“A Higher Percentage Of Conservatives Are More Inclined To Question Empirical Methods”

November 15, 2012 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech | Permalink

Nate Silver, the erstwhile baseball numbers cruncher, who, from what I hear, now does political predictions, just completed a chat with readers at Deadspin. The opening follows.

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Question: 

Will you be forecasting the 2014, and 2016 election?

Nate Silver:

As tempting as it might be to pull a Jim Brown/Sandy Koufax and just mic-drop/retire from elections forecasting, I expect that we’ll be making forecasts in 2014 and 2016. Midterm elections can be dreadfully boring, unfortunately. But the 2016 G.O.P. primary seems almost certain to be epic.

Question: 

Hypothetically, if the GOP presidential nom starts getting up big in the polls in 2016, do you fear a backlash from your most ardent supporters/fanbase?

Nate Silver:

We got a modest amount of this in 2010, where I’d get Tweets saying things like “When did Nate become a Republican?”

But I don’t want to make it sound as though the two sides are equal. It seems as though a higher percentage of conservatives are more inclined to question empirical methods, to put it diplomatically. 

Question:

Nate – Who gave the most ridiculous refutations of your work? Old school baseball guys, or GOP media a couple weeks ago? 

Nate Silver:

It’s MUCH worse in politics, I think:

1) People in sports will make lots of silly refutations of your arguments. But they do tend to deal with your arguments, rather than attack your character or your integrity.

2) A lot of people in politics operate in a “post-truth” worldview, whether they realize it or not. Less of that in sports.

3) In sports, scouts actually contribute a lot of value, even though statistics are highly useful as well. In politics, the pundits are completely useless at best, and probably harm democracy in their own small way.

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