G. Elliott Morris deservedly trashes the once-reliable Harry Enten for feeding the ad-supported eyeball-gluing misinformation beast. & it leads me to harken back to the true Glory Days of Nate Silver…
> Anders: Brad, thanks for that and by the way your stacks are out of the world good. Substack would be much much less interesting and complete without them.
Again, thanks much. Be as well as one can be in a world in which while one may well be, personally, quite comfortable, we live in a world in which no man is an island. Yours,
Please order the worldwide six-figure bestseller: "Slouching Towards Utopia: An Economic History of the Long 20th Century, 1870-2010" <hhttps://www.amazon.com/Economic-History-Twentieth-Century/dp/0465019595/>
Brilliant Brad, right on the money. At the end of the day, all cable News show succumb to temptation to make everything Breaking News to keep the eyeballs glued and rolling
Along with Brad, I can't take Silver's "River" very seriously. However, I take Silver's River/Village dichotomy seriously indeed. His River is Manly Men;™ his Village is Womanly Women. For Nate Silver is on the Right, and the Right can always be explained via racism, ressentiment, and masculinism. Nate Silver's personal Right seems to be mostly masculinist, with a wee tad of ressentiment thrown in.
> Ziggy: Along with Brad, I can't take Silver's "River" very seriously. However, I take Silver's River/Village dichotomy seriously indeed. His River is Manly Men;™ his Village is Womanly Women. For Nate Silver is on the Right, and the Right can always be explained via racism, ressentiment, and masculinism. Nate Silver's personal Right seems to be mostly masculinist, with a wee tad of ressentiment thrown in.
I think that is a powerful element in what is driving Silver's worldview. But I put it something differently. IMHO, "The River" is not a thing: it is, rather, everything that is "Not-The-Village". But "The Village" is not really a thing either. However, Silver thinks that it is:
> The Village… [of those who are “too political”…. Government… media… academia (although perhaps excluding some of the more quantitative academic fields such as economics)… [with the] distinctly left-of-center politics associated with the Democratic Party. Part of the rub is the personality clash—remember, Riverians love decoupling and Villagers hate it…. I’ve never quite taken to the Village, and I’ve often felt like media coverage of me and FiveThirtyEight was misinformed…. Villagers are coupling when they should be decoupling…. Claims to… expertise are becoming increasingly hard to separate from Democratic political partisanship…. Villagers are too conformist and not aware of the degree to which their views are influenced by confirmation bias and political and social fads…. Villagers are stifling competition by increasingly focusing on equity of outcomes rather than equality of opportunity… too paternalistic, too neurotic, and too risk-averse…. The Village’s attempts at speech regulation are hypocritical and often counterproductive…
To Nate, I am definitely a card-carrying member—more than a member, a subchief—in The Village:
* academia, check;
* left-of-center politics, check;
* Democratic Party, check;
* believe lots of “decoupling” and siloing of issues is simply stupid—because there are lots of interconnections—check;
* claims that Republicanism is the negation of real expertise, of course, for only true morons and shameless grifters could even claim think otherwise given the state of the Republican Party today, check;
* don’t think I’m obliged to eat the shit when Elon Musk tries to put true Nazis into my social-media feed, check.
