So Nate & Co sell out to a big corporation then are upset that it does big corporation stuff? I'm more mad at Nate here because 538 was my go-to for political coverage pre-sellout, and because of his greed it went away.

Wow. I have a low opinion of ABC as I said in another post, but this level of pettiness is still surprising to me.

"I won't sell at any price" reads as an invitation to make a much higher bid.

It seems silly at best to take that as a literal statement.

WOuldn't proof of that be some grounds for breach of fiduciary duty?

Just register fivethirtynine.com and don't look back.

Companies have a long history of mis-management of their acquisitions (and mis-managing their portfolio of projects outside their money-making expertise).

As you suggest, it's good that the alumni seem to be doing fine, although Harry Enten's commentary on CNN is not as thougtful as he was on 538 podcasts.

this is what the salesforces of the world do to startups every day. it is so painful to watch. billions upon billions wasted for just the stupidest possible reasons.

Looks like just 30 repos: https://github.com/orgs/fivethirtyeight/repositories?type=so...

they took down the burrito bracket, it must be resurrected

when i lived in SF i found al pastor at Tacqueria Cancun messianic

In theory corporate ownership was supposed to be the solution to that problem. Deep pockets to buffer through the lean years and maximally exploit the profitable content when the harvest arrives.

In practice, of course, corporate bean counting doesn't work on that latency scale. There's always a middle manager seeing fat that can be trimmed today, harvest be damned. But the financial argument was sound.

That's kind of already happened though. Nate and Galen have both launched Substack's covering much of what they did at 538. I've also seen at least 4-5 others working elsewhere doing the similar polling/politics/sports work.

Maybe that was the logic on ABC's part but it's ridiculously wrong given how much clear market demand there is for the 538 people and content.

Fax. It’s amazing how many “leaders” fail to see that in exchange for the payout.

Fair enough, but you can still observe and make comments about them.

I enjoyed the old 538 podcast and usually like Nate's work but didn't care at all about Risky Business. His cohost was terrible in the episodes I listened too. She managed to do a lot of talking without saying anything interesting or insightful.

Gladwell also annoys me, so that didn't help matters.

I started doing actual politics rather than simply consuming it. It's more fun trust me.

I highly recommend G Elliott Morris' blog Strength in Numbers. He exists more in conversation with political science researchers and commercial polling professionals which makes his reporting feel a lot deeper and more interesting than the back of the envelope hot takes a bunch of other pundits try to sell as data journalism these days.

Strength in Numbers is very US politics centric, but Elliott also works with Mary Radcliffe on Fifty Plus One. That's a new hub for raw polling data (and averages) but they also do some broader polling roundup style stories that have a 538 feel.

David Nir of the Downballot is pretty good too if you are looking for information on the smaller races.

Outside of the SiN extended universe, Marist have a podcast called Poll Hub which is very light and fun and reminiscent of the cuddliest 538 podcasts before they started getting that weird contrarian podcast bro energy.

I've trialed a bunch of other sites since 538 went away and also checked in on the other alumni, but none of it outside of SiN-and-friends or the Marist quite hit for me.

https://www.natesilver.net/

i was a casual reader of 538 back in the day. his substack feels pretty similar, if smaller in scope.

That's not what this was.

Nate Silver has some pretty good commentary on it all on his X account (https://x.com/NateSilver538).

No idea. ABC bought it and slowly has been shutting down the parts of it. They got rid of the projects page, then laid off all the folks working on it after the election, and now have gotten rid of all of the articles.

Fortunately the Github is still up: https://github.com/fivethirtyeight

I'm surprised this is news - or perhaps just surprised that there was still some of 538 around ...?

ABC officially sunset 538 over a year ago (and laid off most/all of the staff).

They sold it a while ago

538 was sunset over a year ago.

Fifty Plus One kinda does that now: https://fiftyplusone.news/methodology

No. The 'old school' hated 538 and polling wonks in general. Back in the 2000s there was a huge push back because this blog guy had numbers going against whatever narrative they were trying spin.

I feel like it proves the opposite. A small entity was able to become a valued source of information, a big entity bought it, but then was unable to do anything with it, since being a “big” media seller does not matter due to the accessibility of the internet.

> pretty big credibility hit after getting that election so wrong

That this is the narrative that survived the election is one of the greatest indictments for our society's ability to engage in critical thinking.

The day before the election, the Huffington Post published a hit piece criticising Nate for overrating Trump's odds and inspiring panic. Huffpost predicted a 98.2% chance of Clinton winning, NYT predicted 85%, and Nate's model dared to give her only a 65% chance of winning.

Then the election happens, Trump wins, and the credible figure who gave him the highest odds is now lambasted from the other direction. He was so wrong to give Trump a chance that the mainstream media were publishing articles about it, and he was so wrong to not give Trump a 100% chance that it ruined his reputation. The moral: you literally can't win, because people are too fucking stupid to comprehend probability, period.

538 made thousands of forecasts of events they predicted to happen 30% of the time, and those events happened 29% of the time in actuality. Does that mean they got it wrong every single one of those times a 30% event actually happened? For a forecaster to be 'correct', is it necessary for events forecasted at 30% to never happen?

I remember that whole election starting off very poorly for Nate Silver.

After reading this book, The Party Decides https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/P/bo592160... , he was a big advocate of the idea that the "endorsement race" of state officials and unelected party leaders.

There was a whole "Party Decides: Endorsement Tracker" graphic and everything, but Trump securing the Republican nomination and eventually the presidency pretty conclusively showed that theory to be a relic of the past.

So the 538 election coverage that year was: - Party endorsements matter more than early polling (they didn't) - Hillary's up so big there's no way Trump can win (he did, and yes I know they didn't actually say that but that's what the layman saw)

(ironically the Party Decides thesis seems to have correctly predicted events in the Democratic primary that year)

I remember vaguely the opposite. They were the only major prediction site that thought Trump had any significant chance of winning.

Yeah they sure were bad at predictions. If only they had aggregated all their predictions and compared them to how things actually turned out in one easy assess location. That sure would have been useful..... [0]

[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20250306183754/https://projects....

538 was actually pretty accurate!

They had a good article about how their predictions were much better than you'd expect, but obviously I can't link it anymore because ABC removed it.

The 70:30 prediction against Trump was far better than most. I did see models back then that considered the state polls mostly or entirely uncorrelated, and those produced obviously garbage with 90% or even 99% in favor of Clinton.

But in the end people pick on Nate because he really enjoys being an asshole on the internet. It's far more about when he acts as a pundit, not as an expert on statistics.

He doesn’t have the faintest idea how to turn the keys.

Did he predict odds? How are you so sure his odds were wrong?

This isn't about Nate's articles (although perhaps those are gone as well).