In 1985, Rupert Murdoch bought Fox.
Ted Turner is worth $2.2 billion. Rupert Murdoch is worth $17.6 billion, or 8X as much.
Turner proved that people wanted television news outside the window from 5 to 6. Murdoch proved something more interesting: there is actually more demand for news that will defend your worldview than news that challenges it. Cognitive dissonance is a fancy term for "what you've just told me is forcing me to question what I know." It's no fun to learn that your lover is cheating or that fossil fuels really are driving crazy weather events. Denial is likely the first step for processing any new information that upsets our worldview. (And is one reason why younger people often have better models of the world: they aren't protecting investments in dated worldviews.) Murdoch turned that denial into a business model, offering viewers a safe place to learn about the world without having to change their minds about it.
Unsurprisingly, reporting that defends your worldview is worth 8X as much as reporting that might randomly attack your worldview.
What does this have to do with Nate Silver and fivethirtyeight? Well, as much as we'd love certainty, Silver won't give it to us. "Just tell us who is going to win the election," we demand. He refuses.
Instead, Silver takes into consideration all sorts of variables, weights them, and then his model spits out results that told us in 2016 that Trump had a 28% chance of winning and tells us today that Trump has a 12% of winning (as of this morning, 17-Oct). We want him to tell us who will win. He will only tell us probabilities. Now that doesn't mean that there aren't sure things. There are. Biden WILL win Massachusetts and Trump WILL win West Virginia. If someone wants to bet against those outcomes, go all in. As it now stands, though, there is no certain outcome for this national election. Just probable outcomes that literally change every day as the election nears and as events unfold.
What Silver has done is created a news outlet that won't give us false assurances. Probabilities are tough because it forces us to embrace uncertainty. Even if it fills us with dread, it feels simpler to say, "Trump is going to win again! It doesn't matter what he does or says! His supporters don't care!" than it is to say, "We can't be sure but it is likely that ..." False certainties mean that we're done thinking. They resolve the dramatic tension. Probabilities instead force us to remain uncertain. Probabilities also live at this beautiful place between a world of false assurance and a world in which nothing is knowable.
Our worldview is too simple, too static and too distorted to neatly match reality. The future is probable but not certain. And if we are going to have an accurate worldview even on something as simple as "Who will win the election," that worldview needs to change with new data and be expressed as probabilities rather than certainties.
One of the things that I love about this is that taking fivethirtyeight's model of the world seriously means working hard to get data, understand it, and then use it to choose between different paths based on probabilities rather than false convictions. This process is bigger than an election. It forces you to evolve a worldview rather than defend it. It's a lot of work but it's also more likely to be effective than defending a worldview you seized hold of (or more likely, that seized hold of you) at 18.
Fox news is proof that it is very lucrative to offer worldviews a safe place to come for protection. It is how Fox became the mainstream media, the network that continually leads in ratings. You wouldn't be human if you didn't have moments where you just wanted the oracles to tell you, "Should I marry this person?" or "Should I take this job?" In the realm of politics, Fox will give you such assurances. "Fox News: your worldview is safe with us."
I suspect that Nate Silver's net worth is only a fraction of Murdoch's or Ted Turner's. Still, fivethirtyeight has a great following which I find heartening because it means that there are people incredibly interested in outcomes who also know that probable - and not certain - is the best that we can get.
Here is a link to the presidential election forecast. Biden will probably win.
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