That way if they're "right" they can take the credit for it and if they're wrong they can say "well, we weren't that wrong". That's probably what I'd do anyway...
For anyone making many predictions, you can analyze the outcomes to see how accurate those percentages are.
For anyone making few predictions, you should never trust their track record even if it's technically perfect.
You're completely right, although I believe this number was not decided personally. They just happened to pick algorithms that have this "nice" property because it will lead to the same result.
> Call it emotional, naive, unfair or whatever you want
Yep definitely all those.
Why is it so hard to admit 30% is not 0%?
As a younger man I would have been with the commenters mansplaining probability, but I've aged into realizing that thinking of the election like a marble pulled from an urn whose contents we have probed with polling is just as bad as thinking of it as deterministic. The reason people read fivethirtyeight, probability-savvy or not, was almost entirely to be told what was going to happen, which is sort of incompatible with feeling you can do anything about it. In that way it's probably worse than old-fashioned pundit-driven horse race coverage because it has an air of scientific authority.
> Call it emotional, naive, unfair or whatever you want
We would need a pass from the mods lol.
If you use 538 data, on average you make money betting. Its more correct than not
Nate was a huge outlier in that prediction, he gave trump a better chance than almost anyone else that I can recall, so why are you mad at him about that?
What made me mad is Nate seemed to turn into a MAGA troll himself after that election.
> Founder Nate Silver left in 2023, taking the rights to his forecasting model with him to his website Silver Bulletin.[7][8][9] The site's new owner, Disney, hired G. Elliott Morris to develop a new model.[7][8] On September 18, 2023, the original website domain at fivethirtyeight.com was closed, with web traffic becoming redirected to ABC News pages, and its logo was replaced, with the name 538 used instead of FiveThirtyEight.[2] On March 5, 2025, 538 was shut down by ABC News and its staff were laid off.[10] On May 15, 2026, ABC redirected thousands of archived 538 articles to the politics section of their news website, making them inaccessible.
From Wikipedia.
Easy to go after Disney for this, but did Nate have to sell to ESPN to begin with?
I've been burned too many times subscribing to services that go to shit because the owner wanted their payday. Let's stop (only) blaming the buyer.
He literally said he made the wrong choice by choosing ESPN, so he's in agreement with you.
Yes, but he's failing to see the big picture. Selling any small company to any big company leads to this risk. To hold water, his argument should be: "we shouldn't have sold the business at all," not "we shouldn't have sold to ESPN."
I personally don't love ESPN/Disney/ABC, but basically all major corporations that make acquisitions do this. Google does it all the time. It's very clearly a known risk when you sell a startup. I don't have much sympathy.
It wouldn't have been a business to begin with if he didn't sell it. At the time, it was just a blog driving a modest amount of ad revenue. Partnering with bigger outfits allowed him to hire staff and cover more ground, something that he could never do without outside investment. He has since returned to blogging, which to my understanding drives enough revenue for himself and exactly one assistant.
I replied to your comment, and now you've replied to two other threads I've commented in reiterating that Nate is a sore loser who deserves what he got and he should have expected this. To be honest, it sounds like you have some kind of personal grievance with him. His post doesn't come off like he wasn't expecting this outcome, or that it's devastating him. He mentions that he is significantly happier now having gone back to blogging than he was at Disney. It's just a blog post, about a big era of his life, which is now over with. He's human. He can feel disappointed that 15 years of his work was taken offline, and reminisce about the ways things went wrong, both on his and his employer's end.
The focus of the stories making the rounds about this are not about Nate having made some mistake, they're about big bad Disney deleting someone's work (which yes is also true).
The more I read about how big businesses operate the more I think it resembles the weather. There's no intelligence in there, it's just random fluctuations. FiveThirtyEight never made any sense at Disney and seems to have been passed around there more like a trinket than a decades work of dozens of people.
One of the most frustrating things about getting older — besides all the fun stuff that happens to your knees and hair — is the fact that younger generations just take what has been normal their whole lives and say “yes this is the normal state of affairs.”
We used to have laws and limits regarding media ownership. One company couldn’t own every radio station in most of America. Distributors couldn’t own studios. Etc.
Disney should never have been allowed to buy 538 in the first place. ABC, possibly…? But Disney shouldn't be allowed to own ABC!! (And if you’re left-leaning, you can’t pin this mess on the “corporation-friendly” Republican Party because it was Bill Clinton who put his signature on this mess!)
