New York Times writer and statistician Nate Silver told a full Graham Chapel audience that he might stop writing his renowned blog should his analyses ever start affecting election results. 
 
 Silver spent an hour minimizing his achievements as an auspicious combination of decent blogging and statistical analysis in his Monday night lecture sponsored by the Washington University Political Review. Silver, who began his career doing statistics for Major League Baseball, gained wider fame when his FiveThirtyEight political blog hosted by the Times correctly predicted the 2012 presidential election results in every state. 
 
 He said that his statistics are not intended to affect results, which shouldn’t be an issue in most general elections. But he conceded that in races such as last year’s Republican presidential primary, analysis can make a difference. 
 
 “The polls can certainly affect elections at times,” Silver said. “I hope people don’t take the forecasts too seriously. You’d rather have an experiment where you record it off from the actual voters, in a sense, but we’ll see. If it gets really weird in 2014, in 2016, then maybe I’ll stop doing it. I don’t want to influence the democratic process in a negative way.” 
 
 “I’m [hoping to make] people more informed, I don’t want to affect their motive because they trust the forecasters,” he added. 
 
 Without going into any mathematical specifics, Silver said that the key to doing what he does is accounting for margins of error and directing energy in efficient ways. He said that obsessing over a set of data hoping for big results is a waste of time. 
 
 “You have to get comfortable thinking in terms of uncertainty,” Silver said. “Don’t take a lot of things for granted; there’s a lot of groupthink in a lot of problems.” 
 
 “The basic lesson here—and I guess there are a couple different lessons—is not to expect miracles when you’re looking at big data,” he added. 
 
 Silver also spoke from personal experience when he talked about how even people who ask the right questions will often direct their energy inefficiently. 
 
 “I have a friend who’s from St. Louis, he’s the kind of guy who, we’ll go out to dinner and he’s trying to figure out what to order, and it will be like a 15 minute ordeal where he’ll have a complex negotiation with the waiter or waitress about what options are available, and it’s very, very painful to go out with him,” Silver said. “[This is] a guy who’s been miserable at his job for a year and a half. I ask him, ‘Why don’t you look for a new job?’ He’s like, ‘Uh, I don’t know, I’m tired.’” 
 
 Silver added that it’s similarly important not to overestimate the complexity of things. He referenced the 1997 chess match between Garry Kasparov and the computer nicknamed “Deep Blue.” Kasparov lost the match after the struggling computer made a random move that the grandmaster erroneously interpreted as a sign of some superior knowledge. 
 
 “It turned out that what looked like a bug actually was a bug,” Silver said. 
 
 After his lecture, Silver answered student-asked questions and spoke about how he thinks what he does can be applied to other research-fueled fields. 
 
 “A lot of academic journals should really be blogs instead, where you say, ‘Well I conducted an experiment in the lab today, and here’s what I found.’ One good thing about FiveThirtyEight, for example, is you can do a…study and we can give the audience, the reader, clues about how seriously they should take it. A lot of the time you might be kind of playing around in the data sandbox and you come across something interesting and it’s worth pointing out, but you don’t have to write a whole thesis about it,” Silver said. 
 
 Students present at the discussion said they found the speech interesting and relevant despite the fact that he didn’t go into many specifics. 
 
 “It gave some good insights and showed that he applied his method to more than just politics,” freshman Eli Horowitz said. 
 
 “Since Nate Silver was a mathematician, it seemed like an interesting application of mathematics,” freshman Anthony Grebe, who plans to double major in math and physics, said. “I had seen a little bit about him before the election, and obviously I’m impressed because he predicted it so well.” 
 
 Others were impressed with the New York Times blogger’s humility. 
 
 “He really spoke to a lot of Wash. U. students in terms of where their interests lie,” senior and WUPR co-editor-in-chief Anna Applebaum said. “He talked about sports, talked about poker, talked about math. I thought it was a great speech, and I had a great time attending.” ||||| Nate Silver went on to argue why his model -- which, in its polls-only version, puts the odds of Hillary Clinton winning at 64.7 percent -- is superior to those like the Huffington Pos. Nate Silver rages at Huffington Post editor in 14-part tweetstorm 
 
 It began with “This article is so fucking idiotic and irresponsible,” and got only somewhat more polite from there. 
 
 Nate Silver unloaded Saturday on the Huffington Post’s Ryan Grim, who accused the polling guru and founder of the prediction website fivethirtyeight.com of “changing the results of polls to fit where he thinks the polls truly are, rather than simply entering the poll numbers into his model and crunching them.” 
 
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 Rather than taking a simple average -- like RealClearPolitics does -- Silver’s model weights polls by his team’s assessment of their quality, and also performs several “adjustments” to account for things like the partisan “lean” of a pollster or the trend lines across different polls. 
 
