Out Magazine names Nate Silver Person Of The Year.

[sufrommich]

http://www.out.com/news-opinion/2012/12/18/nate-silver-person-year

For months in the run-up to the election, Silver, editor of FiveThirtyEight, a blog hosted by The New York Times, had been analyzing the polling data and calmly explaining, to the contempt of pundits on Fox and the gratitude of viewers of MSNBC, why Obama had the election sewn up. His quiet confidence—he bet Joe Scarborough $2,000 that the president would win re-election— attracted fans and haters alike.

On the eve of the big day, one in five people going to the Times site were going to his blog. But even as the flood broke over their heads, political veterans continued to resist his analysis. There was Karl Rove on polling night, sputtering and spinning on Fox News, insisting it was too soon to call Ohio. There was Wall Street Journal columnist and Reagan speechwriter Peggy Noonan a day before the election, writing of a near-certain Romney surge.

“While everyone is looking at the polls and the storm, Romney’s slipping into the presidency,” Noonan wrote brashly—and rashly—before taking an obvious dig at Silver. Was it possible, she asked, that we were too busy looking at data on paper “instead of what’s in front of us”? The sniff of disdain directed at “data,” the idea that these two things—information and common sense—were somehow mutually exclusive was, of course, part of the problem. For Silver, data on paper is the best way to see what’s in front of us, so long as we don’t allow our biases to get in the way. His best-selling book, The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail—but Some Don’t—less Malcolm Gladwell than Stephen Hawking in its concession to populism—is all about our tendency to filter information through a self-serving lens. Like Caesar refusing to believe the auguries of his death, we hear what we want to hear, with all the attendant consequences. We fail to take the threat of al-Qaeda seriously, for example, or we miss critical signals of an impending economic collapse.