Nate Silver is #1 on Fast Company's "100 Most Creative People in Business 2013."

Here's the whole (nicely displayed) list. Here's the big article on Silver:

Nate Silver is now trying to see what's coming next for him. He has just turned 35. His interest in politics, always more intellectual than emotional, seems nearly exhausted by the election season. "I definitely get tired of the politics stuff," he tells me. "Or at least I'm tired of it now. You basically have a lot of sociopaths and crazy people who work in the politics industry who are kind of enabled by it being such a strange profession. Just a lack of. . . ." Silver stops to reach over for a french fry, eat it, and think. "I mean, well, the fact that it's seen as so optional to actually be truthful?" It offends his sensibilities as a data scientist in pursuit of truth. "You know," he continues, "whereas business can be amoral, I think politics is actively immoral on many occasions. So people will ask if I will go work for a campaign and I say, 'No way.' I can make a lot more money working for a hedge fund and it would be a lot less actively evil. At least you're not trying to manipulate people's belief systems."

In my view, the way not to get tired of the politics stuff is to be, specifically, interested in the behavior of real human beings, with all their flaws. That they are unusually flawed human beings — "sociopaths and crazy people" — becomes a positive. You are observing and analyzing these people, who are manipulating and dissembling and lying. This does not conflict with your own love of the truth. You pursue the truth about their lies and manipulations.

"In some cases, [Nate] Silver tends to attribute successful reasoning to the use of Bayesian methods..."

"... without any evidence that those particular analyses were actually performed in Bayesian fashion."

For instance, he writes about Bob Voulgaris, a basketball gambler,

Bob’s money is on Bayes too. He does not literally apply Bayes’ theorem every time he makes a prediction. But his practice of testing statistical data in the context of hypotheses and beliefs derived from his basketball knowledge is very Bayesian, as is his comfort with accepting probabilistic answers to his questions.

But, judging from the description in the previous thirty pages, Voulgaris follows instinct, not fancy Bayesian math. Here, Silver seems to be using “Bayesian” not to mean the use of Bayes’s theorem but, rather, the general strategy of combining many different kinds of information.

Is Nate Silver "concerned that during future elections, the accuracy of your predictions will lull readers into a mindset of 'it has been foretold, therefore I needn’t bother to vote'"?

Yes, "a bit."

Did Nate Silver "enjoy getting the ire of pundits (not the few who actually critiqued your method, models, or assumptions, but those who just dismissed your work wholesale)"?

At some point in the last few weeks of the election, I guess I decided to lean into the upside outcome a little bit in terms of pushing back at the pundits in my public appearances — as opposed to emphasizing the uncertainty in the model, as I had for most of the year....

Stupid poker analogy: part of playing well is in maximizing the amount of value you get from a hand in the event that things go well, in addition to mitigating your losses if they don't.

"So why is compromise so hard in the House?"

"Some commentators, especially liberals, attribute it to what they say is the irrationality of Republican members of Congress."

But the answer could be this instead: individual members of Congress are responding fairly rationally to their incentives. Most members of the House now come from hyperpartisan districts where they face essentially no threat of losing their seat to the other party. Instead, primary challenges, especially for Republicans, may be the more serious risk.

"Whether someone owns a gun is a more powerful predictor of a person’s political party than..."

"... her gender, whether she identifies as gay or lesbian, whether she is Hispanic, whether she lives in the South or a number of other demographic characteristics."

Observes Nate Silver, and yet 31% of Democrats own guns (compared to 58% of Republicans). 31% seems like a lot to me, especially when you consider that women are more likely to be Democrats. Women are less likely to own guns, but not by that much: 37% to 48%.

Americans like their guns, and yet the elite class is suddenly adamant about gun control. I think it's funny that those who act like they're so much wiser than the clinging-to-their-guns peasants so often let it show that they don't know what they're talking about.

"There is, of course, no way to monitor the conversations that take place in living rooms around the country. But we can measure the frequency with which phrases related to gun policy are used by the news media."

Says Nate Silver, whose methodology requires countable things, under the headline "In Public ‘Conversation’ on Guns, a Rhetorical Shift." ("Conversation" is in quotes, because it's not really a conversation.)

What he's found is that the phrase "gun control" is much less common than it was years ago, while "gun rights" and "Second Amendment" have grown steadily. What does it mean? Nate Silver guesses — or purports to guess — quite badly (I'd say):

The change in rhetoric may reflect the increasing polarization in the debate over gun policy. “Gun control,” a relatively neutral term, has been used less and less often. But more politically charged phrases, like “gun violence” and “gun rights,” have become more common. 

If "gun control" is avoided, it's because those who would like to push it believe the public doesn't like it! It's not that we used to be more neutral and have become more politically charged.

Those who advocate greater restrictions on gun ownership may have determined that their most persuasive argument is to talk about the consequences of increased access to guns — as opposed to the weedy debate about what rights the Second Amendment may or may not convey to gun owners. 

Weedy debate? As if those who speak in terms of constitutional rights are in the weeds. This presentation of rights is quite disgusting: 1. People believe in their rights, and it's that real belief that gives life and endurance to our rights; 2. This belief in gun rights endured over time, even as elite legalists largely believed they were just about nothing (so it's not an abstruse, academic topic but nearly the opposite); and 3. The Second Amendment doesn't "convey" rights it refers to a right and declares that it "shall not be infringed."

There was a time when rights were real to liberals. Now, oh, let's not talk about some text that may or may not transmit who knows what to us.

"Hillary Rodham Clinton would be a formidable presidential candidate in 2016."

Says Nate Silver, the proven genius.