
FiveThirtyEight relaunches on NYTimes.com - donohoe
http://thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/08/25/a-big-welcome-to-fivethirtyeight/?src=twr
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whakojacko
Congrats to Nate Silver for his fantastic job. 538's success in predicting the
08 elections was really impressive and glad to see him get even more (well-
deserved) coverage.

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spec
How about his failure in predicting UK elections results, US unemployment
rate, Maine's same sex marriage vote, special Senate elections in
Massachusetts? These are just a few examples that I remember. But then the NY
Times thinks that Krugman deserves the coverage too...

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kenjackson
You do realize that even people who have incredibly good prediction records,
do get things wrong. You can't really point to a specific thing and say, "you
suck because you didn't predict this". Look at the totality of their record.

And Krugman has a Nobel Prize in Economics, and numerous other awards for his
work in Economics. I honestly think you'd be hardpressed to find a more
qualified economist (on matters of economics). You may not agree with him, but
I don't think anyone at the NYTimes is losing sleep grappling with the issue
of if Paul Krugman is worthy of being in the paper.

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spec
The point was that selectively praising someone's accurate predictions without
mentioning his failures is wrong.

Krugman is a partisan hack that has a Nobel Prize is one very specific area of
economics. It does not qualify him to opine on all other areas.

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_delirium
> Krugman is a partisan hack that has a Nobel Prize is one very specific area
> of economics. It does not qualify him to opine on all other areas.

That seems to be a general feature of politically-engaged economists on both
the left and right. I see Krugman as basically a mirror version of Milton
Friedman: a blowhard whose statements on politics and policy preferences are
usually wildly unsupported by empirical evidence, but who did also do some
genuinely good economic work.

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Locke1689
I read a piece on Krugman that was really interesting. For one, it challenged
the exact perception that you're advocating: that Krugman takes strong stances
on policy matters and uses strong language to defend them, to the detriment of
the economics behind them. Interestingly, the piece pointed out that Krugman
is usually the stereotypical economist -- quick to qualify and slow to make a
strong policy statement without mountains of evidence. The writing style of
Paul Krugman may be more the writing style of his wife, who encouraged him to
advocate for more policy change. The article definitely painted Krugman's
column as more of a cooperation between him and his wife than a
straightforward economics work.

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spec
There is a very common fallacy committed by people outside economics in
thinking that Krugman has something substantial to say in areas of economics
outside of his very narrow focus of expertise. Let's say you founded a
successful advertising-based Web startup from a scratch and you exited for 8
digits. People who are only vaguely familiar with technology and computers
(let's say nurses, taxi drivers, high school teachers) will now think you are
an expert in pretty much all matters related to starting a business and
computers. However, unless you are a pompous egoist, you should realize that
your opinions, even in seemingly very related matters, like running a Web
store or creating an iPhone app, will likely be quite uninformed. Krugman's
opinions are about economic matters much further away from his true area of
expertise than your opinions about running a Web store.

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_delirium
That's a somewhat strange example to use on a site hosted by Paul Graham, who
writes about a pretty broad set of things, not all of them very strictly tied
to the things he's particularly famous for.

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lallysingh
What's exciting to me is that Nate's got a voice in the NY Times. That the NY
Times voice is suddenly more open, scientific, and math-centric in their
political reporting.

I hope the trend continues in other areas of the NYT.

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klenwell
This is not a new trend. The Times even offers a set of APIs:

<http://developer.nytimes.com/docs>

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jakarta
Direct link: <http://fivethirtyeight.blogs.nytimes.com/>

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metamemetics
For a second I got them confused with TwentyThreeSix and was momentarily
excited.

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K3Z-Jqe5yG4>

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furyg3
This is most certainly a sidetrack, but a worthwhile one.

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grandalf
Congrats to Nate, but I wonder why this was necessary. How could this possibly
lead to better quality posts?

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jorgeortiz85
For one thing, he gets access to the superb (unrivaled?) dataviz team at the
Times.

