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Disney erased FiveThirtyEight

natesilver.net

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Re: Disney erased FiveThirtyEight

#131

Post by panda888888 »

applfanboysbgon wrote: post #119
panda888888 wrote: post #113

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.

Re: Disney erased FiveThirtyEight

#132

Post by panda888888 »

zombittack wrote: post #122

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.

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.

Re: Disney erased FiveThirtyEight

#133

Post by applfanboysbgon »

panda888888 wrote: post #131
applfanboysbgon wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 thi…

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.

Re: Disney erased FiveThirtyEight

#134

Post by kranke155 »

robotresearcher wrote: post #130
nostrademons wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 companie…

> 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.

partial backtrack in some ways.

Re: Disney erased FiveThirtyEight

#135

Post by [deleted] »

hungryhobbit wrote: post #90
bachmeier wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 perfectl…

[deleted]

Re: Disney erased FiveThirtyEight

#136

Post by panda888888 »

simonw wrote: post #25

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.

Re: Disney erased FiveThirtyEight

#137

Post by [deleted] »

kranke155 wrote: post #134
robotresearcher wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

partial backtrack in some ways.

[deleted]

Re: Disney erased FiveThirtyEight

#138

Post by thederke »

reed1234 wrote: post #117
coliveira wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Re: Disney erased FiveThirtyEight

#139

Post by cindyllm »

applfanboysbgon wrote: post #124
zombittack wrote: post #122

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.

> 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 rathe…

[dead]

Re: Disney erased FiveThirtyEight

#140

Post by panda888888 »

applfanboysbgon wrote: post #133
panda888888 wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 thi…

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…

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.)
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