Nate Silver: I'll Stop if I Start Swaying Elections

Stats whiz says he doesn't want to influence voters
By John Johnson,  Newser Staff
Posted Feb 14, 2013 12:19 PM CST
Nate Silver: I'll Stop if I Start Swaying Elections
Nate Silver holds his phone as he sits on the stairs with his laptop computer at a hotel in Chicago last year.   (AP Photo/Nam Y. Huh)

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.”
(Read more Nate Silver stories.)

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