The highlight of the day thus far was the keynote with Nate Silver, of fivethirtyeight.com fame, who was interviewed by BusinessWeek’s Stephen Baker. Silver, who first studied baseball stats, gained notoriety for accurately predicting the results of the presidential election.

Silver says: Politics and baseball are both long seasons, and people are trained to overreact to the early stage polls. Baker asked him if he would put his genome on the internet, to which Silver replied “No. I’m surprised at how much people are willing to share every detail of their lives right now.” He followed up by saying that he’s not on Facebook (unlike the girl seated in front of me, who was on Facebook for most of the talk) because of his compulsive personality.

What has he been occupying his time with since the election’s been over? NY Mag hired him to predict the Oscars,  on the belief that if he can predict politics and baseball, he must be able to predict anything. So he looked at the variables which were most relevant over history of the awards. He inaccurately predicted the winner of best actor wrong, choosing Mickey Rourke instead of Sean Penn. Silver followed with “Sometimes it’s ok to get predictions wrong. If you know your gonna be wrong keep working on your f**ing model.”

Currently Silver is working on a book on forecasting and prediciton in general, covering subjects ranging from hurricanes to fashion design (which he describes as quasi-scientific) to the search for extraterrestrial life.

What’s he currently reading? Irrational Exuberance and Nixonland. He admits to reading a lot of books half-way through (Phew, other people do this too?!). And, inserting a shameless plug, he gave the audience permission to buy his new book, if only to read first and second chapters.