
Nate Silver's FiveThirtyEight: The Emptiness of Data Journalism - ekpyrotic
http://www.newrepublic.com/article/117068/nate-silvers-fivethirtyeight-emptiness-data-journalism
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cruise02
I expect a lot of "opinion" journalists to pile on Silver, but this piece
strikes me as particularly tone deaf.

> Is numeracy really what American public discourse most urgently lacks?

It ranks pretty high.

> Like Ezra Klein, whom he admires, Nate Silver had made a success out of an
> escape into diffidence. What is it about conviction that frightens these
> people?

It's not conviction that's frightening, it's conviction backed by ignorance.

~~~
mikepilla
I agree this is tone deaf, mostly. And certainly journalists have room for
improvement in understanding data. However, I certainly agree with this
statement:

>Neutrality is an evasion of responsibility, unless everything is like sports.

More data can also mean more noise. More data can also mean implying more
causation where none exists. And the world isn't a giant game with sterile
constraints and static rules.

~~~
cruise02
"It's just my opinion" strikes me as the larger evasion of responsibility
here. There's nothing irresponsible about reporting the facts of a story so
that people can make informed decisions.

> More data can also mean more noise.

Nate Silver wrote a book titled "The Signal and the Noise." I'm sure he's
aware of the danger. Data Analysis (Data Science, whatever you want to call
it) is all about turning data into information. _Reducing_ noise.

~~~
mikepilla
Forget about Silver for a moment.

What’s more dangerous, the bias in an opinion page or bias in a feature
article masquerading as neutral fact?

More data, more samples, can produce more spurious relationships, whatever
statistical massaging is applied. Given more Noise, there’s more opportunity
to inject bias in finding your Signal. Journalists shouldn’t pretend their
data doesn’t stink because they just figured out how to get Excel to crap out
regression results.

~~~
cruise02
Who is suggesting they should?

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bgilroy26
This is a 'controversial' article written for hits. There will be thorough,
intelligent criticism of 538, but not until the website publishes more
material.

Towards the end of the article, the author asks "Is numeracy really what
American public discourse most urgently lacks?" I cannot believe there is a
red blooded American who could sincerely ask this question. Americans are
paranoid that our schools are falling behind the Russians, the Danes, or the
Chinese. Education is part of the American dream. The knowledge and
understanding people have of the issues of the day is a metric for the
strength of a democracy.

The author leaves us with a final question: "What is it about conviction that
frightens these people?" upon which he refuses to speculate. Although he is
the literary editor of the New Republic, he does not recognize that the fox
essay is in the genre of manifesto (I wouldn't have known it either, but it
was written in at the top).

Manifestos are meant to be self-aggrandizing and they will always define their
subject over and against what already exists. Mr. Wieseltier needn't worry
about the op ed page, it will survive Data Journalism.

~~~
HillRat
Well, it's Leon Wieseltier and TNR. My expectations are set correspondingly
low. However, he actually stumbles not far from an important point -- Silver
_is_ fetishizing "the side of no side," and using the cult of pretended
objectivity as a blunt instrument to bash his critics with.

Silver isn't doing LHC observations here: he's doing political journalism, and
data in politics and economics are neither neutral nor objective. The data we
select, the models we use, create toy realities that we can use to justify
certain policies and philosophies.

What makes Silver particularly pernicious -- and I count myself a fan of his
approach to weighting election polls -- is that he pretends that data and
modeling means 538's articles are endowed with an Olympian objectivity. Yet
his hires suggest that his articles are going to be animated more by ideology
than rigor.

For example, he chose for his science writer Roger Pielke Jr., a political
scientist whose climate-change denialism (usually published as popular books,
op-eds, and blog posts, not peer-reviewed papers) has been thoroughly debunked
by practicing scientists. Not a promising beginning to his site; if I wanted
to read worthless contrarianism written by unqualified hacks, I'd just renew
my New Republic subscription.

~~~
dcre
I'm not familiar with Wieseltier, so I don't share your negative bias against
him (and maybe I should), but the "important point" he "stumbles not far from"
seems to me to be the main idea of the piece.

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waylandsmithers
>Many of the issues that we debate are not issues of fact but issues of value.
There is no numerical answer to the question of whether men should be allowed
to marry men, and the question of whether the government should help the weak,
and the question of whether we should intervene against genocide. And so the
intimidation by quantification practiced by Silver and the other data mullahs
must be resisted.

This writer makes some good points, but I don't think Silver is attempting to
use statistical analysis to answer these questions. Silver's point about
opinion journalism is one about bad incentives-- those people are rewarded for
attracting attention, not for being accurate or even thoughtful. He's
attacking the George Wills of the world for saying things like "Romney will
win because Americans have realized that blah blah blah" when all the
available polling data indicated a landslide win for Obama.

Of course there is room for opinions and certainly an appetite for it, but the
problem for the New Republic is that the authority bestowed upon
"publications" is rapidly eroding. This obviously hasn't been helped by their
decisions to compete with the Buzzfeeds of the world in the race to the bottom
for pageviews. Now that anyone can say anything in public, the fact that the
New Republic has decided to employ you no longer makes your opinion
automatically worthy of consideration.

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topynate
> He knows many things. He has no priors.

So what is Leon Wieseltier saying here about Nate Silver, exactly? That Silver
considers himself to have no priors? That he, Wieseltier, thinks that Silver
has no priors? Both interpretations seem ignorant. Further, how can someone
"know many things" and yet have no priors, when a prior is a representation of
prior knowledge?

I find it hard to believe that Wieseltier would be so dumb by accident, which
means it's actually on purpose. The article is an attack on the sort of public
discourse Silver wants - arguing over likelihood of outcomes under uncertainty
- in favour of "repetition" and "persuasion". Are _those_ "what American
public discourse most urgently lacks?"

~~~
dcre
Come on, it's rhetorical. Silver complains about the columnists being stuck in
or ignorant of their so-called "priors", and isn't Wieseltier making your
exact point against him? That is, saying "well, what's the alternative?" He is
also sarcastically criticizing the smug application of a technical term
("prior") to a domain where it doesn't hold nearly as much value as Silver
accords to it.

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Brakenshire
This seems like a straw man, the issue isn't that opinion journalism should be
abolished, the issue is that it is overprevalent. News has become too much a
mixture of pack-like reporting of one exciting incident after another (often
stories with little value beyond entertainment), and opinion. In order to form
a judgement about something, you have to have experience of it, and data
journalism is, or should be, about allowing people to understand the reality
of what is actually occurring beyond their immediate bubble. i.e. at its best,
it should be 'empty', and as close as possible to an observation. Once you
have at least some factual basis, then you can start forming opinions, or
forming judgements about the validity of other people's opinions, and it is at
that stage that opinion journalism ceases to be about providing superficially
plausible rationalizations for your ideological preconceptions, and begins to
be about finding some structure to make sense of the nature of the problems,
and the nature of the possible solutions.

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Zigurd
Americans really need to pay attention to the numbers more. Military spending.
Prison population. Educational standards. Numbers of police. When numbers like
these go haywire, that's how empires fall.

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jokoon
I don't understand why people listen to this guy. You can be right many times
and profile political currents and opinions in a very relevant manner, not
belonging to any party, it's still behaving like a prophet, and that's what
people want to hear. That's just dangerous.

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nevinera
Well-written, but still pointless opinion fluff.

