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Disney erased FiveThirtyEight

natesilver.net

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Re: Disney erased FiveThirtyEight

#201

Post by lmm »

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 .

Yes and no. It's a two-party system and a lot of people vote for candidate X to stop candidate Y getting in. Indeed IIRC a lot of democrat messaging around the previous election was explicitly about stopping Trump rather than the merits of whoever their guy was.

Re: Disney erased FiveThirtyEight

#202

Post by Dylan16807 »

panda888888 wrote: post #140
applfanboysbgon wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.)

Big companies love to shut things down. Being so petty about something they don't actually want is less common and deserves loud mockery.

Re: Disney erased FiveThirtyEight

#203

Post by jredwards »

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 think you can both be sad that something you built was destroyed, and also aware that you already sold it and are not somehow personally a victim.

Re: Disney erased FiveThirtyEight

#204

Post by thwarted »

lacewing wrote: post #71
rurp wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had complaints about 538, especially the early days, but don't understand this critique at all. A 30% chance hitting is completely unremarkable, and it was a perfectly reasonable reading of the evidence at the time. Nate isn't wrong that conventional wisdom was way off, with even supposedly statistical models giving Hillary a 99% chance of winning. Elections, like many things, have some inherent uncertainty. A seve…

I don't understand why this is surprising. People didn't go to FiveThirtyEight to marvel the science behind it. The science was just supposed to give you what you came there for: the actual election results. In the end, it turned out that predicting elections is still very hard, and that for all the fanfare, FiveThirtyEight performed only slightly better than what you could find in any other reputable newspaper, so i…

> it turned out that predicting elections is still very hard

So maybe we shouldn't be doing it. The value of predicting an election in the large out in public seems kind of dubious, and it's more like gambling than actually being useful. A candidate only runs, and continues running, if they think they can win. All predictions like these do is confuse voters leading up to election day and while they are voting. It keep candidates from making strong cases for their platform, keeps the voters from listening to the candidates' platforms, and encourages team-based partisan politics.

Re: Disney erased FiveThirtyEight

#205

Post by shalmanese »

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…

This is the wrong level of analysis. Disney owns ABC, ABC owned 538. The relevant decisions were made by ABC’s leadership.

And the firing of the staff happened years ago and people broadly understood even if they did not agree with it.

The recent decision was to take down an archive that cost $8 in server resources and was still bringing in page views and ad revenue.

Re: Disney erased FiveThirtyEight

#206

Post by Aurornis »

chao- wrote: post #13

>The Times was also in the midst of a leadership transition, and new management tends to want to move on from the old regime’s pet projects, even if they were successful. Learning about B2B sales over the years, the size of this leadership-change factor has been among the most eye-opening (and among the most disappointing). It cuts both ways: You can have a successful pilot that doesn't proceed because this-or-that V…

Having been on both sides of this: Often, one of the purposes of the leadership change was to start shedding the old regime's pet projects. Even semi-successful pet projects can be a distraction from the direction the company wants to go.

I've been unlucky enough to work under several executives who thought they could resist direction from the CEO and board. They pushed their pet projects and thought leadership would eventually see the light. Instead they got ejected from the company and replaced with someone who knew how to follow orders.

My cynical assumption when I first saw this was that it was all just politics, but I have to admit that life is so much easier when your management chain isn't fighting uphill all the time. If the CEO and board want the company working on some things and not others, you're on thin ice if your manager is assigning you to go against the company's direction. It's scarier when you may not even know what they're doing to you.

For this specific case, completely pulling the content offline feels like a loss across the board. I could see it happening as an overreaction, to send a message that the new management is serious about not repeating the (perceived or otherwise) mistakes of their predecessors with an unmistakable signal

Re: Disney erased FiveThirtyEight

#207

Post by Barbing »

applfanboysbgon wrote: post #195
burritoAlPast0r wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is a statement on a culture that values insincere "feelgoodery" over truth. We can decry the downfall of common sense even if it comes at the expense of pointing out the obvious. Imo this is a good trend.

> insincere "feelgoodery" over truth This has literally nothing to do with the article, and really nothing to do with almost any usage of the term I've seen. I pretty much always see it as a kind of incoherent insult that, like this usage here, isn't based in any kind of reality but instead just makes the person writing it feel good about themselves for some reason.

Easy phrase for rude folks to trot out when someone raises ethical/moral/legal concerns. Quick little rationalization:

_other person says they care about thing I don't that admittedly does sound good, so it has to be wrong to have mentioned it - I can't just say I don't care about the good-sounding thing_

(Of course, on the internet, people will end up playing make believe with their values, but it shouldn't be the first assumption. Or maybe it should, but with a hard second look.)

Re: Disney erased FiveThirtyEight

#208

Post by Barrin92 »

macintux wrote: post #188
panda888888 wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

they do since Substack was invented because it turns out a digital rehabilitation facility for whiny and overly wordy sore losers is a fantastic subscription business.

Might want to think about selling that one to Disney as well and then writing about your great regrets of selling your substack on substack v2 in ten years, that's gotta be amazing content for another ten posts

Re: Disney erased FiveThirtyEight

#209

Post by Barbing »

thwarted wrote: post #204
lacewing wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand why this is surprising. People didn't go to FiveThirtyEight to marvel the science behind it. The science was just supposed to give you what you came there for: the actual election results. In the end, it turned out that predicting elections is still very hard, and that for all the fanfare, FiveThirtyEight performed only slightly better than what you could find in any other reputable newspaper, so i…

> it turned out that predicting elections is still very hard So maybe we shouldn't be doing it. The value of predicting an election in the large out in public seems kind of dubious, and it's more like gambling than actually being useful. A candidate only runs, and continues running, if they think they can win. All predictions like these do is confuse voters leading up to election day and while they are voting. It kee…

Predictions are like exit polls, aren't they, in that they're both able to provide a check on official election results?

Think that's outweighed by the negatives?

Re: Disney erased FiveThirtyEight

#210

Post by greycol »

tantalor wrote: post #152
bsimpson wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a core mechanic in games like Dispatch. People don't like seeing a 95% chance of winning and then losing. The game tweaks the odds, so certain thresholds become gimmes (something like "if the displayed odds are better than 75%, treat them as 100%").

That's stupid. That would piss me off.

Seems weird that it would piss you off, if you were really that invested in the cold hard stats you'd know that if it was fair rng you could still have been the 1 in 100,000 player that got lucky on 75% 40 times in a row.
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