What does the last sentence mean? [closed]
As Election Day loomed in 2012, traffic at the New York Times website spiked, as is normal during moments of national importance. But this time, something was different. A wildly disproportionate fraction of this traffic—more than 70 percent by some reports—was visiting a single location in the sprawling domain. It wasn’t a front-page breaking news story, and it wasn’t commentary from one of the paper’s Pulitzer Prize-winning columnists; it was instead a blog run by a baseball stats geek turned election forecaster named Nate Silver. Less than a year later, ESPN and ABC News lured Silver away from the Times (which tried to retain him by promising a staff of up to a dozen writers) in a major deal that would give Silver’s operation a role in everything from sports to weather to network news segments to, improbably enough, Academy Awards telecasts. Though there’s debate about the methodological rigor of Silver’s hand-tuned models, there are few who deny that in 2012 this thirty-five-year-old data whiz was a winner in our economy.
— Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World, Cal Newport, pub. Piatkus 2016
I don't get what's going on. What models? What does the author mean by rigor? Rigor on what? So, does he control the broadcast?
Solution 1:
Silver has built a mathematical model for analysing statistics in order to be able to use them to predict outcomes.
Because of its design, he is able to adjust the parameters according to the situation. This adjustment is something which he is able to do himself, on a case-by-case basis, as opposed to some mathematical models in which all the parameters are automatically adjusted by the program itself, as a result of sampling its output and amending parameters based on a mathematical algorithm.
Analogously to the concept of "tuning" the performance of racing cars, for example, this manual adjustment is called "hand-tuning".
Some mathematical authorities consider the use of "hand-tuning" as a technique for getting a better "prediction" as unsound, and more akin to a process of guesswork. Hence they mistrust such a procedure.
However, contrary to what the authorities say, Silver's approach does seem to work.