Mr. Silver does NY real estate / NY Magazine basks in the glow

538 moved from 312 to 718 [update below]
Talk about a perfect marriage: the stat guru with star power, Nate Silver of FiveThirtyEight fame, developed a piece for the will-scream-for-attention, NY Magazine, ranking 50 "top" NYC neighborhoods. Hilarity (and links) ensues!

Predictably, much ink (and bandwidth) is being spilled about whether the criteria are "right", whether the rankings fit one’s own opinion, and why my nabe is better than yours. But what sounds from the start as a (ahem) typical NY Mag windbag agent article is redeemed by Silver’s reputation and rigor. He knows the data have holes … that definitions can be arbitrary … that ranking closely clustered results can obscure.

These are issues that he deals with for a living, not as a mouthpiece in the Manhattan Real Estate Industrial Complex, but as a straight-shooting credentialed math geek (no offense, Mr. Silver) parsing political polling data and ranking Senate elections for likelihood of flipping. He has called out many opinion purveyors for their laxity in using data in about as heated an environment as one could have: the 2008 Presidential and Congressional elections, and the long primary road for President.

I obsessed over FiveThirtyEight when I stumbled on it, late some dark night, after having exhausted my stable of political web sites. He had me at hello ….

Rigor, meet Fluff
This really is a perfect marriage. NY Mag would run an article about Top Neighborhoods in a heartbeat, and probably has 6 times in the last 15 years. It always draws interest. But this one is different, and I suspect that Silver drove them a little batty trying to determine what (a) would be interesting to know and (b) whether it (or a proxy) can be measured. The result is a NY Mag headline with a Silver sheen. Like NY Mag at its best, The Most Livable Neighborhoods in New York is provocative and engaging. Silver is a Chicago guy, so his ear may be off a bit (but wouldn’t a Chelsea guy say that about a Park Slope guy opining off his reservation??), but that’s part of the fun.

Consistent with his approach to politics (and to baseball!), Silver tells you what he is doing, and why; what he is trying to get at, and what variables he is using; what judgments he’s making, and acknowledging that other judgments may be equally (or more) valid. Instead of saying "here are the Top Ten", he says that if you were to tweak the importance of some metrics, the sequence would be very different. Better … he gives you the tools to do that with his data set.

playing for a living
You get a good sense of his approach on this project when he introduced it on his ‘net home base at FiveThirtyEight.com. He’s playing with numbers! Not (just) because he likes to play, but because he wants (my opinion here) to explore how things we ‘know’ or ‘think’ can be judged in the real world. If that were true, how would that show up in things that people measure? What kind of measurements are more meaningful, and which are in the ‘damn lies’ category? How do we distinguish one from the other??

Just imagine if Silver plays with this long enough to create a tool that would permit someone to select from among 20 criteria about neighborhood "quality" (using only the 5 or 13 that are important to that person) and then weight those criteria on their own personal taste, needs, resources. I wonder if he is probing to see if something like that can be done. There might be huge potential to turn that into money, or ‘just’ to add to human knowledge.

In the meantime, NY Mag borrows Silver’s reputation for rigor and generates a ton of commentary. (Sales? I have no idea.) You will be able to tell if it is remunerative for NY Mag by whether (and how soon) they get Silver to do this kind of thing again.

If mixing baseball with the Supreme Court is fun for a Sunday diversion (of course it is), mixing baseball and Manhattan real estate is fun and rewarding on a workday. Life is good. (Yanks open at 1:05; I understand there will be flags and jewelry.)

Welcome to town, Nate! I will buy you a beer at The Brazen Head any time. (I was aware of some details about his Baseball Prospectus days, but I would not have called him a psephologist until checking Wiki.)
 

[UPDATE: Nate put a ton of additional detail about methodology on a post at his home site; h/t Curbed; this salient quote bears adding, even at this late date of April 16:

This is a model of reality. It’s a thoughtfully designed model, based on relatively high-quality and objective data sources. But like all models: it’s a simplification. I think it passes the test of providing some worthwhile information which can serve as a complement to one’s subjective take on the relative quality of different neighborhoods. That is, it points you more in the right direction than the wrong one. But it’s not designed to be, nor could it possibly be, definitive.]
 

© Sandy Mattingly 2010