[douglance]

Silver got lucky a couple times with predictions and people believe everything he and his company says now. Now that they have clout, they use their predictions to push an agenda, which is why their predictions are so innaccurate.

[smt88]

https://github.com/fivethirtyeight/data

You're welcome to use their data and come up with your own analyses or just not read what they write. It's not like they're particularly influential, even if they are highly regarded.

I'm also semi-interested to know what agenda you're talking about. I read every political article they publish, and I'm actually irritated by how neutral they are.

[xlm1717]

They sure dropped the neutrality when Nate Silver got mad at Jim Rutenberg for saying Silver missed the mark on his predictions. He definitely returned the high school lunchroom attitude back, and doesn't handle being wrong well at all.

[smt88]

We're definitely talking about different kinds of neutrality.

In previous comments, I was talking about neutrality in his articles, particularly the political ones. That kind of neutrality is what people usually call "journalistic integrity".

Responding to Jim Rutenberg was a personal issue and had nothing to do with journalistic integrity. Silver perceived an attack and responded with an attack. You can definitely argue that it was immature, but it has nothing to do with his political commentary.

I also think this is a relevant quote:

> And this is someone who, by the way, doesn’t talk about that we were colleagues together at The New York Times, a person who cherrypicks the facts he’s looking at. So he mentions that in our Indiana prediction for the Democrat election, the underdog won [i.e., Sanders over Clinton], but in fact the favorite has won 51 of 56 times in our polls-only forecast. To me, that’s dishonest and unethical, frankly. And he doesn’t really take the time to truly understand what’s going on.