But stifling competition? Is that what Silver thinks I (and FTC Chief Lina Kahn) are trying to do? Too risk-averse? That depends on the actual calculations, doesn’t it? Too conformist? Conformist to what? Not quantitative? Hah!! I’ll give him biased because of fads and fashions (very hard to guard against). And I will give him what I said at the start—that a great deal of media coverage of Silver and FiveThirtyEight back in The Day was worse than misinformed: it was corrupt and mendacious:
* like Toff’s blaming Silver for the “still more troubling development tied to the advent of the aggregators has been the media’s diminishing role as gatekeepers of opinion data”,
* like Haberman’s dismissing Nate Silver’s on-point criticisms of the New York Times as “gratuitous jabs at a former employer”,
* like Confessore’s now-very deleted tweets about Silver’s “cheap shots”,
* like Timm’s dismissal of Silver as a “Very Online Blowhard”,
* like Robinson’s claim that Silver had a “humiliating record”,
and so much much more. Surely the most ignorant and certainly the most embarrassing to the perpetrator example of simply not doing any real reporting or analysis was Dylan Byers’s claim on October 29, 2012 that:
> should… Romney win… it’s difficult to see how people can continue to put faith in the predictions of [a Nate Silver] who has never given that candidate anything higher than a 41 percent chance…
Overwhelmingly, the journalistic-pollster emperor had—and has—no clothes at all: grifters in the business of generating statistical noise and then getting the statistically ignorant to give them money by claiming it is signal. In pushing back against that, we all owe Nate BigTime. And that is one of the reasons that "The Signal & the Noise" is still a great book to read.
But there is also this Nate Silver:
> I’d been a professional poker player for… 2004 and 2007… the… Poker Boom… online poker… Chris Moneymaker, an accountant from Nashville… 2003 World Series of Poker… winning the Main Event for $2.5 million… an archetype for every office drone who wanted to break out of his cubicle and win the big jackpot…. Poker… at night, when your opponents are… drunk, sleep-deprived, or delirious…. I quit my corporate job…. It was a good living…. But… in late 2006, the GOP-led Congress, hungry for a victory with “moral majority” voters ahead of the midterms… passed… the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act… choked off payment processors… the shadow of illegality… friction of getting your money in and out, inexperienced new players avoided the games, making them much tougher to beat…. The bill had been tucked into an unrelated [bill] and passed during the last session before Congress recessed…. It was a shifty workaround, and having essentially lost my job, I wanted the people responsible for it to lose their jobs, too. And they did… Representative Jim Leach[‘s] thirty-year tenure in office ended partly because of poker players who had contributed money to his opponent…
Reflect on " inexperienced new players avoided the [online poker] games [in which I had won so much money], making them much tougher to beat..."
Nate Silver believes that he had an inalienable right to live in a world in which there are a lot of suckers in online poker games. And Jim Leach doing them a favor by making it harder for Silver and company to grift them was and is, in Silver's mind, Leach stealing something from him. The overall vibe is that of this scene from "The Magnificent Seven":
> CALVERA: Suppose I offer you equal shares?
> CHRIS: In what?
> CALVERA (embracing the village): Everything. To the last grain.
> CHICO: And the people in the village—what about them?
> CALVERA: I leave it to you. Can men of our profession worry about that? If God didn't want them to be sheared, he wouldn’t have made them sheep.
Let me repeat: In Nate Silver’s mind, Jim Leach of Iowa stole something valuable from him by adding enough frictions to online poker gambling to make “inexperienced new players avoid… the games” thus eliminating the inflow of suckers that kept his business profitable as the current crop of “losing players either went broke, quit, or got better, removing one sucker from the table at a time.”
Hard disagree. Trump hasn't delivered the economic outcomes he promised and has lost a bit of support from centrist independents as a result. But, in terms of the core program of implementing fascism in the US, he has delivered exactly what he promised, in full and more, and has retained overwhelming support from Republicans (including Republican-leaning "independents". And, if the economy turns around, he would easily be in a position to win a free and fair election (as defined under existing US rules). Of course, this isn't relevant, since his opponents will probably be in prison by the the time of the next election
I don't know anything about Enten, so if he is saying something different from one week to the next, that's bad. But he is right at the moment.
Brad, thanks for that and by the way your stacks are out of the world good. Substack would be much much less interesting and complete without them.
**Aw shucks**. Thx much...
> Anders: Brad, thanks for that and by the way your stacks are out of the world good. Substack would be much much less interesting and complete without them.
