I really don’t understand the hate for Nate Silver. He’s obviously a smart guy who knows how to build a good polling model, and his models have performed quite well generally.
Sometimes he goes into pundit mode and that stuff is obviously nonsense but you just ignore it like you should all punditry. But I don’t have to agree with him politically to respect his work on election forecasting and his deep knowledge of the polling industry.
There’s the whole being paid by Peter Thiel thing.
Can you elaborate? I’m not aware of this.
He was hired by Polymarket as an advisor, which is partly funded by Peter Thiel.
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/polymarket-hires-nate-silver-taking-154956290.html?
Get that time machine and we’ll have him fix his mistake.
Also he seems to think that the US obtaining Greenland is like, totally reasonable.
Lots of smart people are dumb outside of their area of expertise. This is important to remember.
I guess my point is this: if you’re listening to his takes on anything other than elections, polling, or sports, then that’s a you problem.
[Note: I don’t have a fully-formed opinion about Nate Silver, so I’m speaking in general terms.]
People should be accountable for what they say. If you routinely spout off bullshit and people decide you’re full of shit, you have nobody to blame but yourself. If people don’t listen to what you have to say in your area of expertise because you’ve developed a general reputation for being full of shit, you also have nobody to blame but yourself.
When it comes to random C-list celebrities, I don’t have the patience or inclination to figure out which of their opinions I should or should not take seriously. It’s all or nothing, because I have better things to do with my time than try to figure out whether a particular statement by an untrustworthy person happens to actually be accurate. If I know enough about a topic to tell which of their statements are accurate, then I can just figure out on my own what to believe and skip the middleman.
This post is what happens when you can’t handle the concept that others would disagree with you.
(Someone sat down and decided that one of the most accurate pollsters in America today is a dumbie.)
It’s not mere disagreement. The way he processes political news into punditry is deeply flawed. He tends to view everything through a very bookish political science lens. That means he takes politicians at face value (“the US could take Greenland”) instead of having the good sense to push against it (“taking Greenland is insane, and only an insane person would suggest it”).
takes politicians at face value (“the US could take Greenland”) instead of having the good sense to push against it (“taking Greenland is insane, and only an insane person would suggest it”).
You’re arguing for MORE op-ed crap mixed in with the facts? Can’t we understand it’s lunacy without someone telling us how to feel?
If that’s what you want, Silver could have said nothing. It’s not a suggestion worth taking seriously either way.
Can you share an example? You can’t seriously be talking about his three country trade for Greenland which is pretty clearly a joke. (Though, there would be a delightful irony in missing the joke in a complaint about someone else taking things too literally.)
Edit: lol, wait are people downvoting because I committed the sin of asking for an example or I understood that a tweet about a threeway country trade that might be possible because “France is always into weird shit like that, the UK too” was a joke? Seriously?
That’s not obviously a joke at all, but setting that aside, how about what I noted when Tim Waltz was announced as the VP candidate:
https://midwest.social/post/15399609/11501796
He just completely misses what everyone liked about him. He handwaves Waltz as unexciting Minnesota Nice, which is not at all what the base was seeing.
Then the Harris campaign sends Waltz into a hole for a month while wandering around with Liz Cheney.
The link isn’t working for me but this doesn’t seem lile a particularly impressive critique of Nate Silver… Him having a reasonable take that was that he’s a fine pick that doesn’t add a bunch (like say, gasp voters outside the base) and that there were likely better picks doesn’t seem to support this “he’s overly political sciency.”
This reads like “I dislike the argument so he’s a bad pundit!” Even though, in the end, Waltz didn’t seem to move the needle and actually became an attack target for the Right for his statements on carrying weapons in war etc.
I’d suggest re-reading the actual article and thinking about what in particular you dislike.
Edit: though if you think a tweet suggesting a three country trade that ends with “France is always into weird shit like that, the UK too” isn’t obviously a joke, I don’t know how much utility there is to this conversation.
He’s not a pollster. He’s an aggregator; that’s something very different. He uses many other people’s polls to weight them into one aggregation.
It’s not wildly different, or not enough to distract from the meaning, especially when dealing with the general populace.
A pollster typically works for one firm conducting the actual polls, the aggregators are paying attention to how those pollsters work and aggregating them.
So sure, he’s a polling aggregator, does this significantly change the meaning of the comment?
Also didn’t he predict Hilary Clinton would win in 2016?
His 2016 prediction was 70% chance for Clinton, and 30% chance for Trump. That’s substantially higher odds for Trump than any other notable prediction.
Yup. Disliking the guy is no reason for academic dishonesty though. He gave 70/30 odds. The key part about odds though is that they’re basically confidence ratings.
He was wrong and surprised, along with basically everyone else.
Guy came up with the method basically everyone uses to combine and aggregate polling data now, which is far more accurate than previous methods. It’s weird to say he’s an idiot.
NateHate and not knowing what you’re talking about, name a more iconic duo XD
Ahaha, well put.
Yes. He gave Trump like a 15% chance of winning which in a well calibrated model happens well 15% percent of the time. Which was larger than most other aggregators.
Good probabilistic functions are calibrated like that where the odds should be correct which includes the “loser” winning the amount of times its predicted. Before being bought out FiveThirtyEight did great retros on their sports bets to ensure that the winner did not win greater then predicted chance and the loser won at the correct rate. Its called model calibration
