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> I would love to have later learned that leaders who evaluate opportunities separate from personal attachment are seen as more efficient, better, and selected favorably; that more successful companies are less subject to this sort of political/careerist whimsy.

My experience is that it's the opposite: the more successful the company is, the more prone it is to flights of executive whimsy. At more successful companies, it basically doesn't matter what the executives do, because the company's moat is so big that it can tolerate grotesque mismanagement and still make money. (This is the converse of the old aphorism "When a management with a reputation for brilliance tackles a business with a reputation for bad economics, it is the reputation of the business that remains intact."). Executives seem extremely uncomfortable with the idea that they are being paid tens of millions of dollars and yet nothing they do matters, and so they're intent on leaving their mark. Thus, they cancel all the pet projects of the past management, instill their own ideas, and boldly take the company in a new direction. Except not really, because the fundamental parts of the business that make it work are all handled by people 8 levels down in the org chart whose job functions are considered common sense by everybody and never really up for discussion.

At least, this was my experience at Google, which is perhaps the best money-making machine ever invented and yet is grotesquely mismanaged by mid-level VPs that cancel every promising new product that comes out, only to start their own initiatives that themselves get canceled by their successors.

Having been on both sides of this: Often, one of the purposes of the leadership change was to start shedding the old regime's pet projects. Even semi-successful pet projects can be a distraction from the direction the company wants to go.

I've been unlucky enough to work under several executives who thought they could resist direction from the CEO and board. They pushed their pet projects and thought leadership would eventually see the light. Instead they got ejected from the company and replaced with someone who knew how to follow orders.

My cynical assumption when I first saw this was that it was all just politics, but I have to admit that life is so much easier when your management chain isn't fighting uphill all the time.

For this specific case, completely pulling the content offline feels like a loss across the board. I could see it happening as an overreaction, to send a message that the new management is serious about not repeating the (perceived or otherwise) mistakes of their predecessors with an unmistakable signal

"Sometimes you have to change things that are perfectly good just to make them your own." --Jack Donaghy, 30 Rock

Once you look, you see this all the time when new CEOs join large companies, they feel the need to mark their territory by taking a dump on it.

This is the wrong level of analysis. Disney owns ABC, ABC owned 538. The relevant decisions were made by ABC’s leadership.

And the firing of the staff happened years ago and people broadly understood even if they did not agree with it.

The recent decision was to take down an archive that cost $8 in server resources and was still bringing in page views and ad revenue.

Same effect as Killed By Google.

There's value in making more people aware of something, even if it appears obvious to you. It's possible that someone who doesn't share your views on Disney, or corporations more broadly, might have been familiar with FiveThirtyEight and will have their views changed by Nate Silver's account of the situation. There's also nothing wrong with someone reflecting on something they worked on for over a decade and identifying things they could have done differently.

Ironically, your comment adds nothing to the discussion other than virtue signaling that you're "in the know" on this subject.

Cue the Mad Men meme: "THAT'S WHAT THE MONEY'S FOR!"

> I'm simply tired of this hindsight virtue signaling.

Virtue signalling is a funny term. What, exactly, does it mean here? In what way is reminiscing about a venture that lasted 15 years of your life "virtue signalling"? It seems to be that word is trotted out as a meaningless cliche, something in the sense of "I don't like this thing, but I'll sound more sophisticated if I accuse it of this nebulous bad thing rather than just saying I don't like it".

The man is allowed to write a blog post about the final conclusion of a huge phase of his life. You don't have to give him your sympathy, but there's nothing wrong with writing about it.

I think you can both be sad that something you built was destroyed, and also aware that you already sold it and are not somehow personally a victim.

I wrote this exact comment elsewhere on the thread and got downvoted for it. Business is business! It sucks for Nate but he's acting like a sore loser, when this is a totally normal and expected outcome. Businesses acquire other businesses and sunset them all the time. Zero sympathy from me.

You don't need to have sympathy to accept that these chimp outs are virtuous for entirely pedagogical reasons.