The state we’re in is not normal and it wasn’t necessary and we don’t have to just live with it if we don’t want to.
In situations like this I always wonder if there's a decision maker somewhere in the pipeline who just has values and a mental model of the world that's entirely foreign to me - for whom the idea of deleting a decade+ of content from the web doesn't strike them as bad in the slightest.
I can easily see the argument that once an election is over, people don't read the content anymore. Granted, storage is cheap so this is kinda silly, but I bet the old articles weren't getting very much traffic.
I would actually say that for most business people this is all "about numbers" and aren't in the slightest worried about deleting something.
This is why efforts like Internet Archive and others are so important. Whatever you think of 538, it _is_ history, and in this digital world it needs to be preserved.
> The thinking at Disney is presumably that they invested a lot of money in FiveThirtyEight and were left with nothing to show for it. But to my mind, however much they spent on FiveThirtyEight, they never invested a dollar in it. There was never really any effort, or even any pretense of trying, to make it a profitable unit of the company. At one point, other senior staffers and I basically begged Disney to turn on a paywall, figuring this could provide some security, and were told, essentially, that it just wasn’t worth Disney’s bandwidth to figure out the mechanics of one.
I cannot tell you how much of my professional career I have seen this play out again and again and again.
There is an "executive class" in this country that has never had a real job or done real work. They were born to privilege, they went to elite schools, got their first check from a major consultancy, and then spend their whole career bouncing from C-suite to C-suite. They stare at slides all day, occasionally make a meaningful decision, and more or less spend their time insulating themselves from failure.
This may not describe everyone in charge at every major company, but it describes enough to explain why everything in our economy just feels like it's piggybacking off of a handful of actually good businesses.
It's remarkably ironic that we are slowly returning to aristocracy.
Only it's worse this time. Say what you want about those French poofs and British lords: they were expected to do their duty on the battlefield.
Insulation in our society has gone all the way up and down.
It's not the full story, but it's certainly a large part of it.
I'll chime in tangentially with another large part: the disproportionate share of both asset and liquid wealth held by people who are some combination of a) Baby Boomers, b) in the top percentiles of wealth/income, c) politically- or socially-connected. As you say, it's not all of them, but enough of them. At the confluence of the two groups is a desire not to invest in potentially risky ventures, or to spend on consumption, but instead to put as much money as possible into a narrow band of low-risk, often passive investments, and to pull every lever possible to protect those investments, even when they become outmoded in some regard and the income stream or economic activity that supports their high (growing) valuation dries up.
Supporting this paradigm (ostensibly so that seniors don't die in poverty, so that strategically-important businesses and ventures are backstopped, etc., but, crucially, to the detriment of all other concerns) means an erosion of a sort of "constructive inefficiency": "wasted" spending on ventures that might not work out, on employees who are not the best and most productive, on niche services and products, which altogether represent a massive share of potential economic activity that is much better at involving and supporting a diverse population with diverse needs and diverse skill sets that perhaps have not yet found the correct outlet to produce maximal value.
Your C-suite goons and my rich, highly networked seniors don't care about the potential of a paradigm shift to support and enable short-term losers, though. They just want to pile into the sure-thing of your "actually good businesses" (which, in many cases, aren't actually that good).
Some of Disney’s most valuable properties—ESPN, Pixar, Marvel, Star Wars—were acquired. FiveThirtyEight may be smaller, but it should be in Disney’s self-interest to set things right and earn a reputation for being a good home for acquisitions.
Berkshire Hathaway has this attitude, with the proviso that the corporate management at the acquired firm must be competent, and the firm be profitable and protected by a "moat."
It's amazing that they trot out Sees Candy every year for the shareholders' meeting when they own GEICO.
It seems that Disney isn't doing this quite right.
For one thing See's Candy is fundamentally a value-added operation and GEICO is a positive cash flow financial structure which remains competitive by trying not to remove as much value from the customer as the next guy.
See's Candy is also what Charlie Munger considered their shift from distressed companies to high quality companies; its sentimental on a company level because it represented a real shift in investment philosophy.
Sees Candy made the wiki.
