Stats superstar Nate Silver hates the term “data-driven.” He also hates the work of just about every popular columnist at all of the major newspapers, including his former employer, the New York Times. But he loves burritos. On March 17, Silver will deliver his fix — yes, it’s data-driven — for the world of journalism in the form of a new FiveThirtyEight, now owned and operated by ESPN (and its parent company, Disney-ABC). Along with covering his signature topics of sports and politics, Silver’s staff aims to apply an accessible, quantitative approach to economics, science, and the catch-all topic “lifestyle.”....
I hate data-driven as a term — but data journalism takes on a lot of different forms for us. Often, yeah, it does mean numbers and statistics as applied to the news, but it also means data visualization, reporting on data that is both numerate and literate; down the road, it came mean investigative journalism. It can mean building models and forecasts and programs. At the same time, it’s still data journalism. It’s not enough just to be smart. There’s a particular series of methods and a way of looking at the world.
Plenty of pundits have really high IQs, but they don’t have any discipline in how they look at the world, and so it leads to a lot of bullshit, basically....
They don’t permit a lot of complexity in their thinking. They pull threads together from very weak evidence and draw grand conclusions based on them. They’re ironically very predictable from week to week....
It’s people who have very strong ideological priors, is the fancy way to put it, that are governing their thinking....
... we’re not trying to do advocacy here. We’re trying to just do analysis. We’re not trying to sway public opinion on anything except trying to make them more numerate.Sounds refreshing. I suspect we are going to be hearing a lot more about data-driven analysis.
New York
Nate Silver on the Launch of ESPN’s New FiveThirtyEight, Burritos, and Being a Fox
Joe Coscarelli
(h/t Brad DeLong)
2 comments:
Goodbye "Rationalism" hello "Empiricism"? rsp,
Yeah, Nate could change the game. He has enormous cred from his political prognostications and he is also a sports Icon with great popular appeal. Interestingly, this is an ESPN venue.
But in general we are heading quickly into the era of big data instead of big ideas. Nate is at the tip of the spear.
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