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I enjoy Nate Silver and Andrew Gelman’s writing most of the time… so why I am I so bored with FiveThirtyEight.com’s content these days—to the point of having dropped my feed subscription—even when I agree with the substance of the content, even if not the aggressively Obama-cheerleading tone? (Or, to be fair, a link to a Nate Silver post.)
Maybe I’m in the minority—hell, I probably am—but I guess I subscribe to the philosophy of “dance with whomever brung you.” Silver at least has a keen analytical mind that probably would be better spent on his comparative advantage of data sifting and presentation rather than armchair political analysis from a perspective that’s available from, and done more thoroughly and thoughtfully, by folks like Kevin Drum.
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4 comments:
A: Because it’s an election website, and the election’s over.
There’s that too, but I think the “interesting statistical gems to polemics” ratio also dropped. Not that polemics are necessarily bad, but if I want polemics I can find better polemicists!
Chris, what you said. But let me be more blunt, Nate Silver erased the line between statistician and advocate. I don’t even understand why people can give this guy the credence that he has.
In fairness to Nate, I think an advocate can engage in interesting statistical analysis; I think one of the frustrating aspects of many of his posts these days, though, is that there is an air of faux-objectivity about the endeavor even when it’s closer to advocacy. Particularly partisan advocacy, which I find inherently far more suspect than ideological advocacy. It’s one thing to advocate for a liberal/progressive position; quite another in my mind to advocate for the laundry someone is wearing (to borrow from Jerry Seinfeld in another context—or maybe it was Jay Leno—who argued that rooting for or against athletes based on what team’s jersey they were wearing—was pretty silly).