Services & retailing: Ben Bridge Jeweler, Business Wire, Dairy Queen, McLane Company, NetJets, Oriental Trading Company, Pampered Chef, See's Candies, Star Furniture, WPLG
Manufacturing: Benjamin Moore & Co., Clayton Homes, CTB International, Duracell, Fruit of the Loom, Johns Manville, Lubrizol, Precision Castparts Corp, Scott Fetzer Company, Garan Inc
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berkshire_Hathaway
Yeah, Disney, the company that recently tried to bankrupt several novelists by claiming that when they bought Star Wars, they didn't put themselves on the hook for respecting contracts that Lucas signed. https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/business-news/sta...
Disney has never given a single f*ck about that reputation, but the chiefs who agree to these acquisitions never had to care about that.
> ESPN, Pixar, Marvel, Star Wars
And all of those have declined in reputation since their acquisition or soon after.
That's not remotely true.
Disney bought ESPN in 1996, Marvel in 2009 (literally had 2 movies released here and one of them flopped) and Pixar in 2006.
For Pixar, they and Disney were joined at the hip even before acquisition. Besides distribution rights, Disney had full sequel rights to almost all of Pixar's catalogue at the time. Disney could have made a sequel to Finding Nemo, The Incredibles etc even without Pixar's blessing or involvement. There is quite literally no Pixar without Disney.
Marvel? Their most successful years were under Disney. ESPN did not become the media empire you know it as until well after Disney's acquisition either.
I specifically said reputation. Disney has a history of buying properties and squeezing every last dollar out of them until nothing is left but a husk of what they were at their peak. Disney certainly got their money’s worth out of those purchases. I’m not denying that. But the reputation of all of them has been on a steep decline even if there were temporary spikes after the acquisition.
I’ll grant you that “soon after” might have been a stretch for ESPN, but it’s obviously true for the others. Almost all of Pixar’s most enduring films had their start before Disney bought the company. The same is true with Marvel. Sure, Disney’s fanfare might have played before the Avengers films, but those movies were the brainchild of Kevin Fiege, who was already in charge before the Disney purchase. You can maybe claim Disney has a good eye for finding companies on an upward trajectory, but these are all examples of Disney management’s failure to be a long-term steward of their acquisitions.
>Disney has a history of buying properties and squeezing every last dollar out of them until nothing is left but a husk of what they were at their peak
Only if you don't know what you're talking about.
>But the reputation of all of them has been on a steep decline even if there were temporary spikes after the acquisition.
None of these were 'temporary spikes'. Marvel was on an unprecedented high for a decade. If that is a temporary spike then almost every company’s successful era would count as a temporary spike.
>Almost all of Pixar’s most enduring films had their start before Disney bought the company.
Did you not read what I said?
Pixar’s pre-acquisition slate was already deeply tied to Disney. Disney co-produced and distributed those films, and the relationship was so significant that Disney had rights to continue all but one of their properties even without Pixar’s involvement. That's pretty much unheard of.
Any success you can attribute to Pixar pre-acquisition, you can attribute to Disney as well. Moreover, it would be silly to claim Pixar has been mismanaged simply because arguably the most succesfull animation run in history did not go on forever. Pixar has been managed fine.
>Sure, Disney’s fanfare might have played before the Avengers films, but those movies were the brainchild of Kevin Fiege, who was already in charge before the Disney purchase.
Feige was in charge of Marvel Studios, not all of Marvel Entertainment, and his position was not necessarily secure under the old structure. He had well-known conflicts with Ike Perlmutter, who had significant authority over Marvel at the time.
It was Disney who re-structured Marvel Studios to be semi autonomous, answering only to Alan Horn and the Walt Disney Film Studios Division. Regardless, Kevin is still in charge of Marvel Studios and Disney has left the arrangement largely the same, so blaming the current situation on Disney specific mismanagement would be very strange.
> earn a reputation for being a good home for acquisitions.
It's way too late for that to be possible any more.
They're running with their heads down, for at least as long as the current administration exists.
What a delightfully educational article on how the corporate world works
it was super interesting. My gut was like, jesus christ, if you don't live in New York City, seriously, absolutely nobody gives a single flying fuck about any of this stuff!
what i miss most about 538: whether it’s elections or the play offs, nothing comes close to how clean and fun the data interaction felt. i would constantly refresh any time a game finished or when a started called a candidate. i wonder who the front end engineer was, and what they’re doing now. would love for them to be building more fun ways to be interacting with data.
