New York Times writer and statistician Nate Silver told a full Graham Chapel audience that he might stop writing his renowned blog should his analyses ever start affecting election results. 
 
 Silver spent an hour minimizing his achievements as an auspicious combination of decent blogging and statistical analysis in his Monday night lecture sponsored by the Washington University Political Review. Silver, who began his career doing statistics for Major League Baseball, gained wider fame when his FiveThirtyEight political blog hosted by the Times correctly predicted the 2012 presidential election results in every state. 
 
 He said that his statistics are not intended to affect results, which shouldn’t be an issue in most general elections. But he conceded that in races such as last year’s Republican presidential primary, analysis can make a difference. 
 
 “The polls can certainly affect elections at times,” Silver said. “I hope people don’t take the forecasts too seriously. You’d rather have an experiment where you record it off from the actual voters, in a sense, but we’ll see. If it gets really weird in 2014, in 2016, then maybe I’ll stop doing it. I don’t want to influence the democratic process in a negative way.” 
 
 “I’m [hoping to make] people more informed, I don’t want to affect their motive because they trust the forecasters,” he added. 
 
 Without going into any mathematical specifics, Silver said that the key to doing what he does is accounting for margins of error and directing energy in efficient ways. He said that obsessing over a set of data hoping for big results is a waste of time. 
 
 “You have to get comfortable thinking in terms of uncertainty,” Silver said. “Don’t take a lot of things for granted; there’s a lot of groupthink in a lot of problems.” 
 
 “The basic lesson here—and I guess there are a couple different lessons—is not to expect miracles when you’re looking at big data,” he added. 
 
 Silver also spoke from personal experience when he talked about how even people who ask the right questions will often direct their energy inefficiently. 
 
 “I have a friend who’s from St. Louis, he’s the kind of guy who, we’ll go out to dinner and he’s trying to figure out what to order, and it will be like a 15 minute ordeal where he’ll have a complex negotiation with the waiter or waitress about what options are available, and it’s very, very painful to go out with him,” Silver said. “[This is] a guy who’s been miserable at his job for a year and a half. I ask him, ‘Why don’t you look for a new job?’ He’s like, ‘Uh, I don’t know, I’m tired.’” 
 
 Silver added that it’s similarly important not to overestimate the complexity of things. He referenced the 1997 chess match between Garry Kasparov and the computer nicknamed “Deep Blue.” Kasparov lost the match after the struggling computer made a random move that the grandmaster erroneously interpreted as a sign of some superior knowledge. 
 
 “It turned out that what looked like a bug actually was a bug,” Silver said. 
 
 After his lecture, Silver answered student-asked questions and spoke about how he thinks what he does can be applied to other research-fueled fields. 
 
 “A lot of academic journals should really be blogs instead, where you say, ‘Well I conducted an experiment in the lab today, and here’s what I found.’ One good thing about FiveThirtyEight, for example, is you can do a…study and we can give the audience, the reader, clues about how seriously they should take it. A lot of the time you might be kind of playing around in the data sandbox and you come across something interesting and it’s worth pointing out, but you don’t have to write a whole thesis about it,” Silver said. 
 
 Students present at the discussion said they found the speech interesting and relevant despite the fact that he didn’t go into many specifics. 
 
 “It gave some good insights and showed that he applied his method to more than just politics,” freshman Eli Horowitz said. 
 
 “Since Nate Silver was a mathematician, it seemed like an interesting application of mathematics,” freshman Anthony Grebe, who plans to double major in math and physics, said. “I had seen a little bit about him before the election, and obviously I’m impressed because he predicted it so well.” 
 
 Others were impressed with the New York Times blogger’s humility. 
 
 “He really spoke to a lot of Wash. U. students in terms of where their interests lie,” senior and WUPR co-editor-in-chief Anna Applebaum said. “He talked about sports, talked about poker, talked about math. I thought it was a great speech, and I had a great time attending.” ||||| Let’s start by stating the obvious: Hillary Rodham Clinton would be a formidable presidential candidate in 2016. 
 
 Mrs. Clinton’s credentials as secretary of state, as a United States senator and as a politically engaged first lady would be hard for any of her Democratic or Republican rivals to match. She would have little trouble raising funds or garnering support from the Democratic officials, and she might even come close to clearing the Democratic field of serious opposition. 
 
 Mrs. Clinton made some tactical errors during the 2008 campaign — particularly, in her staff’s failure to understand the importance of contesting caucus states. But she improved considerably as a candidate over the course of the long primary, and the experience she gained would undoubtedly help her if she were to run again. 
 
 But if Mrs. Clinton runs for president in 2016, one thing is almost certain: she won’t be as popular as she is right now. Recent polls show that about 65 percent of Americans take a favorable view of Mrs. Clinton, while only about 30 percent have a negative one. Those are remarkably high numbers for a politician in an era when many public officials are distrusted or disliked. 
 
 But part of the reason for Mrs. Clinton’s high numbers is that, as secretary of state, she has remained largely above the partisan fray that characterizes elections and fights over domestic policy. 
 
 Over the course of her long career, the public’s views of Mrs. Clinton have shifted along with her public role. When she has been actively engaged in the hand-to-hand combat that characterizes election campaigns and battles in Congress, her favorability ratings have taken a hit, only to recover later. 
 
 Mrs. Clinton might be the most polled about American in history, other than those who have actually become president. Between the PollingReport.com database and other publicly available polling archives, I was able to identify about 500 high-quality telephone surveys that tested her favorability ratings with the public. Read more…
– Nate Silver may have cemented his reputation as a political forecaster in the last election, but he doesn't want his reading of the polls to influence flesh-and-blood voters. And if it does, he might pull the plug on his FiveThirtyEight blog, reports Student Life, the college paper at Washington University. It quotes him thusly in a lecture this week: "I hope people don’t take the forecasts too seriously. You’d rather have an experiment where you record it off from the actual voters, in a sense, but we’ll see. If it gets really weird in 2014, in 2016, then maybe I’ll stop doing it. I don’t want to influence the democratic process in a negative way.”