AP
Here are the most interesting things we've learned so far.
Strangest experience from after his sudden fame?
When I was in Mexico last week, I got recognized at the top of the Sun Pyramid at Teotihuacan, which I'm pretty sure really is a sign of the Apocalypse.
On whether he would ever take FiveThirtyEight open source:
I'd certainly like to aim to increase the level of disclosure at 538 going forward. Sometimes what happens is that I have best intentions to write a super detailed, 5000-word methodology post, and then some senate candidate does or says something stupid, and I get caught up in the news cycle and it gets forgotten about. Which is a pretty lame excuse, I know. At the same time, 538 is a commercial business and the ability to license proprietary intellectual property is a fairly big part of how I make my living, so the disclosure would probably stop short of outright releasing source code or my database in most cases.
Why were the Romney campaign predictions off?
Groupthink and perverse incentives were the causes; to the extent their polling or analysis was bad, it flowed from that.
Where is FiveThirtyEight going?
One of the things I'm trying to figure out is what range of topics to cover at 538. After the 2008 election, it became sort of a quantitatively-flavored
We're definitely overdue to do a couple of posts on same-sex marriage, however.
I don't own (or rent) a cat.
On whether gun control would make America safer:
It's a tricky problem, statistically. The issue is that while gun ownership rates could plausibly be a cause of fatal crimes and accidents, it can also be a reaction to it, i.e. people purchase guns because they feel unsafe.
I'm not saying that the issue is intrinsically inscrutable. But it's something that more requires a PhD-thesis-level treatment than a blog post to really add much insight, I think.