RIP 538's burrito bracket from 2014
A Pew study of a random sample of Internet links conducted in October 2023 found significant “link rot”: almost 40 percent of links that had been active 10 years earlier were broken. And that’s probably an underestimate: the study was based on the Common Crawl web archive (the same one that AI labs use to train their models), which is quite comprehensive but probably contains some bias toward more prominent sites.
"Random sample of Internet links" is going to include a lot of absolute garbage.
If we're talking about news sites, or commentary, or blogs, or magazines, or newspapers, or other publishers, the number of dead links will be far higher. Those are the types of sites that are likely to fail, be acquired, get migrated, or become paywalled.
I worked as a technology journalist for years starting in the late 90s. I did a lot of freelance work as well, and almost nothing survives online. There were media brands that were shut down, content migrated to another site, the CMS was migrated from Drupal to Wordpress to something else, there were two or three acquisitions, and so on. Last week, I checked some articles that I worked on between 3 and 10 years ago and they were either 404s or paywalled.
When I left one of the higher-profile pubs in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis, I knew my articles wouldn't last even though they were migrated to a sister publication. I made PDF copies of every single one. I still have them in a folder somewhere, not sure what to do with them.
My personal blogs are still up, but even those will die at some point.
> "Random sample of Internet links" is going to include a lot of absolute garbage.
It's also likely to include a lot of non-content links, e.g. links to index and navigation pages, interstitials, search results, user profiles, image galleries, etc. These sorts of links don't reliably address specific content, and it's natural that they'll change or die over time. This doesn't necessarily mean that anything valuable has been lost.
https://blog.archive.org/2026/04/23/introducing-vanishing-cu...
https://archive.org/details/vanishing-culture-2026
(when able, please consider donating to the Internet Archive; they are the durable, long term storage system of last resort)
> Yes, you can still access (for now) Disney-era FiveThirtyEight content via the invaluable Internet Archive, and pre-Disney-era content from The New York Times (which I partnered with from 2010 through 2013). And obviously, we’re trying to recreate some of the most popular parts of FiveThirtyEight at Silver Bulletin. The election models and polling averages are here, and new-and-improved versions of the sports models (PELE, ELWAY, COOPER) are gradually returning too.2 Galen Druke, Clare Malone and I have even been getting the old podcast crew back together for live shows.
With regards to:
> When I left one of the higher-profile pubs in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis, I knew my articles wouldn't last even though they were migrated to a sister publication. I made PDF copies of every single one. I still have them in a folder somewhere, not sure what to do with them.
May I suggest:
https://help.archive.org/help/uploading-a-basic-guide/
You can upload them all as a single item, or as individual items per piece and asking IA Patron Services to create a collection for you.
> My personal blogs are still up, but even those will die at some point.
Drop links, and they will be queued for crawling, if not already archived. If you would like to self serve, https://web.archive.org/save
Thank you!
This is quite sad.
I mean... you've spent how many articles talking shit about Disney and then complain they won't sell you back your baby that you sold to them.
Hard to get sympathy here.
I agree, and am getting downvoted in other comments for this position. If you sell a small company to a giant one, there's a major risk that they will sunset your work. It's the risk Nate knowingly took on when he sold the company.
No surprises here, no sympathy from me, and his blog post reads like he's a sore loser.
(Disney sucks and isn't blameless, but this is very much a standard business practice.)
Previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48152553
Even if you believe Nate Silver's analysis was deeply flawed/inaccurate the layout and presentation of the data itself made it easy for others to understand why it was flawed or innacurate. Modern science is built on thousands and thousands of failed experiments and research that went the wrong path. That makes preservation of this site important, more important than whatever personal grudge you may hold against him.
It’s what happened to Star Wars. Figures.
How so? To me it seems like the exact opposite of what's happened with Star Wars in the last 20 years.
538 was purchased and then left to wither and die where as Disney seems intent on squeezing every last penny from the Star Wars franchise by using the IP as much as possible
Disney removed a lot of the earlier IP from the official Star Wars storyline shortly after acquiring it. That IP was much better than the complete mess and politicization of Star Wars that happened in the sequels. Sure they are trying to squeeze money out of it - and maybe some of the TV shows are tolerable - but they killed the brand and its best content in the process.
