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Nate Silver
@NateSilver538
, 3 tweets, 1 min read Read on Twitter
Part of it is that after a 3-year-long story, you'll have tens of thousands of examples to cherry-pick from. So the cherry-picks ought to be really good! (Non-opinion journalists at very high-prestige outlets repeatedly fucking up in very big ways that are central to the story.)
I also don't get why people write these maximalist polemics when they could be more compelling by being more focused. Wanna critique what's happened to left-leaning cable news? Russiagate is *great* for that. The overuse of anon sources? Russiagate gives you a lot to work with.
Ironically, the tendency by these critics to tie together a number of fairly discrete news events and coverage decisions under the rubric of the Big Hoax or the Catastrophic Media Fuck-Up reflects the same sort of paranoid style that the worst Russiagate pundits were guilty of.
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Nate Silver
@NateSilver538
Your argument has nothing to do with reality, that's the problem, bro.
p.s. You continue to cite a paper in which you critique our *now-cast* (a deliberately volatile hypothetical of what would happen in an election held today) and mistake it for our *forecast* but because you're such a stubborn idiot you won't admit to this very basic mistake.
p.p.s. We've been publishing forecasts for 11 years & they're extremely well-calibrated (if anything the politics forecasts are a bit *underconfident*). This totally undermines any semblance of a point you think you have so I get why you're mad, bro. projects.fivethirtyeight.com/checking-our-w…
Read 3 tweets
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Nate Silver
@NateSilver538
So, we published an interactive today that basically looks at every probabilistic forecast that FiveThirtyEight has ever made (dating back to 2008).

Here's what we found: When we say 70 percent, it *really does* mean 70 percent. 53eig.ht/2OWhD33
Technically speaking, our elections forecasts have been a bit *under-confident*, meaning favorites have won a bit MORE often than they're supposed to, but the differences from perfect calibration aren't statistically significant. Overall, the forecasts are really well-calibrated.
Here's the interactive itself. Obviously, there are lots of ways to criticize 538. But some of the more philosophical criticisms about probabilistic forecasting just don't hold up very well if you look at the actual track record. 53eig.ht/2uNtE1c
Read 3 tweets
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Nate Silver
@NateSilver538
I have quite a few different thoughts on this.

1) People inside the bubble (includes Ezra & me) have difficulty understanding what people hear outside the bubble. That's a challenging problem. Our gut impressions are often way wrong. It's good to validate against external data.
2. Almost all media is now niche media. Lots of seemingly popular/influential news products have audiences of only 10s or 100s of thousands of people or low 7 figures at most. That's not a lot in a country of 327 million people. That makes media analysis harder than it once was.
3. There are a lot of very complicated feedback loops between and among "the audience" and "the media". It's hard to know who is influencing who. The causality is difficult to tease out. It's especially difficult in the primaries, where "party elites" also play a role.
Read 7 tweets

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Berryhorse
@berryhorse29
It's a pretty easy choice for me to pick the most analytically interesting position player on the Atlanta Braves as well.

Pitch-framing and berryhorse model darling, Tyler Flowers, is a fascinating sabermetrics and gambling case study.
I'm gonna be honest, I am actually hesitant to say so much about him because as I'm about to go into, the model's opinion of Flowers seems pretty contrarian/unique and profitable.
Though pitch-framing is a less scarce skill than even five years ago, it is still tremendously important and part of the reason I don't love JT Realmuto quite as much as other SABR geeks seem to (to be clear - I do still love him).
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isaacs 💙💜💖🏳️‍🌈
@izs
Particle Man is such a weird song to try to unpack, and in fact, I'm marking myself as a TMBG nerd by even considering it. According to The Johns, it has no meaning at all. It just is what it is. tmbw.net/wiki/Particle_…

And yet...
In the words of Roland Barthes in La mort de l'auteur, "To give a text an author is to impose a limit on that text." The creator of a work of art is a collaborator and instigator of its meaning, but should not ever be seen as the final authority of that meaning.
The song is a bouncy play on the Spider-Man theme, and presents a few characters in brief vignettes.
Particle Man, the unknowably small
Triangle Man, the violent and hateful
Universe Man, the unknowably large
Person Man, the human condition
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Mike Prysner
@MikePrysner
I know many are using this study to “prove” that enlisted US troops are not working class, and therefore not capable of working-class consciousness or organizing. Since the argument cherry-picks facts from an already misleading report, I wanted to—very gently—put it to sleep...
First of all, The Heritage Foundation is a pro-imperialist think tank. Their other “reports” at the time included “Fighting a Just War in Iraq” and “The Left Ignores Our Enemies in Iraq”
Furthermore the ENTIRE purpose of this report is to “debunk” the left’s argument that the US government disproportionally sends poor, working-class & oppressed people to die overseas. Ironic leftists would use it for the same thing!
Read 28 tweets
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Molly McKew
@MollyMcKew
Morning all. Will live tweet House hearing with Zuckerberg in this thread.

Mostly today I will tweet what is not being asked, and not being answered.

Privacy is important. So is hostile foreign influence. Too many things weren't asked yesterday.

#ZuckUnderOath
Pallone hits the right point: ok, Cambridge Analytica did bad things with data. Doesn't Facebook do exactly the same thing?

**yes
Zuck rolls back the reel, repeats opening statement. It is literally like watching an old reel to reel recorder spin. It's slow and nonadaptive and you keep waiting for it to jam and shred.
Read 42 tweets
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Cleolinda Jones
@cleolinda
I think that’s on my mind because my allergies are giving me hell but I think I’m gonna sit down with the SW prequels today, and hating on them for several hours is not actually what I had in mind.
I have come to really value absurdity as a source of joy and humor, which I think is what our Jupiter Ascending thread was getting at. If we’re hypothesizing that The Culture was extremely cynical circa ~2000, then yeah, bad timing for the prequels.
(I’m making breakfast, not watching yet. Officially a merry little #sithmas though?)
Read 155 tweets
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Jim OShaughnessy
@jposhaughnessy
I’m torn on how to approach the idea of luck. I’m the first to admit that I am one of the luckiest people on the planet. To be born into a prosperous American family in 1960 with smart parents is to start life on third base. The odds against my very existence are astronomical.
I’ve always felt that the luckiest people I know had a talent for recognizing circumstances, not of their own making, that were conducive to a favorable outcome and their ability to quickly take advantage of them.
In other words, dumb luck was just that, it required no awareness on the person’s part, whereas “smart” luck involved awareness followed by action before the circumstances changed.
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