Thread by @studentactivism

Everyone's dunking on Nate Silver today, but I'm not seeing a lot of people flagging his claim that when "one side" of a FACTUAL DISPUTE "is excessively concerned with policing the discourse…that side is more likely than not to be wrong."

https://twitter.com/NateSilver538/status/1397876974434066432

I mean, let's start with how he puts his thumb on the scale with "excessively." Is "policing the discourse" evidence that you're in the wrong in a factual dispute? No, because of one side of the dispute is obviously incorrect, they're going to get yelled at more.

So the "excessively" isn't a rhetorical flourish. It's central to his argument. But how can "excessively policing the discourse" be measured? What does it refer to, other than someone's gut feeling that one group of people are yelling at another group of people for bad reasons?

Am I missing something here? If I'm not, then Silver's argument is entirely circular—people who have weak arguments excessively police discourse, and you can tell their discourse-policing is excessive because their underlying arguments are weak.

Birtherism is a PERFECT example of this. The pose of reasonableness was central to the birtherist position—that they were just asking questions, just asking that evidence that should be readily available be provided to them.

https://twitter.com/grudging1/status/1397976935251124225

And note that I'm not saying that excessive discourse policing isn't a thing—I think it absolutely is. But the way Silver framing it is precisely upside down.

It's good to call out Holocaust denial as pernicious antisemitic garbage, and it's good to shame media outlets who give uncritical coverage to deniers. That's discourse-policing, and it's smart and moral and effective, because Holocaust denial IS pernicious antisemitic garbage.

And yeah, he said "when the evidence is murky." But when someone makes a novel claim about, say, IQ and race, and that person is a longtime racist scumbag, it's reasonable to point out that they're a racist scumbag while you're waiting for the experts to weigh in on their data.

The existence of people saying "the lab leak theory is racist bullshit" isn't evidence that the lab leak theory is false, but neither is it evidence that the lab leak theory is true. Even if there are a lot of them. And even if they're yelling really loud.