Statistician Nate Silver has come out
gay.
The 34-year-old Silver publicly
discussed his sexual orientation for the first time in an interview
with the UK's The
Guardian.
“I've always felt like something of
an outsider,” Silver said. “I've always had friends, but I've
always come from an outside point of view. I think that's important.
If you grow up gay, or in a household that's agnostic, when most
people are religious, then from the get-go, you are saying that there
are things that the majority of society believes that I don't
believe.”
Silver is the brain behind
FiveThirtyEight.com, which was renamed to FiveThirtyEight: Nate
Silver's Political Calculus when it moved in 2010 to The New
York Times. In detailed blog posts, Silver accurately predicted
the 2008 presidential winner of 49 out of 50 states.
In the final weeks of the 2012
presidential election, Silver was gay baited by conservative Dean
Chambers of UnSkewedPolls.com. In dismissing Silver's prediction of
an easy victory for President Obama, Chambers pronounced him a “thin
and effeminate” man “of small stature” with a “soft-sounding
voice.”
Silver's book The
Signal and the Noise: Why Most Predictions Fail – But Some Don't
has received widespread praise from critics.