Under Attack, Nate Silver Picks the Wrong Defense

[octoberlib]

http://publiceditor.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/11/01/under-attack-nate-silver-picks-the-wrong-defense/?ref=natesilver



...SNIP......His skirmish with Mr. Scarborough is especially high profile. Mr. Scarborough, as noted above, disagrees with Mr. Silver’s prediction, calling the race a dead heat and saying that Mr. Silver is a fool to say otherwise.

Mr. Silver is quite accurate in his argument against Mr. Scarborough. He clearly says that the closeness of the popular vote does not affect the probability that Mr. Obama will win. They are, simply, two very different things.



So on Thursday, frustrated and irritated, Mr. Silver challenged Mr. Scarborough to a wager in a Twitter message — $1,000 to the Red Cross. (The offer later climbed to $2,000.)

If Mr. Obama wins, Mr. Scarborough pays up; if Mitt Romney wins, Mr. Silver does the same.

 So far, Mr. Scarborough isn’t biting on the offer and I could not reach him for comment Thursday.

In a phone conversation, Mr. Silver described the wager offer as “half playful and half serious.” " He’s been on a rant, calling me an idiot and a partisan, so I’m asking him to put some integrity behind it,” he said. “I don’t stand to gain anything from it; it’s for charity.”


He added that he is feeling the strain of being under attack and vulnerable to criticism as Election Day approaches. "It's a high-stress time'" he said. But whatever the motivation behind it, the wager offer is a bad idea – giving ammunition to the critics who want to paint Mr. Silver as a partisan who is trying to sway the outcome.

It’s also inappropriate for a Times journalist, which is how Mr. Silver is seen by the public even though he’s not a regular staff member...SNIP....

[elleng]

1. Too bad editor had to come down on Nate,

even tho it was mild.

[Mutiny In Heaven]

2. Ridiculous piece

Just pathetic and nonsensical from the editor.

[Floyd_Gondolli]

3. An absurd critique from a colleague

Bottom line: Silver brings his name and the clickety clicks to the NYT's website. He pays the bills.

He's not a beat reporter covering the state house or city hall. He is a pundit with exceptional knowledge of statistics. I don't see why there should be any confusion on what the difference is.

And frankly, it was about time someone called DI Joe out on his bullshit.

[octoberlib]

4. Agree with all of you.

The Times needs to loosen up. Other journalists were making fun of this article all day on Twitter.

[Cha]

8. Good to know..thanks, octoberlib I'm with Nate on

this one. Nate deals in numbers..and hopefully they're right. He's earned the right to make a wager with joe, who is decidely a pundithead and therefore "useLess".

[GeorgeGist]

10. That was so clear from your OP.

October is over.

[blogslut]

5. NYT's public editors have all been awful

This latest one is no exception.

[regnaD kciN]

6. I'm not sure Nate really cares about his editor...

He's already hinted that 2012 will be the last election he covers; that he'll turn 538 over to others and move on to other areas of statistical analysis. If this is so, what is the NYTimes going to do? Fire him three days before he was planning to move on anyway?

[elleng]

11. No, they won't 'fire' him for such a trivial matter.

Nate may very well care about this, as I think he's 'exhausted' due to the criticism he has received.

He's a statistician, doing his job AND explaining how he gets his results, and being kicked around for it.

[Hissyspit]

7. "Why political journalists can’t stand Nate Silver: The limits of journalistic knowledge"

http://markcoddington.com/2012/10/31/nate-silver-journalism-politics-knowledge-epistemology/

Why political journalists can’t stand Nate Silver: The limits of journalistic knowledge

The more I think about the rift between political journalism and Nate Silver, the more it seems that it’s one that’s fundamentally an issue of epistemology — how journalists know what they know. Here’s why I think that’s the case.

- snip -

That process is very roughly this: Journalists get access to privileged information from official sources, then evaluate, filter, and order it through the rather ineffable quality alternatively known as “news judgment,” “news sense,” or “savvy.” This norm of objectivity is how political journalists say to the public (and to themselves), “This is why you can trust what we say we know — because we found it out through this process.” (This is far from a new observation – there are decades of sociological research on this.)

Silver’s process — his epistemology — is almost exactly the opposite of this:

Where political journalists’ information is privileged, his is public, coming from poll results that all the rest of us see, too.
Where political journalists’ information is evaluated through a subjective and nebulous professional/cultural sense of judgment, his evaluation is systematic and scientifically based. It involves judgment, too, but because it’s based in a scientific process, we can trace how he applied that judgment to reach his conclusions.

Both of those different ways of knowing inevitably result in different types of conclusions. Silver’s conclusions are at once much more specific and much less certain than those of the political punditry. The process of journalistic objectivity can’t possibly produce that kind of specificity; that’s outside of its epistemological capabilities.

