If you're anything like me and someone gave you the choice between writing a 5 page essay on why you'd rather shoot yourself in the face and actually shooting yourself in the face, you'd probably choose the latter. But when it comes to doing a problem set / building a model / typing furiously into excel, you'd put the gun down, roll up your sleeves and start cranking.
Meet Nate Silver, a man cut from the same cloth as us. Silver is the founder of http://fivethirtyeight.com, a website devoted to accurately predicting Nov. 4th's results. Again, if you're like me, you probably want to know how he did, then immediately after, how he did it. Answer: He did well. Silver and co. accurately predicted 48.666 (repeating of course) states, wrongly predicting Indiana to be light red and that all three Nebraska counties would go red. His method: He aggregated surveys from all over and weighted them based on their historical accuracy, taking into account trends like what seasons polls are least accurate and whether particular states trend along others. Clearly Nate, a long-time baseball statistician dweeb, pretty much dominated the election. He was so hot right now on CNN, MSNBC and other news networks that it was only a 0.77% chance that women wouldn't come a'flockin.
My suggestion for next prediction - probability that Barack won't kick some conservative Californian ass and repeal Proposition 8. C'mon, everyone knows that Obama only said he was against gay marriage for the votes. Ask Nate.
8 comments:
i know the last graph wasn't meant to be taken too seriously, but its worth noting that Obama/Arnold and others could have come out against Prop 8 and they didn't. But Bill Clinton did and did robocalls. So kudos to Bubba.
also, in "graph" 1, you state "But when it comes to doing a problem set / building a model / typing furiously into excel, you'd put the gun down, roll up your sleeves and start cranking" but in the label at the bottom you state "yea well how many burnt out shirts does he have". I'm guessing that rolled up sleeves prevents the burnouts and saves him about $50 a shirt and therefore your remark on burn-outs is innocuous!
"He said innocuous!"
KPD to ARV at Spring Break 2002 after an overheard conversation between ARV and two bikini-clad babes
ARV at SPI,TXSB06: http://www.facebook.com/photos.php?id=502145#/photo.php?pid=30272775&id=502145
he placed in the top 4.
babes is used here loosely
this nate guy looks a little bit like baum, no?
yeah, they share that look.
they were 16!
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