Monday, November 5, 2012
Maclean’s: Tarnished Silver: Colby Cosh assesses the new king of stats
If the history of Silver’s PECOTA is new to you, and you’re shocked by brutal phrases like “wring the intellectual property out of it and chuck what was left”, you should now have the sense to look slightly askance at the New PECOTA, i.e., Silver’s presidential-election model. When it comes to prestige, it stands about where PECOTA was in 2006. Like PECOTA, it has a plethora of vulnerable moving parts. Like PECOTA, it is proprietary and irreproducible. That last feature makes it unwise to use Silver’s model as a straw stand-in for “science”, as if the model had been fully specified in a peer-reviewed journal.
Nate Silver’s gone from drawing the wrath of baseball fans who hated his projections to drawing the wrath of political pundits who hate his projections.
I don’t do politics, but since some people like to do it and it is sort of baseball-related, here’s an interesting article on Silver and the guff he’s taking these days.
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