This is what David Brooks is saying when he tells Politico’s Dylan Byers, “If you tell me you think you can quantify an event that is about to happen that you don`t expect, like the 47 percent comment or a debate performance, I think you think you are a wizard. That`s not possible.” There’s no place in Brooks’ journalistic way of knowing for quantifying the possibility of future events, so he can’t see how anyone else can know that, either. It’s simply impossible.
Joe Scarborough gets us even closer to the clash between processes of knowing when he tells Byers, “Nate Silver says this is a 73.6 percent chance that the president is going to win? Nobody in that campaign thinks they have a 73 percent chance — they think they have a 50.1 percent chance of winning. And you talk to the Romney people, it’s the same thing.” How does Scarborough know that Silver’s estimate is incorrect? He talked to sources in both campaigns. In Scarborough’s journalistic epistemology, this is the trump card: Silver’s methods cannot possibly produce more reliable information than the official sources themselves. These are the savviest, highest inside sources. They are the strongest form of epistemological proof — a “case closed” in an argument against calculations and numbers.

The other objection political journalists/pundits have to Silver’s process is evident here, too. They don’t just have a problem with how he knows what he knows, but with how he states it, too. Essentially, they are mistaking specificity for certainty. To them, the specificity of Silver’s projections smack of arrogance because, again, their ways of knowing are incapable of producing that kind of specificity. It has to be an overstatement.

MORE[p]

[elleng]

12. Thanks.

[msongs]

9. only hard core political junkies know who nate silver is lol. not a big deal nt

[floppyfeet]

14. wasnt someone found dead

In scarbourogh's office when he was a politician???

[TroyD]

15. Yes

Although he apparently had no connection to the cause of the death.

[TroyD]

13. I think Nate Silver should just have ignored Joe Scarborough & the others

And just waited until after Tuesday's election to weigh in and prove he was right. Why get drawn into something like this?

If Nate ends up being right, the rewards will be evident in the others being wrong.

[quaker bill]

16. He is an odds and numbers guy

He thinks his odds and numbers are very good. It is pretty normal for a guy like that to offer up a bet "if you really think I am wrong, just how wrong do you think I am? --- Am I 1000 bucks worth of wrong, 2000 bucks worth of wrong, whatcha think?"

Sending the proceeds to charity is sufficient journalistic detachment, in a friendly wager between reporters. Nate is becoming a way bigger personality this time around. He will get even bigger if he gets it right, which likely means more money in his pocket. If he blows it his star will fall. He has no personal interest in anything other than being right, the understanding that he is generally right is the only reason people are really interested in him and how he gets fame and bucks off this work.

[Cosmocat]

17. Bullshit

We are under a RELENTLESS drive from half witted hacks who chaff at actual facts and data.

The jobs report comes in at 7.8 percent, and that is not what conservatives want to hear, so they go on wild eyed rants about the numbers being ginned up. Their nonsense changes the perception of the news, and they are not held to account for it.

The people who deal in facts and reality are the good guys, the people who want to form perception to what they WANT get to say and do what they want unabated.

The bet is a simple, direct way of calling BULLSHIT.

But, sure, the halfwitted simpleton who spews nonsense continues to do so unabated, and the person who is trying to dispense facts gets wrist slapped for a honest effort to push back on the bullshit.

[RomneyLies]

18. Josh Marshall rebuts that piece of shit nicely

http://talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/2012/11/sorry_margaret_you_need_to_get_out_more.php?ref=fpblg

The NYT needs Nate. Nate is his own brand and can go anywhere.

Even more to the point, Nate threatens the author of the piece in the OP. Level headed data analysis usurps the mumbo jumbo of idiot political pundits every time.

[DemocratSinceBirth]

19. He's Not Betting So Much That O Will Win But That His Methodology Is Correct/nt

[Arkana]

20. I don't blame him. If I was under attack from wannabe idiots and pundit assholes all day

then I'd start cracking under the strain too.

[ItsTheMediaStupid]

21. Basically Nate said, put your money where your mouth is

I can understand him saying that. I don't see anything wrong with it. He's dealing with a motormouth ideologue and they are incredibly aggravating to deal with, because no amount of information or logic is going to divert them from their talking points.

Joe S is going to stay on message and the media meme is that this is an incredibly close election. Stay tuned, because we don't know who's going to win. Then Silver shows up and says, there is an 80% probability Obama wins. Joe S. can't let that stand, otherwise his audience shrinks.

Every reputable aggregator has Obama winning and all of them give him a significantly better chance than 50.1 . I think one or two are higher on Obama than 538.

[Jeff In Milwaukee]

22. Margaret Who?

Some back-bencher without half to accomplishments and a third of the name recognition is just trying to get some attention for herself.

"It’s also inappropriate for a Times journalist, which is how Mr. Silver is seen by the public even though he’s not a regular staff member."

So it's inappropropriate for Nate to make the wager, even though he's not a journalist, because some dumb-ass rednecks THINK he's a journalist. So the NY Times "public" editor -- which I can only assume is someething analogous to a "public" toilet -- thinks that we should dumb down our discourse to accomodate the lower common denominator.

I thought that was the Post's core readership...

[smorkingapple]

23. It was a little beneath him to go to Joey Scar's level tho

Let Tuesday do all t he talking for you then go on his show and rip him a new one face to face