The Story of FiveThirtyEight - How Nate Silver Went From Forecasting Baseball Games to Forecasting Elections

/via @creepysleepy:

Nate Silver is a number-crunching prodigy who went from correctly forecasting baseball games to correctly forecasting presidential primaries—and perhaps the election itself. Here’s how he built a better crystal ball.

In a month when the Dow had its worst single-day plunge in over twenty years, when Lehman imploded, AIG faltered, and WaMu failed, when the word crisis became an everyday staple in newspaper headlines and the presidential race pulled close, then pulled apart, when the Chicago Cubs kicked off a playoff quest to win their first championship in 100 years (then got swept out in three straight games) and, for good measure, some scientists in an underground lab near the Swiss Alps fired up a Large Hadron Collider that some serious observers warned might create a black hole that would swallow up the Earth, it was comforting to sit down and have lunch in midtown with a man who can see the future. It’s not that Nate Silver is psychic, or even that he’s right all the time. He’s just proved very good, especially of late, at looking at what’s already happened and using that information to predict what will happen next.

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