SXSW: Nate Silver Discusses Data Bias, the Strangeness of Fame

Nerval's Lobster writes "Nate Silver feels a little odd about his fame. That's not to say that he hasn't worked to get to his enviable position. Thanks to his savvy with predictive models, and the huge readership platform provided by The New York Times hosting his FiveThirtyEight blog, he managed to forecast the most recent presidential election results in all 50 states. His accuracy transformed him into a rare breed: a statistician with a household name. But onstage at this year's SXSW conference, Silver termed his fame 'strange' and 'out of proportion,' and described his model as little more than averaging the state and national polls, spiced a bit with his algorithms. "It bothered me that this was such a big deal," he told the audience. In politics, he added, most of the statistical analysis being conducted simply isn't good, which lets someone like him stand out; same as in baseball, where he made his start in predictive modeling. In fields with better analytics, the competition for someone like him would be much fiercer. He also talked about, despite a flood of data (and the tools to analyze it) in the modern world, we still face huge problems when it comes to actually understanding and using that data. 'You have a gap between what we think we know and what we really know,' he said. 'We tend to be oversensitive to random fluctuations in the data and mistake the fluctuations for real relationships.'"

Comments

Re:silver is honest

[JayBean]

I think Silver stands out because unlike too many modern American politicians, he is interested in the facts, and not what bullshit he can use the data to support.

So it's not so much that he's done a fantastic job figuring all this out, it's just that he's fucking honest about the results unlike a certain perpetually-deluded political party I'm sick of naming.

You are only thinking of one perpetually deluded political party? I have the opposite experience. I can't name a political party/organization that wasn't perpetually deluded.

Science is rare

[Hatta]

Very, very little in this world actually happens because the data suggests its a good idea. People make decisions based on their comfort level, tradition, who their friends are, etc. Suggesting that we should listen to the data disempowers the powerful. It's 2013, and the principles of evidence based medicine were only developed 20 years ago, and are still not widely used in practice. We're going to have to wait centuries before evidence based public policy becomes the norm.

Re:Science is rare

[Hatta]

The thing is you can have mountains of data (which we do). The problem is asking the right questions.

The problem is that those in power dont want to ask the right questions because it will force their hand. e.g., we have mountains of data that show that Cannabis is less harmful than most over the counter drugs. Certainly less harmful than alcohol. So we 75,000 of us get together and ask the President a question. "Why can't we regulate Cannabis like alcohol?"

His response amounted to "Cannabis is a dangerous drug", and he never mentioned alcohol once. He didn't even bother dismissing the question, he failed to acknowledge its existence.

Why would he do that? It's obvious, if he actually considered the question, he would have been unable to come up with an answer that would be consistent with our current policy. He knows that, and he doesn't care that the policy is demonstrably harmful.

That, my friends, is the face of evil.

Re:silver is honest

[pezpunk]

"both sides are equally bad/dishonest/wrong" is the biggest political cop-out ever. it's sad that such pat vaguaries aren't instantly embarassing to the faces they so often fly out of.

Re:silver is honest

[Hatta]

Both sides are not equally wrong, but that doesn't mean both sides are right. The Republicans are wrong 99% of the time. The Democrats are wrong 95% of the time. Why can't we field a candidate who's right even half the time?

If you vote for the party that's right most often, you're still voting for someone who is almost always wrong.

Optimism

[sjbe]

We're going to have to wait centuries before evidence based public policy becomes the norm.

I think you are being optimistic. Very optimistic.

Deadlocked into debt

[sjbe]

Deadlocking them produces the best feasible outcome.

Except on the periodic occasion when we need them to do actually something. You know, like not endlessly raise the national debt because they want to promise everything but don't want to have to tell the voters they have to actually pay for it someday.

