Things got worse after Disney had their first round of layoffs. Their problem was they weren't profitable outside the presidential election years when interest peaked in the general public. 3 out of 4 years only diehard election polling wonks tuned in.
Edit: nm it was definitely the burrito battle royale bracket. Big burrito couldn’t handle the truth being revealed about their restaurants.
--Nate Silver (538 founder)
ABC seem pretty petty here.
Not that it's always the same company doing both at the same time, but it's crazy 538 was just left to die. It was a very recognizable brand among wonky professionals, a very desirable customer base. It's not as if politics and sports have gotten less relevant in the world over the past decade. ABC's decision to toss this aside is baffling.
Much of the 538 alumni seem to be doing well, either independently or as part of a major organization, so I don't think much was lost overall. But I sure empathize with the folks who lost their dream job and ABC looks pretty bad for frittering away a successful business for seemingly no reason. Taking down these articles is nonsensical.
Guess we better back up their GitHub repos before that gets taken down as well
If Nate Silver buys it back (for pennies on the dollar) and then makes it successful, it's embarrassing and makes ABC look bad at business.
I expected it would be resurrected outside the Pushkin network, but hasn't happened yet.
What I _don't_ miss is listening to podcasts on Pushkin. I had nothing against Malcolm Gladwell, but something about having his voice on every one of the network's very numerous ads became incredibly grating.
All this proves is when the press was deregulated to allow one person to own all the media they can afford brought us were we are now.
when i lived in SF i found al pastor at Tacqueria Cancun messianic
Fortunately the Github is still up: https://github.com/fivethirtyeight
ABC officially sunset 538 over a year ago (and laid off most/all of the staff).
That this is the narrative that survived the election is one of the greatest indictments for our society's ability to engage in critical thinking.
The day before the election, the Huffington Post published a hit piece criticising Nate for overrating Trump's odds and inspiring panic. Huffpost predicted a 98.2% chance of Clinton winning, NYT predicted 85%, and Nate's model dared to give her only a 65% chance of winning.
Then the election happens, Trump wins, and the credible figure who gave him the highest odds is now lambasted from the other direction. He was so wrong to give Trump a chance that the mainstream media were publishing articles about it, and he was so wrong to not give Trump a 100% chance that it ruined his reputation. The moral: you literally can't win, because people are too fucking stupid to comprehend probability, period.
538 made thousands of forecasts of events they predicted to happen 30% of the time, and those events happened 29% of the time in actuality. Does that mean they got it wrong every single one of those times a 30% event actually happened? For a forecaster to be 'correct', is it necessary for events forecasted at 30% to never happen?
After reading this book, The Party Decides https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/P/bo592160... , he was a big advocate of the idea that the "endorsement race" of state officials and unelected party leaders.
There was a whole "Party Decides: Endorsement Tracker" graphic and everything, but Trump securing the Republican nomination and eventually the presidency pretty conclusively showed that theory to be a relic of the past.
So the 538 election coverage that year was: - Party endorsements matter more than early polling (they didn't) - Hillary's up so big there's no way Trump can win (he did, and yes I know they didn't actually say that but that's what the layman saw)
(ironically the Party Decides thesis seems to have correctly predicted events in the Democratic primary that year)
[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20250306183754/https://projects....
They had a good article about how their predictions were much better than you'd expect, but obviously I can't link it anymore because ABC removed it.
Maybe that was the logic on ABC's part but it's ridiculously wrong given how much clear market demand there is for the 538 people and content.
Gladwell also annoys me, so that didn't help matters.
i was a casual reader of 538 back in the day. his substack feels pretty similar, if smaller in scope.
I need to mirror everything to keep it accessible when they decide to shut this down, too?
I loved that site, and referred people to it frequently.
Any exec who operates that way should be shown the door ASAP as they are likely doing similar emotional management of other aspects of the business.
It's a world of difference to the political standing of the ABC Vice President between "Nate Silver launched something and made a gazillion dollars" vs "Nate Silver bought FiveThirtyEight back for a song and made a gazillion dollars" even if Nate Silver did the exact same thing. In the second case, the ABC Vice President gets fired because he signed off on the purchase.
This is why long copyright is such a terrible idea. With long copyright, there is every incentive to sit on IP and do nothing with it because of political losses. With short copyright, the incentive is to do something quick because the copyright will expire otherwise.
But in the end people pick on Nate because he really enjoys being an asshole on the internet. It's far more about when he acts as a pundit, not as an expert on statistics.
Who's shareholders are the public.
> The shareholders aren't going to care
This is not a valid defense in court. You can't let "attitude of investors" override "sound financial decisionmaking."
https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/DIS/disney/net-inc...
So in an election, that happens all the time. It just doesn't always happen in the race for president.
(Internally I'm sure they could probably phrase it some other less negative way such as chance of people confusing the brand as still owned by them, etc) association
"It's okay set millions of dollars on fire because we have billions in this pile over here!"
As far as I can tell the fiduciary duty to make money for the shareholders is something that Jack Welsh of GE said enough times that people remembered it. However, I’m always interested in additional details concerning the history of this meme, and happy to learn more.
(Not legal advice. I'm not licensed in either state.)