This whole Krugman/Silver brouhaha broke out when I was on vacation. And I’m only beginning to catch up on the details. But TPM Reader SR has some interesting thoughts on trying to “disrupt” fields of inquiry which, unlike politics and formerly sports, already have a lot of highly numerate practitioners …
Krugman and Silver are both notoriously a bit prickly—whether by nature or just because of all the idiotic hack pushback both of them have endured for years for the unpardonable sin of being right again and again when the Cohens and the Noonans and the Scarboroughs of the world have been willfully wrong.
But when you see Silver trying to refute Krugman’s criticism that people on his new site have so far been using data as like a drunk uses a lamppost by conflating correlation with causation and, more generally by treating Krugman as if he was just another hack defending the NYT and his own blowsy, fact free turf, he rather conclusively establishes the truth of Krugman’s criticism.
Silver is blowing it. He’s blowing years of credibility with his target audience with this pissing match. Not because Krugman is some beloved Olympian sage whose comments are above reproach or contest simply by virtue of his status as a sage, but because he’s demonstrably wrong and Krugman is demonstrably right. He’s blowing it, as commenter Walt French at Noah Smith’s blog said, because he seems to think the economics and climate science fields are “populated by the same kind of bloviators and shills he encountered in politics.”
At this point, Silver is looking an awful lot like a guy who’s invested so much ego in his project as it is developing he is incapable of pulling back and reconsidering whether he is, in fact, foolish asserting the superiority of his opinion and his math modelling in data-driven fields populated by real experts who do real math. And I would have to wonder whether at some level his defensiveness is born of the fact that he’s contractually locked in with some of these guys he’s hired for a period of years.
Silver is becoming the very thing he purports to disdain before he even gets the site up and running.