Good point, Star Wars was famously not about politics. Very apolitical.
The politics of the original trilogy Star Wars was essentially “dictators and fascists with big armies are bad”. It was naïve and simplistic; a simple storytelling device, nothing more. There was no conscious choice behind it. If it had been made 40 years earlier, the enemies would have been savage indigenous people, as was the style at the time. The politics of modern Star Wars are… specific. Pointed. Winking at the camera. I suspect they may not age well.
The Viet Cong parallels in the original Star Wars about as much "winking at the camera" as current Star Wars is to current politics.
What Viet Cong parallels? Whatever you mean, it can’t have been very visible to the audience, since clear Viet Cong sympathies would not have gone over well (at least not universally) in 1977-1983.
This 3 minute clip of a conversation between George Lucas and James Cameron might help.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=fv9Jq_mCJEo
“Not available in your country.”
But what George Lucas claims to have thought (now many years later), is essentially irrelevant. What matters is how audiences interpret the movies when watching them, both at the time and now. If, as I strongly suspect, essentially nobody saw clear Viet Cong sympathies in the original trilogy, then the modern Star Wars differs significantly.
And this is my point. The politics of the original trilogy was cookie-cutter, incidental, and unimportant, whereas much of the modern Star Wars has political creeds, obvious symbolism and grandstanding all over the place, front and center. You may (or may not) agree with the politics of the new Star Wars, but you can’t deny that they are different.
You said “There was no conscious choice behind it” and here is the creator telling you the choice was intentional from the start. Some people simply can’t admit they are wrong.
Content quality and content monetization are very different. The EU had exceptionally low monetization and brand recognition.
Polling, particularly in US elections, is hard. A lot of people, particularly tech people, got very excited about Nate Silver and 538 after the 2012 presidential elections but they shouldn't have. When you look at any polling or election predictions, the US has voluntary voting so it's not just a question of how people will vote but who will vote. So, if your predictions just guessed an outcome without explaining why (accurately) then it's just astrology, basically.
In polling circles, the voters tend to be segmented into high and low propensity voters. High propensity voters will always vote. Low propensity voters won't. But the differences are often so small the results can flip on unexpected turnout in just one segment of the voters.
As an example, the 2024 election turned on 3 big factors:
1. Millions of Biden voters in 2020 stayed home. Affordability was the biggest factor but there are were other huge factors too, most notably Palestine;
2. Trump retained the white vote while increasing his share of the Hispanic vote; and
3. Trump activated younger, low-propensity voters. You'll often osee this described as the "podcast sphere". We're talking the people who end up in alt-right pipeline on Youtube and in podcasts (eg Andrew Tate).
Most recent presidential elections come down the results in about 7-8 states. The other 42-43 are known before you go in with some rare exceptions. The most recent exception was Obama in 2008 who won Iowa, for example. Other big sweeps were Reagan in 1984 and Nixon in 1972.
So, with a modern election you can just flip a coin 7 times and you have a 1 in 128 chance of just being correct, 50 out of 50. This is why you need to show your work with any prediction modeling and polling. You need to show how you reached your prediction in terms of turnout as well as how major demographics will vote.
Every election cycle complicates this with external factors and per-state issues. Covid loomed large over 2020 but it also made voting easier than ever, with easy access to early voting and mail-in voting. This changes the high and low propensity voter math significantly. Also, the Arizona legislature went on a mission to punish Native Americans for flipping Arizona blue in 2020 by disenfranchising Native Americans in subsequent elections in many, many ways.
So what tends to happen is that results are close enough that it become s abit of a guess. No pollster wants to be an outlier AND wrong so there's a convergence to mean thing that happens where they all tend to make the same prediction because everybody being wrong is way better, optically, than you being wrong and everyone else being right.
Add to all this, population sampling used to be done on landlines decades ago. Now we just don't have an equivalent and if your sampling algorithm is off, your results are off. Garbage in, garbage out.
I guess my point is that Nate Silver got kinda lucky in 2012 and came back to Earth in 2016 so I've never been that impressed and honestly I jus tdon't care if 538 exists or not.
Call me a skeptic, but it's certainly odd all the errors always lean to one side. Maybe this has to do with the leftward trend of the mainstream press.
