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Disney erased FiveThirtyEight

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Re: Disney erased FiveThirtyEight

#181

Post by pclmulqdq »

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.

Re: Disney erased FiveThirtyEight

#182

Post by bryanlarsen »

gh02t wrote: post #98
ngriffiths wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 car…

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 th…

Regularly referring to that ~30% spread as "one polling error" made this a lot more understandable than most statistics for many people.

Re: Disney erased FiveThirtyEight

#183

Post by famouswaffles »

slg wrote: post #142
famouswaffles wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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 af…

>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.

Re: Disney erased FiveThirtyEight

#184

Post by applfanboysbgon »

pclmulqdq wrote: post #178
applfanboysbgon wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

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".

Re: Disney erased FiveThirtyEight

#185

Post by this_user »

gh02t wrote: post #98
ngriffiths wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 car…

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 th…

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.

Re: Disney erased FiveThirtyEight

#186

Post by pixl97 »

pclmulqdq wrote: post #181

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 be…

Same effect as Killed By Google.

Re: Disney erased FiveThirtyEight

#187

Post by jojobas »

palata wrote: post #53
bellowsgulch wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I find it interesting to blame it on the democrats. We ended up with him because enough people voted for him .

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.

Re: Disney erased FiveThirtyEight

#188

Post by macintux »

panda888888 wrote: post #132
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.

Sore losers don’t generally write at length about their own mistakes and poor decisions that led to the ultimate demise of their baby.

Re: Disney erased FiveThirtyEight

#189

Post by slg »

teddyh wrote: post #175
slg wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 o…

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.

Re: Disney erased FiveThirtyEight

#190

Post by macintux »

xmcp123 wrote: post #126
palata wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find it interesting to blame it on the democrats. We ended up with him because enough people voted for him .

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.

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