… Evaluating the ingenuity of Silver’s mathematical models can be difficult. But it’s easy to admire his accuracy and the savvy with which he chooses the problems he wants to solve. “I’ve tried to pick fields where the competition was not that good,” he says, laughing. He’s actually serious. When he decided to try politics, he felt that a few good competitors did exist–Simon Jackman at Stanford, for instance, and Drew Linzer at Emory. But having grown up during the “moneyball” wars in baseball–when statistical geeks argued for rationality against major-league scouts who argued for the superiority of experience and intuition–Silver was largely surprised by the statistical ignorance, and outright clubbiness, of most political experts. [cont.]
Jon Gertner, Fast Company