Hans-Sachs-Straße - Emirates.com

profile than he ever could have
imagined when he started posting
his statistics-related thoughts on a
left-leaning website in late 2007. But
Silver’s rise into the political stratosphere
normally reserved for politicians-turned-television
windbags or
journalists who write for The New
York Times, The New Yorker, and
other respected publications did
something else as well. By proving
the doubters wrong, by showing
that intelligent formulas and smart
algorithms could see facts as they
were, not facts that were tinged
with bias, Silver delivered a decisive
uppercut in the ongoing battle
between maths and political punditry.
The nerd became the king,
showing the United States and the
wider world that what we think we
knew isn’t always true. It’s a difficult
lesson to learn, but one that is vital
in our complex times.
Nate Silver did not originally
learn statistics to solve the problem
of political polls. Initially, he had
a simpler need: to win his fantasy
baseball league. After gradating
from the University of Chicago with
a degree in economics, the son of the
political science department chair at
Michigan State University took a job
with the consulting firm KPMG. But
Silver, a baseball fan since his youth,
found the gig dull and he needed
another outlet. He started fiddling
with a system that would come to be
called Player Empirical Comparison
and Optimization Test Algorithm,
or PECOTA after Bill Pecota, a
journeyman infielder who spent
time with the Detroit Tigers team
for which Silver supported.
The goal of his creation was to
use past performance on the field
to predict future results. Baseball,
a sport that is obsessed with statistics,
offered mountains of data.
Silver simply needed to develop a
workable model that would make
sense of the variables. He spent
years refining the formula, eventually
quitting KPMG to play online
poker where he made $400,000 in
75
Open skies / march 2013
three years, according to Sports
Illustrated. In 2003, Baseball Prospectus
purchased PECOTA and
hired Silver to manage the company’s
projections.
Numbers were paying off.
Fantasy baseball, in which people
‘draft’ players from different teams
to create their own club and then
play other managers in their league,
was exploding in popularity. Baseball
fans, long rooted in traditions
such as the value of batting average
and earned run average, were beginning
to understand the importance
of new statistics, highlighted in Michael
Lewis’ bestseller, Moneyball.
Silver, PECOTA, and Baseball Prospectus
came along at the perfect
time, serving as a place where fans
and fantasy players on the cutting
edge could pay for advance information.
Hundreds of thousands
Karl Rove found himself
melting down on national
TV, while the country
looked in horror, disgust
and amusement. The
statistics had beaten
the talking heads
did. Life was good as 2003 became
2005, then 2007. But, once again,
Silver found himself bored.
The 2008 presidential election
felt like an extremely important
moment in American history. After
eight years of George W Bush,
the country found itself divided,
searching for a new leader. Neither
Democratic nor Republican Party
had a candidate who was sure to
win the nomination.
The rise of Twitter, Facebook,
and other forms of social media, in
addition to the relentless assault
of cable news programmes aiming
to capture audience share added
to the attention the country paid