A List Of Things Thrown Five Minutes Ago

STAT BOY: New York magazine and former Fametracker scribe Adam Sternbergh -- of whom we've long been a fan -- has done an extensive profile of Nate Silver of FiveThirtyEight.com and Baseball Prospectus fame, focusing on the differences between (and similarities of) forecasting politics and baseball:

As stats are to baseball, polls are to politics; i.e., the basic numeric measurement of how things have gone in the past and how they might go in the future. Ask any pollster, though, and he will tell you that polls aren’t meant to be used as predictive tools — they’re simply a rough measure of where the electorate stands at a given moment. As pollster John Zogby put it to me, “We take snapshots. And when you take many snapshots in a row, you get motion pictures.”

But unlike baseball stats, polls are a notoriously imprecise measurement. In baseball, at least, a hit is a hit. With polls, a yes isn’t always a yes. Sometimes it’s more like a “maybe,” or a “yes, until I change my mind,” or an “I don’t know, but I’ll say yes anyway to get you off the phone.” Poll results can vary dramatically based on what you’re asking, who you’re asking, how you’re asking, and how many people decide to answer you. Three different polls were conducted recently asking Americans how they felt about the federal $700 billion bailout. They all asked the question in slightly different ways and the results were essentially useless: One poll had people in favor of the bailout 57 to 30 percent, one had them against it 55 to 31, and one was basically split down the middle. In other words, polls are, at best, educated guesses. But if there’s one thing Nate Silver loves to make, it’s an educated guess.

Regardless of your political views, it's a piece worth reading.