I had complaints about 538, especially the early days, but don't understand this critique at all. A 30% chance hitting is completely unremarkable, and it was a perfectly reasonable reading of the evidence at the time. Nate isn't wrong that conventional wisdom was way off, with even supposedly statistical models giving Hillary a 99% chance of winning.

Elections, like many things, have some inherent uncertainty. A several point polling error is normal, so a candidate who is down a couple points on election day has a decent shot of winning.

If I say you have a 50% chance to win a coin flip and you lose it, that doesn't mean I'm wrong.

A key thing though is 538 did regularly test the calibration their models: https://web.archive.org/web/20190410030104/https://fivethirt...

> "What you’ll find, though, is that our calibration has generally been very, very good. For instance, out of the 5,589 events (between sports and politics combined) that we said had a 70 chance of happening (rounded to the nearest 5 percent), they in fact occurred 71 percent of the time. Or of the 55,853 events that we said had about a 5 percent chance of occurring, they happened 4 percent of the time."

Huh. I first started listening to 538 in the run-up to the 2016 election and started really paying attention to them precisely because their 30% figure was so much higher than all the other polls. It was shocking to me then (and still is now reading your comment) that people didn’t seem to understand that 30% in the context of that particular election and that particular candidate suggested a remarkably high chance of winning, not a really low chance of winning. It’s a strange thing where people seem to think that less than 50% = not happening.

I really think a majority of NYTimes and ABCnews consumers don't know the difference between a 2/3 chance (super close) of winning and 2/3 of the vote (a landslide).

That’s like saying “there was only a 30 percent chance of rain today and it rained, so I will never look at the weather forecast again.”

Because they said trump only had a 30% chance to win?

What if they had said 49%? Would that have made their prediction worthless?

We should have a drinking game in Nate Silver thread anyone complains about 2016 prediction. Then everyone piles on to point out how probabilities work.

538 used the example of Trump having approximately the same chance of winning the 2016 presidential election as the Cavaliers had of winning the NBA championship round vs the Warriors. Both Trump and the Cavaliers won with a ~25% predicted chance.

538 made very clear with this analogy that both Trump and the Cavs were underdogs, and that both had a solid chance of winning.

A dice roll has a 16.6% chance of landing on any given side, meaning an 83% chance of not landing on that side.

If you guessed a "two", and it landed on "two, I wouldn't really be that impressed, even though there was an 83% probability going against you.

I think this gets to the core of why a lot of this election prediction stuff doesn't work. People just don't parse the numbers the way the authors intend.

FiveThirtyEight had Trump at a 30% chance of winning, and he won. The model wasn't wrong. The less likely of two outcomes occurred. Even if they'd had him at 1% they still wouldn't technically have been wrong though I think complaints might be more warranted.

If they had Trump at 49% would you have still been angry? What about at 51%? Would it have been okay then?

FiveThirtyEight gave Trump a 30% chance. Their reporting did make clear that with margin was within the range of a normal polling error. And sometimes you get more than a normal polling error.

It doesn't help that the US has a terrible election system that often leads to small margins in some states being decisive.

> Call it emotional, naive, unfair or whatever you want

Yep definitely all those.

Why is it so hard to admit 30% is not 0%?

As a younger man I would have been with the commenters mansplaining probability, but I've aged into realizing that thinking of the election like a marble pulled from an urn whose contents we have probed with polling is just as bad as thinking of it as deterministic. The reason people read fivethirtyeight, probability-savvy or not, was almost entirely to be told what was going to happen, which is sort of incompatible with feeling you can do anything about it. In that way it's probably worse than old-fashioned pundit-driven horse race coverage because it has an air of scientific authority.

> Call it emotional, naive, unfair or whatever you want

We would need a pass from the mods lol.

If you use 538 data, on average you make money betting. Its more correct than not

Nate was a huge outlier in that prediction, he gave trump a better chance than almost anyone else that I can recall, so why are you mad at him about that?

What made me mad is Nate seemed to turn into a MAGA troll himself after that election.

He literally said he made the wrong choice by choosing ESPN, so he's in agreement with you.

One of the most frustrating things about getting older — besides all the fun stuff that happens to your knees and hair — is the fact that younger generations just take what has been normal their whole lives and say “yes this is the normal state of affairs.”

