Nate Silver Warns Against Overestimating His Value To ESPN

NEW YORK—After officially announcing his move from The New York Times to ESPN, prominent statistician and blogger Nate Silver reportedly urged Americans Monday to avoid overestimating his overall worth to the sports network. “According to recent web-traffic figures, my popularity peaked from 2010 to 2012 as a function of the presidential election, but given the tendency of such linear regression models to heavily fluctuate, it serves as a poor signifier of any actual, real-dollar value to ESPN,” said Silver, adding that according to data projections, his FiveThirtyEight blog has only a 7.4 percent chance of generating considerable interest on the ESPN home page. “The approximations of my future drawing power in fact resemble more of a random walk—in layman’s terms, a random model that cannot accurately predict future outcomes. There is strong statistical evidence to suggest that ESPN could have operated more efficiently by offering me a far smaller contract.” Silver also noted that, considering recent statistical trends within the television industry, there is an overwhelming likelihood that Keith Olbermann’s new weeknight talk show on ESPN will be fucking awful.