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<blockquote data-quote="Ovinomancer" data-source="post: 7473946" data-attributes="member: 16814">Only if you're going to include most sports betting in the same category.&nbsp; Fancy statistical models aren't much different from serious betters parsing the stats.&nbsp; It's prognostication by knowledge of the game, which is how Silver builds his models through heavily weighted and sorted data.&nbsp; Silver doesn't take straight data as an input, he selects and massages it according to his keen political insights and then makes a model that matches his guesses.&nbsp; Same as someone betting on sports.&nbsp; Or casting a horoscope, really.ETA: I guess a more succinct way to put it is that what's successful about Nate Silver's predictions isn't his method, but rather Nate Silver.&nbsp; He's an astute political observer, and I enjoy his analysis -- it's thought provoking.&nbsp; But I don't ascribe any more science to his methods than I do any other pundit.If you're making a guess about the future, it's no longer history, is it?&nbsp; Under this interpretation, ALL science is history, because it all uses past observations to inform the method.&nbsp; This proves too much.</blockquote>

[QUOTE="Ovinomancer, post: 7473946, member: 16814"] Only if you're going to include most sports betting in the same category. Fancy statistical models aren't much different from serious betters parsing the stats. It's prognostication by knowledge of the game, which is how Silver builds his models through heavily weighted and sorted data. Silver doesn't take straight data as an input, he selects and massages it according to his keen political insights and then makes a model that matches his guesses. Same as someone betting on sports. Or casting a horoscope, really. ETA: I guess a more succinct way to put it is that what's successful about Nate Silver's predictions isn't his method, but rather Nate Silver. He's an astute political observer, and I enjoy his analysis -- it's thought provoking. But I don't ascribe any more science to his methods than I do any other pundit. If you're making a guess about the future, it's no longer history, is it? Under this interpretation, ALL science is history, because it all uses past observations to inform the method. This proves too much. [/QUOTE]

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