Nate Silver: The Numbers Don't Lie

As an undergraduate, Nate Silver studied economics, but baseball was his first and enduring love. He soon earned a reputation as a formidable baseball statistical analyst. A disciple of Bill James, Silver's remarkable PECOTA (Player Empirical Comparison and Optimization Test Algorithm) system for predicting player performance, career development, and seasonal winners and losers has changed the way baseball-insiders and fans alike think about the game. In 2007 and 2008, Silver applied his statistical models to the presidential election and impressed the world of political polling with his uncannily accurate election forecasts. In the 2012 presidential election, Silver, in his FiveThirtyEight column for the New York Times, correctly predicted election results in all 50 states. In this CHF program, Silver shares his insights about America's greatest game and its favorite spectator sport (baseball and politics, respectively—or maybe the reverse) and he gives listeners a preview of his just-published book, The Signal and the Noise: Why Most Predictions Fail but Some Don't.