The renowned pollster John Zogby of Zogby International sends a note to Nate Silver to congratulate him on his new gig at the New York Times. The note, however, comes with some warnings.

With these well wishes, from someone who has also achieved a good deal, be alerted to your new responsibilities. To date you have many fans. But the real scrutiny is just beginning and some fans are ephemeral.

It also comes with some advice from “an old warrior,” such as: Don’t create standards you will find hard to maintain yourself:

You are hot right now — using an aggregate of other people’s work, you got 49 of 50 states right in 2008. I know how it is to feel exhilarated. I get the states right a lot too. But remember that you are one election away from being a mere mortal like the rest of us. We very good pollsters have missed some. They tell me you blew the Academy Awards and your projections in the 2010 U.K. elections were a tad squidgy. So be humble and continue to hone your craft.

Be honest:

You take other people’s polls, compare records for predictions, add in some purely arbitrary (and not transparent) weights, then make your own projections and rankings. But your efforts include more than just statistics. There is some edginess: you don’t like numbers when they don’t agree with your pre-conceptions.

Understand that there’s much more to being a good pollster and appreciate innovation. The last piece of advice: Do some polling:

Janet Maslin and Robert Bianco are terrific reviewers and critics but they never wrote or directed a movie or stage production. You are a statistician—a very good one but you are not a pollster. You should conduct some polls and learn that the rest of us good pollsters survey people, not statistics. The numbers tell the story; pre-conceived ideologies and fuzzy-math statistical models do not.

The whole note is here. The tensions between statisticians and pollsters raise some interesting questions, especially in light of the recent Daily Kos troubles.

Update: I just saw that Nate Silver already posted an answer to John Zogby’s note:

“Now, I’m certainly not going to pretend that we take an attitude of austere academic humility toward everything that we do. We’re happy to engage both our friends and our critics in lively arguments, and we can be sarcastic and combative at times. I have a background in competitive, adrenaline-intensive disciplines like poker, policy debate, and sports writing, and that attitude has become hardwired by now.
The only thing that I knowingly am a bit conceited about is the only thing that I have complete control over: the amount of effort that I put into FiveThirtyEight and my other projects. I work my butt off — 80-100 hour weeks have been the norm for about two years here.”

The whole thing is here.