morning after

[calimac]

I didn't watch any of the Oscar telecast: I contented myself with checking up on news websites a couple of times in the evening as I worked on the computer, which is also how I've been following election returns for the past decade.

So, with that comparison, it's appropriate to think of Nate Silver and his attempt to wade into Oscar predicting, a field with no reliable polling and no release of voting figures. He based his predictions entirely on the results of other movie awards, as a substitute for polling.

So far this morning I haven't seen any post-mortems on his predictions - maybe it's still too early in the morning - but, heck, here's his original article. Of the six categories he forecast, he got four of them right, and the two that he didn't were the ones that he acknowledged his data was insufficient for a reliable prediction on, and they still went to high-probability candidates.

So Silver has struck again, even in this unlikely field for election prediction.

My own comments on the results would be virtually nil, as there's no category I've seen more than 2 of the nominees in, except for Best Picture where I've seen 3. I thought they were all pretty good movies, but that speaks more to my ability to select the movies that I'd like than to the Academy's ability to select the movies that I'd like.

Comments

[wild-irises.livejournal.com]

If you read The Signal and the Noise (didn't you read part of it after it was discussed here?), you'll see that Silver's prediction interest is not only, or even primarily, about elections.

What I found interesting is how often he is being called a "witch," or people are saying "Silver is not a witch."

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

Silver himself compared this to his election forecasts in his blog posts. What impressed me was not that he was branching out - I know that he started out in baseball statistics, and has ventured into many other fields - but that here he was making election predictions without the availability of his usual forecasting tools.