Nate Silver: Statistics, Baseball and Politics

Nathaniel Read ("Nate") Silver (1978 - ) is a statistician who got his start after catching "the baseball bug" when his hometown team, the Detroit Tigers, won the World Series in 1984. "It's always more interesting to apply [math] to batting averages than algebra class," Nate said.

Nate worked on his high school newspaper and went on to the University of Chicago, where he earned a bachelor's degree in economics.  While working as a bored economics consultant, he started to develop a statistical system called PECOTA to forecast the performance and career promise of Major League Baseball players.  He quit his job and made a living at online poker Links to an external site..  Silver then sold PECOTA to Baseball Prospectus, which marketed it as a fantasy baseball product.  Silver managed it until 2009.

By then he had developed a statistics-based election forecasting system that accurately predicted the outcomes in all but one state in the 2008 U.S. Presidential election Links to an external site..  Four years later, Silver's system correctly predicted the winner of all 50 states and the District of Columbia Links to an external site..  Like most analysts, Silver wrongly predicted a Clinton victory in 2016.  Critics have complained that he will not release the code for his proprietary system.

In 2008, Silver established the award-winning blog FiveThirtyEight.com, named for the number of members of the US Electoral College.  It ran in the New York Times from 2010-2014 and was then bought by ESPN.  Since then, Nate Silver has been one of the best-known "data journalists" in the world.  

His award-winning best-seller The Signal and the Noise (2012) has been translated into at least eleven languages.  It describes, in a popular style, the principles and methods of using probability and statistics to construct mathematical models.  Silver evaluates models (mostly unsuccessful ones) for predictions in baseball, poker, elections, finance, weather, climate change and epidemiology

Nate Silver never attended graduate school, but he was been awarded at least six honorary doctorates.  He is openly gay and has been outspoken on social issues such as the right to marry.

In this 2017 video, Nate Silver talks about How Data Can Improve Human Life Links to an external site.