{"id":2074,"date":"2014-03-24T10:53:45","date_gmt":"2014-03-24T15:23:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.danielpradilla.info\/blog\/?p=2074"},"modified":"2014-03-24T11:01:26","modified_gmt":"2014-03-24T15:31:26","slug":"nate-silver-and-the-age-of-data-journalism","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.danielpradilla.info\/blog\/nate-silver-and-the-age-of-data-journalism\/","title":{"rendered":"Nate Silver And The Age of Data Journalism"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"538_intro4\"<\/a><\/p>\n

A few days ago, the new version of Nate Silver’s FiveThirtyEight<\/a> went live, backed by ESPN.<\/p>\n

According to Silver’s observations, explained in his site’s manifesto<\/a>, the market is ripe for a data-oriented journalism.<\/p>\n

I totally agree. A day doesn’t go by in which I hear or read an argument that painfully drags along because of its lack of data. Facebook, Twitter and the traditional media are full of these poorly documented ideas and debates.<\/p>\n

I don’t know how it is in other countries, but where I come from, us engineers chose our career because we were socially awkward and\/or bad with words, whereas others\u00a0chose mass communications because they were poor at math. Turns out that basic math and the arithmetic rule of three are insufficient tools for explaining complex phenomena in the real world.<\/p>\n

One of the first posts in FiveThirtyEight was precisely about my home country and it\u00a0coldly and matter-of-factly explains the current political crisis just using numbers<\/a>.<\/p>\n

I think that you either believe in science (and the importance of science) or you don’t. And it’s a dogma. People from one camp just cannot have arguments with the other because they live in different realities. “Do you believe in science? Do you know how to spot a tainted poll?” should be the starting questions for any debate.<\/p>\n

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