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In 2012, when I first saw FiveThirtyEight founder Nate Silver making the talk show rounds to tout his site, I was excited. He talked about bringing critical thought to data, striving for better polling analysis, and renewing our collective faith in statistics. He spoke with confidence about the power of pure data analysis as a predictive tool, and I bought every line. FiveThirtyEight has lived up to some of the early promise, but it is also beginning to see disastrous missteps that are leading some to ask whether there is even a place for data journalism going forward.
Listening to FiveThirtyEight’s Election Podcast the message you’ll hear Silver and his crew repeat the most is a warning against overconfidence in polls. Polls, he explains, are of varying quality and must be gathered together with other variables to make predictions. This data aggregation, however, has led FiveThirtyEight to commit their own deadliest sin: in abstracting real information into a predictive figure they have come up with a model in which they have much too much faith
http://www.salon.com/2016/05/15/nate...nalism_go_now/
Listening to FiveThirtyEight’s Election Podcast the message you’ll hear Silver and his crew repeat the most is a warning against overconfidence in polls. Polls, he explains, are of varying quality and must be gathered together with other variables to make predictions. This data aggregation, however, has led FiveThirtyEight to commit their own deadliest sin: in abstracting real information into a predictive figure they have come up with a model in which they have much too much faith
http://www.salon.com/2016/05/15/nate...nalism_go_now/