Guys and Dolls

When I was just a little boy, I asked my mother what will I be? Will I be pretty... Well, wrong musical. It was actually written for a Hitchcock film ("The Man Who Knew Too Much")! Who knew Hitchcock did songs? Not all that much.

In any case, I'm going more the Nathan Detroit, "Guys and Dolls", route. Some way to get Nate into the stream of consciousness. You may know that Nate Silver left the NYT for other parts, ESPN for the moment, so the Times have built an in-house version of Nate.

This is where the link goes from the RA piece.

What's cute is the RA piece describes the process as "...a similar poll-aggregation methodology to that used by Silver". There's been very few times that Nate/538 have been accurately characterized. Most often Nate is lauded as Saint Statistician, and while he's been good at what he does, he ain't a math stat. Having made his first splash in baseball, and given that baseball zealots were among the first groups to co-opt the word "statistics" to describe any numeric display, I suppose it was inevitable.

Kind of like what RM supporters have to deal with: any bytes stuffed into a relational engine is a "database", just because the coders say it is.