> What happened in 2024 isn’t something I’d have scripted, though. Basically, their new election model was literally broken, continuing to show Joe Biden virtually tied with Trump even after his disastrous debate. (Evidently because Morris’s design for it had been overcomplicated. These models are hard to design, by the way.)
> Maybe this has to do with the leftward trend of the mainstream press.
What mainstream press outlet has moved leftwards? I can't think of any, and I certainly am interested in knowing which those might be. Inversely, cbs, the ny times, and the washington post have all shifted rather noticeably rightward in the last 10 years.
According to AllSides, many outlets moved left, although some did move right: https://www.allsides.com/blog/AllSides-Media-Bias-Rating-Ove...
It and https://mediabiasfactcheck.com say NYTimes “leans left” and is “left-center” respectively.
What’s an example that you believe highlights NYTimes moving rightward?
> What’s an example that you believe highlights NYTimes moving rightward?
The treatment of Mamdani for one, or Hochul/Cuomo.
>say NYTimes “leans left” and is “left-center” respectively.
That can be true and at the same time it can be moving rightward.
I’ll give you that one: Madmani is treated unusually different by the news and social media, and his opponents were bizarrely overtly flawed.
you should scroll through AllSides' twitter before trusting them to be impartial.
https://xcancel.com/AllSidesNow
Again, which one of these tweets highlights their bias? Most of them are event headlines from a “left”, a “center”, and “right” source.
This is a pretty comprehensive treatment: https://www.plutobooks.com/product/how-to-sell-a-genocide/
That same result would also be achieved by the Overton window moving right.
> What’s an example that you believe highlights NYTimes moving rightward?
Look at their coverage of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's response to a question about Taiwan versus Trump's response to a question about Taiwan. In the first case, their quote included all of the um's and other similar pauses in answering the question. In the second case, their quote of Trump cleaned up all of those artifacts. The end result is that it looks like AOC is flailing to come up with an answer while Trump has a clean, polished answer. But if you compare the actual audio clips of both answers, Trump's answer is the one that involves far more flailing to come up with a response.
There is a general pattern in the more subtle aspects of presentation and framing that generally excuse the behaviors of right-wing politicians compared to the same actions being done by a left-wing politician.
I assume you mean this article for AOC quotes: https://archive.ph/gmvBy
And this for Trump quotes: https://archive.ph/staNQ
You’re right about the quotes.
But also consider this article that was published after Trump’s, not even labeled “editorial” or “opinion”: “Trump’s Taiwan Gambit is Already a Gift to China” (https://archive.ph/lwBWD)
NYTimes constantly deletes parts of Trump's comments or outright rephrases them in an attempt to make him seem smarter, or at least, less insane. They rarely to never do that for other people.
> They rarely to never do that for other people.
They do that to everyone. That's how all quotation in journalism is done.
>cbs, the ny times, and the washington post have all shifted rather noticeably rightward
As the Overton window or activist left moves further left on issues like identity politics, crime and free speech (1619 Project era at NYT, staff revolts etc), steady coverage can appear "righter" by comparison without actually changing
Remember when Net Nuetrality was the priority of hackernews and slashdot and basically all people in tech. Now it's a "leftist policy". We live in crazy times.
Overton window has definitely shifted to the right. Beign a normal person who values science is now considered "leftist". Its nuts.
There's also a bloc that's been working to try to retroactively redefine what "Net Neutrality" means.
Instead of the usual stuff like "consumers have rights" or "ISP monopolies are bad" or "utilities should just provide the product and not spy and manipulate", they want it to mean something closer to "no online community can moderate itself."
And that's the charitable version. The worse version involves rank hypocrisy and selective enforcement, where large social "networks" must be "neutral" to literal nazis, while somehow it's also OK to permaban for insulting Dear Leader.
The set of people who are "basically all people in tech" has changed a lot since then for a variety of reasons; it's not surprising that any given political issue from a decade ago might not have the same resonance today.
Where is the steady coverage? Again, I see coverage moving rightward at every major publication (including the ny times)
Apparently it's "steady coverage" for CBS to be taken over by a culture warring op-ed writer who singlehandedly spikes investigative journalism if the Trump administration don't want to offer their comments on the story, and for WaPo op-eds writers to tweet that "we're now a conservative opinion section"...
Wait, so your argument is that people being against censorship or discrimination are now considered to be left wing? That's literally the overton window moving to the right, you're contradicting yourself!
