Why so many predictions fail – but some don’t.
Nate Silver built an innovative system for predicting baseball performance, predicted the 2008 election within a hair’s breadth, and became a national sensation as a blogger—all by the time he was thirty. He solidified his standing as the nation’s foremost political forecaster with his near perfect prediction of the 2012 election. Silver is the founder and editor in chief of the website FiveThirtyEight. Now he’s released a fascinating book that features Eric Floehr, founder of ForecastWatch.
“In 2002 an entrepreneur named Eric Floehr, a computer science graduate from Ohio State who was working for MCI, changed that. Floehr simply started collecting data on the forecasts issued by the NWS, the Weather Channel, and AccuWeather, to see if the government model or the private-sector forecasts were more accurate. This was mostly for his own edification at first—a sort of very large scale science fair project—but it quickly evolved into a profitable business, ForecastWatch.com, which repackages the data into highly customized reports for clients ranging from energy traders (for whom a fraction of a degree can translate into tens of thousands of dollars) to academics.”