Nate Silver Might Stop Blogging

Under what circumstances would Nate Silver quit? From Politico:

New York Times statistician Nate Silver told an audience at Washington University this week that he might stop writing his influential FiveThirtyEight blog were it to start influencing election results.

"The polls can certainly affect elections at times,” Silver told the audience, according to a report in Student Life, an independent campus newspaper. “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.”

Silver said he wanted to make people "more informed, I don’t want to affect their motive because they trust the forecasters."

POLITICO reached out to Silver to ask how much of an effect he believed his data and analysis had on voters in 2012, if any. Silver, who has been a critic of this blog and of POLITICO in the past, did not respond.
 

Say it aint so, Nate.