FiveThirtyEight
- Thread starter JimD
- Start date
Not on IE either. Maybe it's my firewall? But we're Disney here.
EDIT: The site is down/having issues.
UPDATE: Now I can see it. Manifesto is good. Not crazy that they are running photos without attribution. Take it back, if you mouse over the photo you get credit and caption.
EDIT: The site is down/having issues.
UPDATE: Now I can see it. Manifesto is good. Not crazy that they are running photos without attribution. Take it back, if you mouse over the photo you get credit and caption.
Terrible opinion alert: http://www.newrepublic.com/article/117068/nate-silvers-fivethirtyeight-emptiness-data-journalism
That opinion reads eerily similar to the angry sportswriters/FO folks/morons who complain about Bill James/"Moneyball"/sabermetrics.
I find this quote particularly troubling, especially coming from a member of the media:
Better to have a 'serious belief system' then to let the actual facts get in the way? No wonder a lot of people are fed up with the so-called mainstream media. Please take off your serious belief system glasses and look at things objectively. I think that's why Nate's project is so hopeful.
One of the comments summed it up pretty well:
Better to have a 'serious belief system' then to let the actual facts get in the way? No wonder a lot of people are fed up with the so-called mainstream media. Please take off your serious belief system glasses and look at things objectively. I think that's why Nate's project is so hopeful.
One of the comments summed it up pretty well:
Ha! Good point. It's like having your film be banned- now everybody wants to see it.dcmissle said:
Yes, baseball was, shockingly, ahead of the game compared to the media-politics industrial complex.CaptainLaddie said:
This is a boring shitty faux intellectual site so far. Like a bad Slate column designed by Right Now Web!
Same with the non-sports stuff I have seen. I don't want to pollute the board with links to political posts, but some of it seems like basically pure editorial/punditry-type columns, including some of it that criticizes punditry. No actual data, just subjective analysis and opinion.snowmanny said:
I am disappoint.
Hopefully that is just a result of it being early in the process and they'll eventually find a groove. Grantland went through a lot of similar issues when it launched, with a lot of short half-developed features. Part of Grantland's success has been finding a strong group of feature writers, and either relegating writers' whose styles didn't fit to the blogs/podcasts (e.g. Molly Lambert) or phasing them out altogether (e.g. Carles). We'll see if 538 can do the same, because it definitely has been underwhelming so far.
I am disappointed as well. I figured with his newfound resources that the backbone of his site would be at least intellectually consistent with his established brand. I'm still giving it a shot, though.
I've felt disappointed as well, but damn, when they dig in it's real good. More of this, which I think is exceptional data journalism, please.
http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/rich-suburbs-cant-save-the-democrats-come-the-midterms/
http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/rich-suburbs-cant-save-the-democrats-come-the-midterms/
This breakdown of umpires' count tendencies is outstanding.
http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/four-strikes-and-youre-out/
http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/four-strikes-and-youre-out/
So, anyone still reading this?
I'm finding the vast majority of it to be pretty trite. There's quite a bit of short form stuff (I'm excluding the sports stuff) where they throw some stat into a chart and say "isn't this interesting." Maybe it is, maybe it isn't, but it's not adding that much to the discussion.
I wonder if some of it is because while statistical analysis has been poorly used by the media historically, statistical approaches to the underlying issues of politics and policy have been used by academics for a long time, and with much greater care than Nate's number crunchers. This is a sharp difference from baseball where basically no one was doing good analysis before Bill James. On economics, public policy and even politics, there's been plenty of good scholarship around for a long time, it's just that the media has ignored it or distorted it.
I'm finding the vast majority of it to be pretty trite. There's quite a bit of short form stuff (I'm excluding the sports stuff) where they throw some stat into a chart and say "isn't this interesting." Maybe it is, maybe it isn't, but it's not adding that much to the discussion.
I wonder if some of it is because while statistical analysis has been poorly used by the media historically, statistical approaches to the underlying issues of politics and policy have been used by academics for a long time, and with much greater care than Nate's number crunchers. This is a sharp difference from baseball where basically no one was doing good analysis before Bill James. On economics, public policy and even politics, there's been plenty of good scholarship around for a long time, it's just that the media has ignored it or distorted it.
I follow them on Teh Tweeters and if I see something I like I'll click. Otherwise I'm not going there.
So far they have a low batting average and if I cared enough, I'd make a mock graphic showing how useless most of their graphics are.
So far they have a low batting average and if I cared enough, I'd make a mock graphic showing how useless most of their graphics are.
jose melendez said:
I think part of the problem is that the focus on stats has forced them to think of every story statistically. The beauty of BP and earlier 538 was that the primary story is the game or the election, and statistics were just tools to answer bigger questions like "Is this player better than that player?" or "Will so and so win the election?" Now, it seems like they say, "What stats are relevant to Topic X?", and then they go and find the stats and try to shoehorn a story into the statistics. They had a story on the Nigerian kidnapping recently, and I remember thinking, "What could stats possibly have to say about the Nigerian kidnapping that would warrant an entire article?" After having read the article, I still don't know the answer to that question.
In some sense, I feel like Nate Silver has misunderstood his own popularity. The point isn't that people want to read about stats - it's that people want to read informed discourse.
jose melendez said:
I follow it and click on stuff that might interest me
I think a big problem is they barely differentiate the long-form articles from the Datalab blog posts. I'm thinking the short form stuff Jose is complaining about is the Datalab blog posts. Those aren't meant to be in-depth, they are just quick takes. But except for the banner at the top of the page they look basically the same, and they are posted on social media similarly to the longer stuff. Often, I'll click on something from the feed, and it's a puny Datalab post, which may be mildly interesting, but I was expecting something deeper.
Great story about an amateur archivist who kept stats for early NBA games.
http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/meet-the-man-who-preserved-decades-of-nba-history/
http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/meet-the-man-who-preserved-decades-of-nba-history/