Entry tags:	political-ish
Crossposts:	http://giandujakiss.livejournal.com/1593357.html

Short version: Nate Silver used to be a sports statistician who used mathiness to predict baseball players' performance. He then moved to political blogging, using mathiness to assess the state of various races based on polling data. After the 2008 election, his blog moved to the NYT, where it is widely read and is a comfort to liberals everywhere because he generally finds that Obama has about a 70% chance of winning.

So, of course, he's come under attack from a lot of political pundits, especially conservative ones, who prefer to rely on their "sense" of the race, and/or the very latest poll, rather than - you know - facts. Here's one summary of the criticisms; I've also been laughing over People Who Can't Do Math Are So Mad at Nate Silver for days.

Some of the more bizarre attacks on Silver have - I shit you not - accused his fans of drinking coffee, and of Silver himself of being sorta gay. Which, apparently, he is, but it's unclear what bearing that fact has on his statistical models.

I personally loved Atrios's tweet:

one wonders why media orgs have been spending so much money on polls all these years if we could learn more from goat entrails

— Atrios (@Atrios) October 31, 2012

But by far the most informative piece, at least to me, has been TNR's discussion of how the criticisms of Silver from political pundits mirror the criticisms that used to be leveled at sports statisticians - until sports fans learned math.