This past week, ESPN launched FiveThirtyEight, a website dedicated to data journalism. The lead for the site is Nate Silver, a statistician and writer, who most famously correctly predicted the winner of all 50 states in the 2012 US presidential elections. Roughly, the site is dedicated to to the use of quantitative methods in journalism across politics, economics, science, life, and sports.

Silver outlines a manifesto for the site, and I want to draw attention to a few points he makes. First, he leads with the point that his presidential prediction was not impressive by comparing it to other models, but instead by comparing it to pundits. I think the framing of his argument is very important here because it points out the type of thinking that we’re used to. Second, he points out the spectrum along quantitative and qualitative approaches to journalism. Both types of analysis are important, but he sees quantitative as being under-represented, hence the creation of FiveThirtyEight. Third, he outlines an approach to journalism as collection, organization, explanation, and generalization. Particularly, he criticizes the last two steps in in conventional journalism. Explanation in often missing as journalists fail to properly attribute causation, and predictions (as part of generalization) are under-scrutinized and often inaccurate.

So far, I think the site has been so-so. On the whole, I have found the content to be somewhat lacking, though they have generated a lot given the size of their staff. I’m sure that the content will improve with time as the culture, style, and goals of the site develop in the coming months. However, the criticism so far has been directed more towards Silver’s position and the general approach rather than the exact content. The piece from Leon Wieseltier linked in particular seems to build up what I believe is an inaccurate picture of Silver and his supposedly feigned impartiality hidden behind data. I would assume that Silver is aware that statistics, like any other basis for argument, can be manipulated and must be understood as no more than it is.

Another point in that criticism is, “Is numeracy really what American public discourse most urgently lacks?” Wieseltier asks it rhetorically, but in fact, I do happen to believe that the answer is yes. There’s a lot of unsupported opinion on television and in print that happen to further inflame the public, and the statistics that are put out there are often given without context and not fully developed. My hope is that data journalism, such as that from FiveThirtyEight, will clearly develop arguments to the public from raw data to allow readers to fully follow the process for assertions and beliefs.

So the tie back: I have had many goals with Spawning Tool, but one that I think I have always maintained was making StarCraft data accessible to the community. Just as Silver compares predictions to parlor games, I think there’s a lot of theorycrafting that happens without substantial basis in data (often drawn from limited personal experience playing or the events of a few games in tournaments). Questions like, “Is strategy X imba?” can be informed by data. I think most interesting answers have to come from interpretation of the data and not from the data directly, but it’s a starting point.

Gathering and organizing StarCraft data is hard, and my hope is that Spawning Tool could bootstrap that process for data-minded people to develop arguments. Were I more dedicated or creative, I would be generating more of this content myself, such as posts about relevant statistics before a tournament or deeper analysis of the state of the game. But that’s not where I am right now, so my hope is that this approach takes hold in the community and flourishes in the future.

So I think the most comes short of being a manifesto for Spawning Tool, but hopefully it gives you better insight into my thinking behind the site and maybe will make you think differently about the game. As usual, all thoughts are welcome.