We used to have laws and limits regarding media ownership. One company couldn’t own every radio station in most of America. Distributors couldn’t own studios. Etc.

Disney should never have been allowed to buy 538 in the first place. ABC, possibly…? But Disney shouldn't be allowed to own ABC!! (And if you’re left-leaning, you can’t pin this mess on the “corporation-friendly” Republican Party because it was Bill Clinton who put his signature on this mess!)

The state we’re in is not normal and it wasn’t necessary and we don’t have to just live with it if we don’t want to.

It's remarkably ironic that we are slowly returning to aristocracy.

Only it's worse this time. Say what you want about those French poofs and British lords: they were expected to do their duty on the battlefield.

Insulation in our society has gone all the way up and down.

It's not the full story, but it's certainly a large part of it.

I'll chime in tangentially with another large part: the disproportionate share of both asset and liquid wealth held by people who are some combination of a) Baby Boomers, b) in the top percentiles of wealth/income, c) politically- or socially-connected. As you say, it's not all of them, but enough of them. At the confluence of the two groups is a desire not to invest in potentially risky ventures, or to spend on consumption, but instead to put as much money as possible into a narrow band of low-risk, often passive investments, and to pull every lever possible to protect those investments, even when they become outmoded in some regard and the income stream or economic activity that supports their high (growing) valuation dries up.

Supporting this paradigm (ostensibly so that seniors don't die in poverty, so that strategically-important businesses and ventures are backstopped, etc., but, crucially, to the detriment of all other concerns) means an erosion of a sort of "constructive inefficiency": "wasted" spending on ventures that might not work out, on employees who are not the best and most productive, on niche services and products, which altogether represent a massive share of potential economic activity that is much better at involving and supporting a diverse population with diverse needs and diverse skill sets that perhaps have not yet found the correct outlet to produce maximal value.

Your C-suite goons and my rich, highly networked seniors don't care about the potential of a paradigm shift to support and enable short-term losers, though. They just want to pile into the sure-thing of your "actually good businesses" (which, in many cases, aren't actually that good).

I can easily see the argument that once an election is over, people don't read the content anymore. Granted, storage is cheap so this is kinda silly, but I bet the old articles weren't getting very much traffic.

I would actually say that for most business people this is all "about numbers" and aren't in the slightest worried about deleting something.

This is why efforts like Internet Archive and others are so important. Whatever you think of 538, it _is_ history, and in this digital world it needs to be preserved.

Berkshire Hathaway has this attitude, with the proviso that the corporate management at the acquired firm must be competent, and the firm be profitable and protected by a "moat."

It's amazing that they trot out Sees Candy every year for the shareholders' meeting when they own GEICO.

It seems that Disney isn't doing this quite right.

Yeah, Disney, the company that recently tried to bankrupt several novelists by claiming that when they bought Star Wars, they didn't put themselves on the hook for respecting contracts that Lucas signed. https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/business-news/sta...

Disney has never given a single f*ck about that reputation, but the chiefs who agree to these acquisitions never had to care about that.

> ESPN, Pixar, Marvel, Star Wars

And all of those have declined in reputation since their acquisition or soon after.

> earn a reputation for being a good home for acquisitions.

It's way too late for that to be possible any more.

They're running with their heads down, for at least as long as the current administration exists.

it was super interesting. My gut was like, jesus christ, if you don't live in New York City, seriously, absolutely nobody gives a single flying fuck about any of this stuff!

> "Random sample of Internet links" is going to include a lot of absolute garbage.

It's also likely to include a lot of non-content links, e.g. links to index and navigation pages, interstitials, search results, user profiles, image galleries, etc. These sorts of links don't reliably address specific content, and it's natural that they'll change or die over time. This doesn't necessarily mean that anything valuable has been lost.

https://blog.archive.org/2026/04/23/introducing-vanishing-cu...

https://archive.org/details/vanishing-culture-2026

(when able, please consider donating to the Internet Archive; they are the durable, long term storage system of last resort)

> Yes, you can still access (for now) Disney-era FiveThirtyEight content via the invaluable Internet Archive, and pre-Disney-era content from The New York Times (which I partnered with from 2010 through 2013). And obviously, we’re trying to recreate some of the most popular parts of FiveThirtyEight at Silver Bulletin. The election models and polling averages are here, and new-and-improved versions of the sports models (PELE, ELWAY, COOPER) are gradually returning too.2 Galen Druke, Clare Malone and I have even been getting the old podcast crew back together for live shows.