> leftward trend of the mainstream press
Oh yeah, venerable institutions like the Washington Post, New York Times, LA Times, Chicago Tribune, and the like? Or maybe you mean the TV news organizations owned by Sinclair Broadcasting, Nexstar, or Hearst? Or maybe cable news organizations like CNN or Fox News?
The narrative of the "liberal media" is so out of date it makes you look out of touch. The mainstream media is captured by billionaire interests and has been so for years now.
Are you sure you aren’t experiencing selection bias? The article only mentions one modeling error (the one you quoted), so “all the errors” must be the ones you’ve noticed elsewhere.
It seems calling a state purple is just using a synonym for red.
> Maybe this has to do with the leftward trend of the mainstream press.
What? Media in the USA has staggered to the right over the past ten years. The only reason it was called liberal before that was because one party used facts and data and the other preferred to rig the system against the common people. While Stephen Colbert made the joke "Reality has a well known liberal bias" it's joke only in that the conservative viewpoint today seems focused on imaginary problems and denying the existence of real ones.
> Stephen Colbert made the joke "Reality has a well known liberal bias"
Video (queued up): https://youtu.be/IJ-a2KeyCAY?t=270
It's always pretty depressing to go back and watch this or old Colbert Report episodes and realize how parts are incredibly "evergreen", sometimes you don't even need to change out the names.
Why would a left-leaning press engineer errors predicting the victory of the left? Wouldn't this lull supporters of the Democrats into a false sense of security and enable Republican wins?
its this really what we're left with, people sharing their skepticism? without any dint of rationale, just stories about how these obviously bad people did all this stuff that everyone knows.
I'm not going to defend Silver's predictions, but what was really refreshing about his work was some lovely diagrams, and real intent behind exposing his methodology. it was never 'trust me I'm the expert', but 'wow, this is hard and these are the problems and this is how I tried to deal with them'
Maybe there were no errors and a certain techbro helped with the counting machines so right wing could win?
Am I the only one who finds this whole blog post to be super unprofessional? I agree it's sad that the content is gone, but airing grievances about your former employer leaves a bad taste in my mouth (assuming you're not a whistleblower talking about illegal activity or something like that). I feel bad for Nate Silver, but business is business. I guess he had to learn that lesson the hard way.
> airing grievances about your former employer leaves a bad taste in my mouth
Absolutely not. Creating a culture where employees are expected to be silent about their (mis)treatment by wealthy owners is only favorable, to, well, wealthy owners. Business is business, so why is it unprofessional to point out they're bad at business?
I view Nate as basically acting like a sore loser here, which is why I find it unprofessional. I'm not arguing that we should clamp down on free speech or anything like that.
If a company wants to buy another company and sunset it, that's a normal business practice. I get that it's disappointing, but in no way is this "mistreatment." At least to me, this is a perfectly normal business situation that doesn't merit this level of complaining. It reads as an ex-employee being petty.
Funny, this story reads as ABC/Disney being petty to me. They were made a business offer to repurchase an IP that is worth nothing to them, and are instead choosing to blackhole any value it has and burn it to the ground because somebody with an ego has a personal grievance over Disney having been criticised for their management of the brand in the past. If that's what professional conduct entails in your eyes, I don't suppose there will be any agreement in our views.
I guess I feel like Nate should have anticipated this situation. By choosing to sell his company to a big conglomerate, this is the type of risk he opened himself up to. ABC/Disney certainly isn't blameless here, but this is the risk that any smaller company takes on when they get acquired. (The exact same thing happens to the startups that Google buys and then sunsets 12 months later.)
Big companies love to shut things down. Being so petty about something they don't actually want is less common and deserves loud mockery.
I wouldn't say unprofessional, because this isn't a normal employer-employee relationship. Nate Silver is a famous professional, he made a business deal with a large media corporation, he made some money; later that large media corporation used the IP he sold them in arguably-bad ways, and he's upset. I don't blame him for being upset, certainly I don't think he owes Disney anything, but at the same time he's the one who agreed to sell his IP to a corporation and this is the kind of things corporations do with IP.
No wonder Disney won’t bother giving him his domain back.
It feels a little disingenuous to call out your opponent's model failures when Silver's model on Live Election Night also completely bugged out showing Kamala as more favored as she lost state after state: https://web.archive.org/web/20241109030935/https://www.theda...