Brooks vs. Silver: The Limits of Forecasting Elections

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In Tuesday’s Times, David Brooks had a pop at political forecasters, including his colleague, Nate Silver, whose blog, FiveThirtyEight, is a popular feature on the Times Web site. Of course, Brooks was too polite to personalize his argument, but given Silver’s popularity and profile there can be little doubt whom Brooks was referring to when he wrote “I know … how I should treat polling data. First, I should treat polls as a fuzzy snapshot of a moment in time. I should not read them, and think I understand the future. If there’s one thing we know, it’s that even experts with fancy computer models are terrible at predicting human behavior.”

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