I Less-Than Three Nate Silver

I have a bit of a crush on Nate Silver. No, despite the graphic, it's strictly platonic. ;-) But a headline that read "I Highly Admire Nate Silver" just didn't carry the same impact.

If you are unfamiliar with Nate Silver, odds are that you weren't following this past election cycle. Silver garnered a lot of publicity for his coverage of polling through his website, fivethirtyeight.com. (The website is named such as there are 538 votes in the electoral college.) Of course, there was TONS of coverage on presidential polling; Silver stood out against his competitors for three reasons. First, he did not conduct any polls himself--he compiled the results of other parties' polls, and he has a complex model for weighting each poll. Some sites compile others' polls as well, but fivethirtyeight compensates for the pollster's historical accuracy, the recentness of the poll, the size of the poll, and other factors. Second, his were incredibly accurate. And finally, Silver's background is actually not in political science--it's in baseball. More specifically: in analyzing baseball statistics (aka sabermetrics). I'm sure he was proficient at his old job, but I find it uncanny how successfully he took the skills from his job and applied them to his hobby--to the point of usurping established professionals. And now that he's become an established authority through the popularity of the 2008 elections, it looks as though he's going to become a full-time political pundit. Very impressive, Mr. Silver.