Quick Wiki
- Full Name Nate Silver
- Occupation Statiscian, Baseball Analyst
- Nationality American
- Birthplace Michigan, USA
- Birth Date Jan 13, 1978
- Age 46 Years, 10 Months
Nate Silver | Biography
Silver predicted the victory of Joe Biden in the 2020 United States Presidential Election, forecasting 48 out of 50 states accuratelyNate Silver started working for Baseball Prospectus in 2002. He developed the PECOTA (Player Empirical Comparison and Optimization Test Algorithm) system after he realized the need for improvement in pitcher forecasts. He also came up with the catchy acronym paying tribute to a former Major League Baseball infielder Bill Pecota.
Nate Silver is an American statistician known for his accurate prediction of the United States election results.
Who is Nate Silver?
Nate Silver first rose to fame for developing PECOTA, a system for forecasting the performance of Major League Baseball players. He sold PECOTA to Baseball Prospectus in 2003 and managed the system from 2003 to 2009. He is also the founder of the blog FiveThirtyNine, which publishes the possible outcome of upcoming elections.
Early Bio and Parents
Nate Silver, full name Nathaniel Read Silver, was born on 13 January 1978 in East Lansing, Michigan. His parents were Brain D. Silver, a retired political science professor and former chair of the political science department at Michigan State University, and Sally Thrun Silver, a community activist. He has one sister named Rebecca Gard Silver. In an interview with Politico, Silver described himself as half Jewish.
Silver graduated with a Bachelor of Arts degree in Economics from the University of Chicago in 2000.
Early Career
After graduating from the university, Silver began his career in 2000 as a financial consultant at KPMG, a global network of professional firms that provide audit, tax, and advisory services. Silver worked at KPMG for more than three years and was making $55,000 per year. In an interview with Freakonomics in March 2009, Silver said that his biggest regret was "spending four years of my life at a job I didn't like."
In April 2004, he quit his job at KPMG to make a decent income by playing the online card game Poker. Expecting to make more than $100,000 in 2004, Silver began his new venture by signing on to EmpirePoker.com and putting $1,000 into his account. He folded most hands before the first round of betting, losing his $15 ante. He lost $170 on the first hand he played. However, he was hopeful and did not panic about loss.
"If I lose $170 on a hand, it's nothing. You can't let it get to you," Silver told the Chicago Tribune in October 2004. He mostly played on weekday evenings and sometimes also stayed up until sunrise. As per Silver, he did financially better with online Poker than he expected. According to the Sports Illustrated article about Silver that was published in September 2012, he made $400,000 by playing online Poker over the three years.
PECOTA
In 2002, Silver started working for Baseball Prospectus. He developed and became a managing partner of PECOTA (Player Empirical Comparison and Optimization Test Algorithm) for Baseball Prospectus.
Silver developed the PECOTA system after he realized the need for improvement in pitcher forecasts. He soon pitched the idea to Basketball Prospectus' founder Gary Huckabay and developed the same. He also came up with the catchy acronym paying tribute to a former Major League Baseball infielder Bill Pecota.
Silver sold PECOTA to Baseball Prospectus in 2003 and managed the system from 2003 to 2009. Baseball Prospectus published PECOTA forecasts in its annual books and on the BaseballProspectus.com website.
Silver received wide acclaim for his PECOTA system on forecasting the performance of Major League Baseball players. The system uses historical comparisons of players to predict the future performance of players.
FiveThirtyEight.com
While he was still working with Baseball Prospectus, he started forecasting politics in 2007. In March 2008, he launched his own blog called FiveThirtyEight.com, named from the total number of electors in the United States Electoral College. The blog focuses on accumulating and analyzing political and polling data. It also publishes the possible outcome of upcoming elections. The blog moved to The New York Times website in 2010 and was then acquired by ESPN in July 2013. Later, the blog was acquired by ESPN's sister property ABC News on 17 April 2018.
Silver predicted the victory of Barack Obama in the 2008 United States presidential election. His blog also forecasted the results in every state during the 2012 United States presidential election.
During the 2016 United States presidential election, Silver initially predicted that Donald Trump had a lower chance of victory than Hillary Clinton. According to The Atlantic, Silver, by the eve of the general election, predicted that Trump had a 29 percent chance of winning. It was significantly higher than that of most other analysts and media outlets.
Silver also predicted the victory of Joe Biden in the 2020 United States presidential election, forecasting 48 out of 50 states accurately.
Books
On 27 September 2012, Silver published a book titled 'The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail But Some Don't,' exploring the art and science of prediction.
Personal Life
Openly gay, Silver told The Guardian in November 2012, "I've always felt like something of an outsider. I've always had friends, but I've always come from an outside point of view. I think that's important. If you grow up gay, or in a household that's agnostic, when most people are religious, then from the get-go, you are saying that there are things that the majority of society believes that I don't believe."
