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Disney erased FiveThirtyEight

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Re: Disney erased FiveThirtyEight

#221

Post by bambax »

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.

This comment is maybe a little too aggressive but I kind of share the sentiment. Mostly, after reading this long article, I'm surprised he never quite explains why he never tried to go at it independently? He says

> I’ve always had a fairly entrepreneurial spirit

but that doesn't square well with being a cog in the huge Disney machine.

Re: Disney erased FiveThirtyEight

#222

Post by matt_daemon »

applfanboysbgon wrote: post #184
pclmulqdq wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 an…

It kind of ended up being a funny dance between 538, the NYT and The Athletic. The original sale to The Athletic probably would've made the most sense for 538 (in hindsight). Then the NYT obviously realised what they'd lost with 538 departing, and end up buying The Athletic a few years later.

Re: Disney erased FiveThirtyEight

#223

Post by autoexec »

dwoldrich wrote: post #96
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 .

And he won the popular vote if you believe that all U.S. elections are secure and sacrosanct. He is diabolical at getting people to talk about him and think about him constantly. Joe Biden on the other hand was a senile wrecker for Build Back Better and the party finally made "the switch" to unelected Harris far too late in the process. Even if she was a great candidate, with her odd laughter and fascination with bus…

> Even if she was a great candidate, with her odd laughter and fascination with buses, there was not enough time to shape her candidacy.

I don't think anyone who would have ever voted for her actually cared at all about her laugh. I do think that she'd have done much better with more time though. I also agree that Democrats are too invested in themselves and the status quo to put forward a candidate who will make the kinds of meaningful changes that Democratic voters actually want. If a third party were viable I think a lot of registered democrats would be eager to jump ship, but in order for that to happen we'd need elected officials willing to make major voting reforms which at this point would take a third party.

Re: Disney erased FiveThirtyEight

#224

Post by rwmj »

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 plus to be "Disney-level" successful means if it doesn't make 10s/100s of millions in profit, it's not worth doing. Something that's ordinarily successful (even making steady millions each year) is going to get the chop.

Re: Disney erased FiveThirtyEight

#225

Post by causalmodels »

munchler wrote: post #68
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 think this is all true, but it dodges the bigger issue. A presidential election has a binary outcome: yes/no, win/lose. If your statistical model doesn’t contain this single bit in its output, then it doesn’t meet the minimum requirement for being a prediction. Now you might say that it was on me as a consumer to understand this in 2016, but I remember the look of total shock on Nate Silver’s face when he called th…

> If your statistical model doesn’t contain this single bit in its output, then it doesn’t meet the minimum requirement for being a prediction.

I would be fascinated to know how you model a coin flip.

Re: Disney erased FiveThirtyEight

#226

Post by [deleted] »

rwmj wrote: post #224
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 plus to be "Disney-level" successful means if it doesn't make 10s/100s of millions in profit, it's not worth doing. Something that's ordinarily successful (even making steady millions each year) is going to get the chop.

[deleted]

Re: Disney erased FiveThirtyEight

#227

Post by mulmen »

Barbing wrote: post #209
thwarted wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

No. They can’t be used to verify election results. There’s too many confounding factors.

Re: Disney erased FiveThirtyEight

#228

Post by egorfine »

3eb7988a1663 wrote: post #169
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.

Admit wrong, from Apple? Was there acknowledgement of say butterfly keyboards? Seems on brand to quietly walk back an unpopular decision.

> butterfly keyboards

Bear in mind that they forced the butterfly keyboard for years despite loads of users complaining. It took Johnny Ive to leave for Apple to finally fix the keyboard, that's how powerful the detrimental leadership can be at times.

Re: Disney erased FiveThirtyEight

#229

Post by Gud »

shalmanese wrote: post #205
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.

Nothing costs $8 in a corporate setting.

Re: Disney erased FiveThirtyEight

#230

Post by sixtyj »

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.

His book is really good reads indeed.

Sometimes you get an offer that is financially irresistible. And after thousands of hours of hard work you finally get some reward.

Betrayed? That’s why people have lawyers to let them draft really good contract proposal so they aren’t ripped off.

But public whining is somehow a common tactic for getting attention online :)

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