Students in my classes know how often I advise them to “call your shots” – that is, do an honest and personal self-assessment of performance (whether on a project, in a class or on your job.) Only by genuinely understanding the difference between your aspirational and actual outcomes (and why they came to be different!) can you become effective at bringing the two into alignment. Lies are things we tall at a bar, not what we tell ourselves. (Another colloquialism from Purtilo: “Never believe your own b******!”)
Doing such an assessment is often difficult, not only because it brings us face to face with outcomes that are sometimes short of what we wanted. It takes practice. So when we see good examples of how this is done (and especially with analysis as to why, so one can improve) we really sit up and take notice.
That’s the case this morning with a spectacular assessment from Nate Silver, at his site fivethirtyeight.com. Silver’s piece is titled “How I Acted Like A Pundit And Screwed Up On Donald Trump” and he goes into excellent detail about the statistical methods that worked (or sometimes didn’t work) in his predictions on this year’s races to date.
Forthright assessments are a hallmark of serious scholars, and I commend this to you as a great example. This should be all the more interesting to some on campus since of course Silver had been one of the First Year Book authors on our campus.