| Silver, a former professional poker player, was in the business of measuring probabilities. Many readers mistook him for an oracle.  Illustration by Pierre Buttin When Nate Silver and his team at FiveThirtyEight correctly predicted the outcome of all fifty states during the 2012 Presidential election, they were hailed as geniuses—king data nerds who spelled doom for practitioners of older, fustier forms political journalism and prognostication. But in a new interview with the columnist Jay Caspian Kang, Silver argues that his forecasting success was misunderstood. “It’s very weird to become very well known for the wrong reasons,” he explains. “People say, ‘Oh you have numbers and therefore a lot of certainty’ and they can’t quite process the fact that you can use numbers to quantify uncertainty as well.” Silver is leaving FiveThirtyEight at the end of the month, and Kang uses this moment to reflect on the total data revolution that never fully came to American politics. “Our industry,” Kang writes, “still has not extricated itself from the Beltway-gossip model in which a writer talks to a few people in D.C., puts his finger up to the wind, and takes what amounts to an educated guess.” Is the next Nate Silver out there, ready to take another run at the purveyors of conventional wisdom? Support The New Yorker’s award-winning journalism. Subscribe today » | 
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