Last fall my teenage daughter fell in love with a thirty-something data geek. She constantly checked her smartphone for updates from him, gushing when the news was good and panicking when the trend line pointed down.
Did this obsession worry me? Not for a second, since the data geek was none other than Nate Silver, editor in chief of the FiveThirtyEight.com blog and author of the recent best-selling book, The Signal and the Noise.
As an ardent Obama supporter, my daughter relied on Silver’s daily analysis of the presidential election polls for reassurance that the President was indeed still very likely to win, despite all the too-close-to-call noise being spun up by the media pundits. When the dust cleared, Silver had correctly predicted the outcome in all 50 states.
In a wide ranging conversation, Nate discusses the difficulty the media has in distinguishing opinion from fact, talks about why he is moving his blog from The New York Times to ESPN, and reveals his lifetime love of the Detroit Lions.
He is a very interesting and engaging personality who I am sure you will enjoy.