 According to Grim, however, Silver is “just guessing” and his “trend line adjustment” technique is “merely political punditry dressed up as sophisticated mathematical modeling.” Grim also noted that FiveThirtyEight’s model -- due to his adjustments -- shows Trump more likely than not to win Florida, while the Huffington Post’s calculates her victory there as more likely. 
 
 And that, apparently, enraged Silver, whose track record of correctly predicting elections -- and explaining how he does it in painstaking, but accessible detail -- has made him a celebrity whose very name is synonymous with the art of data-driven prognostication, and whose model is widely considered the gold standard in election forecasting. 
 
 After dropping his initial f-bomb, Silver went on to argue why his model -- which, in its polls-only version, puts the odds of Hillary Clinton winning the presidential race at 64.7 percent -- is superior to those like the Huffington Post, which rates her election a near-certainty, at 98.3 percent. 
 
 The reason we adjust polls for the national trend is because **that's what works best emperically**. It's not a subjective assumption. — Nate Silver (@NateSilver538) November 5, 2016 
 
 It's wrong to show Clinton with a 6-point lead (as per HuffPo) when **almost no national poll shows that**. Doesn't reflect the data. — Nate Silver (@NateSilver538) November 5, 2016 
 
 Every model makes assumptions but we actually test ours based on the evidence. Some of the other models are barley even empirical. — Nate Silver (@NateSilver538) November 5, 2016 
 
 There are also a gajillion ways to make a model overconfident, whereas it's pretty hard to make one overconfident. — Nate Silver (@NateSilver538) November 5, 2016 
 
 If you haven't carefully tested how errors are correlated between states, for example, your model will be way overconfident. — Nate Silver (@NateSilver538) November 5, 2016 
 
 Not just an issue in elections models. Failure to understand how risks are correlated is part of what led to the 2007/8 financial crisis. — Nate Silver (@NateSilver538) November 5, 2016 
 
 There's a reasonable range of disagreement. But a model showing Clinton at 98% or 99% is not defensible based on the empirical evidence. — Nate Silver (@NateSilver538) November 5, 2016 
 
 We constantly write about our assumptions and **provide evidence** for why we think they're the right ones. https://t.co/IhLKXdxGGK — Nate Silver (@NateSilver538) November 5, 2016 
 
 That's what makes a model a useful scientific & journalistic tool. It's a way to understand how elections work. Not just about the results. — Nate Silver (@NateSilver538) November 5, 2016 
 
 The problem is that we're doing this in a world where people—like @ryangrim—don't actually give a shit about evidence and proof. — Nate Silver (@NateSilver538) November 5, 2016 
 
 The philosophy behind 538 is: Prove it. Doesn't mean we can't be wrong (we're wrong all the time). But prove it. Don't be lazy. — Nate Silver (@NateSilver538) November 5, 2016 
 
 And especially don't be lazy when your untested assumptions happen to validate your partisan beliefs. — Nate Silver (@NateSilver538) November 5, 2016 
 
 When you go low, I go high 80% of the time, and knee you in the balls the other 20% of the time. — Nate Silver (@NateSilver538) November 5, 2016 
 
 The Huffington Post’s senior polling editor, Natalie Jackson, didn’t tweet out Grim’s article. Asked by another Twitter user if she thought Silver was calling out “you and your staff,” Jackson demurred. 
 
 “He is,” she wrote. “But I'm not going to get into it on Twitter. Details are published several times over. (on both models).” 
 
 Grim, after Silver’s tweetstorm, responded by updating his post, but without engaging with his arguments. 
 
 “We’ll have to wait and see what happens,” he wrote. “Maybe Silver will be right come Election Day ― Trump will win Florida, and we’ll all be in for a very long night. Or our forecast will be right, she’ll win the state by 5 or 6, and we can all turn in early. 
 
 “If he’s right, though, it was just a good guess ― a fortunate ‘trend line adjustment’ ― not a mathematical forecast. If you want to put your faith in the numbers, you can relax. She’s got this.”
– Nate Silver may have cemented his reputation as a political forecaster in the last election, but he doesn't want his reading of the polls to influence flesh-and-blood voters. And if it does, he might pull the plug on his FiveThirtyEight blog, reports Student Life, the college paper at Washington University. It quotes him thusly in a lecture this week: "I hope people don’t take the forecasts too seriously. You’d rather have an experiment where you record it off from the actual voters, in a sense, but we’ll see. If it gets really weird in 2014, in 2016, then maybe I’ll stop doing it. I don’t want to influence the democratic process in a negative way.”