With regards to:

> When I left one of the higher-profile pubs in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis, I knew my articles wouldn't last even though they were migrated to a sister publication. I made PDF copies of every single one. I still have them in a folder somewhere, not sure what to do with them.

May I suggest:

https://help.archive.org/help/uploading-a-basic-guide/

You can upload them all as a single item, or as individual items per piece and asking IA Patron Services to create a collection for you.

> My personal blogs are still up, but even those will die at some point.

Drop links, and they will be queued for crawling, if not already archived. If you would like to self serve, https://web.archive.org/save

I agree, and am getting downvoted in other comments for this position. If you sell a small company to a giant one, there's a major risk that they will sunset your work. It's the risk Nate knowingly took on when he sold the company.

No surprises here, no sympathy from me, and his blog post reads like he's a sore loser.

(Disney sucks and isn't blameless, but this is very much a standard business practice.)

How so? To me it seems like the exact opposite of what's happened with Star Wars in the last 20 years.

538 was purchased and then left to wither and die where as Disney seems intent on squeezing every last penny from the Star Wars franchise by using the IP as much as possible

> Maybe this has to do with the leftward trend of the mainstream press.

What mainstream press outlet has moved leftwards? I can't think of any, and I certainly am interested in knowing which those might be. Inversely, cbs, the ny times, and the washington post have all shifted rather noticeably rightward in the last 10 years.

> leftward trend of the mainstream press

Oh yeah, venerable institutions like the Washington Post, New York Times, LA Times, Chicago Tribune, and the like? Or maybe you mean the TV news organizations owned by Sinclair Broadcasting, Nexstar, or Hearst? Or maybe cable news organizations like CNN or Fox News?

The narrative of the "liberal media" is so out of date it makes you look out of touch. The mainstream media is captured by billionaire interests and has been so for years now.

Are you sure you aren’t experiencing selection bias? The article only mentions one modeling error (the one you quoted), so “all the errors” must be the ones you’ve noticed elsewhere.

It seems calling a state purple is just using a synonym for red.

> Maybe this has to do with the leftward trend of the mainstream press.

What? Media in the USA has staggered to the right over the past ten years. The only reason it was called liberal before that was because one party used facts and data and the other preferred to rig the system against the common people. While Stephen Colbert made the joke "Reality has a well known liberal bias" it's joke only in that the conservative viewpoint today seems focused on imaginary problems and denying the existence of real ones.

Why would a left-leaning press engineer errors predicting the victory of the left? Wouldn't this lull supporters of the Democrats into a false sense of security and enable Republican wins?

its this really what we're left with, people sharing their skepticism? without any dint of rationale, just stories about how these obviously bad people did all this stuff that everyone knows.

I'm not going to defend Silver's predictions, but what was really refreshing about his work was some lovely diagrams, and real intent behind exposing his methodology. it was never 'trust me I'm the expert', but 'wow, this is hard and these are the problems and this is how I tried to deal with them'

Maybe there were no errors and a certain techbro helped with the counting machines so right wing could win?

> airing grievances about your former employer leaves a bad taste in my mouth

Absolutely not. Creating a culture where employees are expected to be silent about their (mis)treatment by wealthy owners is only favorable, to, well, wealthy owners. Business is business, so why is it unprofessional to point out they're bad at business?

I wouldn't say unprofessional, because this isn't a normal employer-employee relationship. Nate Silver is a famous professional, he made a business deal with a large media corporation, he made some money; later that large media corporation used the IP he sold them in arguably-bad ways, and he's upset. I don't blame him for being upset, certainly I don't think he owes Disney anything, but at the same time he's the one who agreed to sell his IP to a corporation and this is the kind of things corporations do with IP.