Now and then over the years, I’ve been fortunate enough to extend a job offer for someone to come work with me. Being a huge dork, I’ll usually speculate about the candidate’s likelihood of accepting the position. I don’t bat 1.000 on my predictions, but one simple rule has proven reliable the majority of the time: If I can honestly say I’m offering a candidate a better job than the one they currently have, they almost always accept the offer. If I can’t say that with a straight face, they usually don’t.

When you’re in the midst of making someone a job offer, you’re privy to a lot of “inside information” about the candidate: what their mood is during interviews, for example, or how happy they seem to be with their current employer. But it’s easy to get carried away with those things. Unless the “inside information” is weighed very carefully, it often just leads you astray. I was reminded of this by today’s news that Vice President Joe Biden will not seek the Democratic nomination for president. Here at FiveThirtyEight, we’ve been skeptical of Biden’s potential candidacy for a long time, even as on-the-ground reporting — almost always relying on anonymous sources or named sources with tenuous connections to Biden — repeatedly insisted that Biden was likely to run.

The reason for our skepticism was twofold. First, Biden has a pretty good job now: vice president. While I have no doubt that he’d like to be president, the job of being a failed presidential candidate isn’t such a great one. And in all likelihood, that’s what a Biden candidacy would have amounted to.

Read the article “How The Media Blew The Biden Story” on fivethirtyeight.com.