Nate Silver Went Against the Grain for Some at The Times

Meta comment: the institutionalized role of the "public editor" as a kind of quasi-independent internal advocate for the interests of the public has fascinated me for a while. They generally have no real power, but are given a platform and considerable independence, and are supposed to help hold newspapers to their stated interest in informing the public, with an expectation that they will be critical to some degree. So they can write posts like this, which normally would only come from outside sniping, but with better internal access to sources, and an officially sanctioned platform.

I've on occasion wondered if it would be beneficial for companies in other fields to adopt such a role. Could Google regain some trust and goodwill if it appointed a "public editor" with a suitably credible background, a degree of independence, and a mandate to advocate for the public interest?

I feel like traditional pundits got pissed off because he kept wrecking their narratives. And he upset them further by turning political prognostication into something understandable by common readers -- instead of something only pointy-hatted political wizards could divine with the right amount of eye-of-newt and other secret ingredients.

Anyway: The New York Times should've worked harder to keep him. They should fire Tom Friedman and Maureen Dowd and put those resources into the kind of analysis Nate Silver espoused. Y'know, the "actual journalism" kind.

Nate's work was practically the definition of "disruptive" when he started and it's been a joy to follow him over the years. As far as papers go I happen to like the NY Times, so I'm a bit sad to see him go. But I'll gladly follow him no matter where he is. This is definitely much more of a loss for the Times than for Nate.

I'll be curious to see what he says about why he left. It's very easy to imagine several reasons the he found it hard to work for the Times. It was very interesting to me to see how hostile some folks were to him during the 2012 election cycle. He obviously threatened the viability of a great deal of the(mostly useless) political punditry that we see. I think it's hard to separate which parts of that hostility were conscious reactions to a perceived threat and which parts were an unconscious reaction to ideas of how the news should work.

I'm sure Nate will do a great job with ESPN and I hope he likes it more than his time with the Times.

It's interesting that he would go to a sports network over the culture clash between statistics and narrative. Sports has traditionally been extremely negative on "stats geeks", and favored narrative explanations, along with factors like "grit" and "determination" and that kind of thing. Silver's own former work in sabermetrics was a frequent target of pot-shots from ESPN commentators for years. There used to be a blog on that kind of anti-intellectualism in sports commentary (written by people who post-blog went on to write for the TV series Parks and Recreation): http://www.firejoemorgan.com/

Sign of a more general change?

I think, at least in baseball, the culture has come around to the importance of statistics and numbers in the game. The fact that Silver has a decent track record in his analysis and that sabermetrics has been showing some positive results probably make him a welcome voice in ESPN's baseball programming. Numbers are a fun thing to show a viewer and to make comparisons with and I think ESPN is coming around to that (they developed their own QB Rating for football a few years ago).

That said, it also makes him an interesting counter to some sports pundits when there are invariably differences between the numbers and perception of players and teams. This will make for some good television. Heck, ESPN just started a show called "By the Numbers" a few months/years ago, so I think there really is a move to numbers-based analysis in sports. The key is just making digestible to the general public, which Silver has been very good at on 538.