Nate Silver: I'll Stop if I Start Swaying Elections

Nate Silver may have cemented his reputation as a political forecaster in the last election, but he doesn't want his reading of the polls to influence flesh-and-blood voters. And if it does, he might pull the plug on his FiveThirtyEight blog, reports Student Life, the college paper at Washington University. It quotes him thusly in a lecture this week:

• "I hope people don’t take the forecasts too seriously. You’d rather have an experiment where you record it off from the actual voters, in a sense, but we’ll see. If it gets really weird in 2014, in 2016, then maybe I’ll stop doing it. I don’t want to influence the democratic process in a negative way.”

(More Nate Silver stories.)