Baseball statistician tries politics and bats almost one thousand

This is hilariously awesome:<p><i>When we took him to preschool one time, we dropped him off, and he announced, ‘Today, I’m a numbers machine,’ and started counting, Brian Silver said. When we picked him up two and a half hours later, he was ‘Two thousand one hundred and twenty-two, two thousand one hundred and twenty-three...’</i>

Silver predicts White Sox lose 90 games. Is ridiculed in baseball circles. Vindicated when they end up sucking.<p>Silver predicts Rays win 88 games. Is ridiculed further. Rays win 97 games and go to the World Series. Absolute vindication.<p>That said, I hate his player projection systems. You can't predict baseball (though he comes about as close as you can).

Thanks for posting this. A very enjoyable article that demonstrates how the broader application of entrepreneurial behaviors to a problem, that Nate clearly has a passion for, can blow the incumbents clean out of the water.<p>I doubt we've heard the last of Nate Silver.

<i>By the end of [election] night, Mr. Silver had predicted the popular vote within one percentage point, predicted 49 of 50 states’ results correctly, and predicted all of the resolved Senate races correctly.</i><p>From his posted predictions back in March? W-o-w.

Um, I (and the whole world) called it for Obama before 10pm that night. It seemed clear to me that the "incumbents" must have been legally required (or something) to wait till the polls closed on the west coast before they could make it official.<p>And lots of people called the election months before too. I followed <a href="http://electoral-vote.com/" rel="nofollow">http://electoral-vote.com/</a> just because I followed them the last two elections. The job of prediction they did was comparable. Though FiveThirtyEight.com did seem to have more/better features.

Does Nate Silver invest on Intrade (or another prediction market) and make money off of his predictions? If not, why not?