Re:silver is honest

[Hatta]

You can't deadlock them, you can only deadlock us. The Democrats and Republicans have a lot more in common than they have differences. The rich people who control the Democrats have much more in common with the rich people that control the Republicans than either have with any of us. The worst thing that could happen to the Democratic party is for the Greens to win some major elections.

If the Democrats are 95% wrong, and the Republicans are 99% wrong, that means that 90% of the time they are completely unopposed in doing the wrong thing. If you vote for either Democrats or Republicans, that's what you're voting for.

Analytics

[Anonymous Coward]

Silver's rise to prominence most closely mirrors Google's. Find a good model and apply it to an area that has been underserved.

When they write the book on the history of the Information Age, it will be about how we learned to leverage analytics for the common good.

"Right" is frequently just opinion

[sjbe]

Both sides are not equally wrong, but that doesn't mean both sides are right. The Republicans are wrong 99% of the time. The Democrats are wrong 95% of the time. Why can't we field a candidate who's right even half the time?

Because "right" is for better or worse often a matter of opinion. There is no single objectively right answer for many questions. Think abortion or gun control. Lots of opinions on both sides but there is never going to be a single "right" answer. At best there might be a consensus but probably never a unanimous one. Even for questions where a single objectively right answer may theoretically exist, there often is insufficient data to figure out what that answer is. (for example what is the optimal tax rate)

Re:silver is honest

[Hatta]

But they do. Warrantless wiretapping, eternal copyright, the war on drug users, the ever increasing militarization of the police, the for-profit prison industry, and a DOJ that cares more about Aaron Swartz than about John Corzine, etc, etc,. The Democrats and Republicans agree on most of the most harmful policies that afflict this country. And when they pretend to disagree (e.g. Rand Paul on domestic drone strikes), it's all for show.

Re:silver is honest

[hedwards]

The cause of the debt in the US, is that the GOP believes in spontaneously generating wealth. They book the projected increases in revenue as being real when balancing the budget, but fail to make any adjustments when that turns out to not be the case.

Ultimately, the Democrats at least understand that you need real revenue in order to balance the budget and you have to actually make real cuts to the DoD which alone could more than finance Obamacre with the waste in war spending without having to cut back on things that actually matter.

not evil...humanity

[bussdriver]

Some people think a tiger who kills a human is evil; it is in it's nature to kill it's food. The human animal is still just an animal and does natural things lacking any conscious rational but unlike the tiger, it has the brain power to rationalize its instincts into an illusion of free thinking and therefore believe it is unlike other animals. This is extremely hard for the human ego to accept.

Politicians succeed by tribalism; not reason and not logic. To some degree they must reflect the populace; even a dictator has limits and must bend to expectations.

What is evil is how to make generally good people collectively manifest "evil" deeds. A mental hack which makes somebody do antisocial things is evil - I use the word make because of the above statement. Free will is not as strong as people BELIEVE it is. Now if you don't have your parent's religion, politics, tastes... maybe then you are in a position to argue otherwise.

Re:silver is honest

[MightyMartian]

Mod up! This is exactly what happened last November. It wasn't the politicians who Nate revealed had no clothes, it was the pundits. While stories abound about Romney's supreme overconfidence, I think one could tell from the Republican rank and file that they knew months before the election that Obama was going to win a second term and there was little likelihood that they could gain a Senate majority.

But the pundits, now that was a group that was utterly stripped of any illusion of wisdom. They were proven to be absolute fools, little more than shouting ignoramuses. I hope that Silver and the other statisticians working on electoral prediction continue to hound this overpaid talking heads to extinction. In no small part, politics is as bad as it is because of the pundits.

Re:silver is honest

[SlippyToad]

Just to pile on, when you say "both sides do it," you are implicitly refusing to deal with the actual topic at hand, which is for example "budget" or "national security," or whatever.

So when you do that, you are basically throwing up your hands and saying "who can know such things?"

It's fucking lazy. Very, fucking lazy. I don't have much time to argue with people too lazy to at least delve into the elements of a topic. You obviously are.