By Margaret Sullivan
Media columnist
October 16 at 6:00 AM
NEW YORK — After the roller-coaster ride of 2016’s election night, have journalists and political junkies learned not to let conventional wisdom substitute for hard knowledge?
Nate Silver — the closest thing there is to a celebrity in the arcane field of statistical journalism — is not wildly optimistic about that.
“Media understanding about probability, margin of error and uncertainty is very poor,” Silver said Monday afternoon when I stopped by the Manhattan office of his FiveThirtyEight.com for a pre-election chat.
“That led them to be more surprised than they should have been,” he said, based on the quite accurate polling numbers that were available.
Silver, who turned 40 this year, was in jeans and sneakers, his hair unruly, as he sat in his office before a whiteboard of incomprehensible — at least to this visitor — phrases and calculations.
Now that we’re three weeks away from the midterm elections, Silver is seeing some of the same tendencies in media coverage and social-media chatter that plagued 2016’s coverage