Again, thanks much. Be as well as one can be in a world in which while one may well be, personally, quite comfortable, we live in a world in which no man is an island. Yours,
J. Bradford DeLong
<http://braddelong.substack.com> <https://braddelong.substack.com/about>
Please order the worldwide six-figure bestseller: "Slouching Towards Utopia: An Economic History of the Long 20th Century, 1870-2010" <hhttps://www.amazon.com/Economic-History-Twentieth-Century/dp/0465019595/>
Professor of Economics, UC Berkeley
brad.delong@gmail.com :: @delong@mastodon.social :: @delong.social
+1 925-708-0467
P.O. Box 5488 :: Holgate House :: Berkeley, CA 94705
Brilliant Brad, right on the money. At the end of the day, all cable News show succumb to temptation to make everything Breaking News to keep the eyeballs glued and rolling
Enjoyable and incisive as always.
I wrote this response to Silver's latest book (and your kind praise of my previous extended "Summa Contra Argentum") almost exactly a year ago, and if I do say so myself it stands up pretty damned well. https://patrickmarren.com/2024/10/sca-8-thanks-to-dr-j-bradford-delong
Oh great, now I can't decide whether my new band name is Panic Octopus, Embarrassed Penguin, or Dumpster Parade.
Along with Brad, I can't take Silver's "River" very seriously. However, I take Silver's River/Village dichotomy seriously indeed. His River is Manly Men;™ his Village is Womanly Women. For Nate Silver is on the Right, and the Right can always be explained via racism, ressentiment, and masculinism. Nate Silver's personal Right seems to be mostly masculinist, with a wee tad of ressentiment thrown in.
Re your:
> Ziggy: Along with Brad, I can't take Silver's "River" very seriously. However, I take Silver's River/Village dichotomy seriously indeed. His River is Manly Men;™ his Village is Womanly Women. For Nate Silver is on the Right, and the Right can always be explained via racism, ressentiment, and masculinism. Nate Silver's personal Right seems to be mostly masculinist, with a wee tad of ressentiment thrown in.
I think that is a powerful element in what is driving Silver's worldview. But I put it something differently. IMHO, "The River" is not a thing: it is, rather, everything that is "Not-The-Village". But "The Village" is not really a thing either. However, Silver thinks that it is:
> The Village… [of those who are “too political”…. Government… media… academia (although perhaps excluding some of the more quantitative academic fields such as economics)… [with the] distinctly left-of-center politics associated with the Democratic Party. Part of the rub is the personality clash—remember, Riverians love decoupling and Villagers hate it…. I’ve never quite taken to the Village, and I’ve often felt like media coverage of me and FiveThirtyEight was misinformed…. Villagers are coupling when they should be decoupling…. Claims to… expertise are becoming increasingly hard to separate from Democratic political partisanship…. Villagers are too conformist and not aware of the degree to which their views are influenced by confirmation bias and political and social fads…. Villagers are stifling competition by increasingly focusing on equity of outcomes rather than equality of opportunity… too paternalistic, too neurotic, and too risk-averse…. The Village’s attempts at speech regulation are hypocritical and often counterproductive…
To Nate, I am definitely a card-carrying member—more than a member, a subchief—in The Village:
* academia, check;
* left-of-center politics, check;
* Democratic Party, check;
* believe lots of “decoupling” and siloing of issues is simply stupid—because there are lots of interconnections—check;
* claims that Republicanism is the negation of real expertise, of course, for only true morons and shameless grifters could even claim think otherwise given the state of the Republican Party today, check;
* don’t think I’m obliged to eat the shit when Elon Musk tries to put true Nazis into my social-media feed, check.
But stifling competition? Is that what Silver thinks I (and FTC Chief Lina Kahn) are trying to do? Too risk-averse? That depends on the actual calculations, doesn’t it? Too conformist? Conformist to what? Not quantitative? Hah!! I’ll give him biased because of fads and fashions (very hard to guard against). And I will give him what I said at the start—that a great deal of media coverage of Silver and FiveThirtyEight back in The Day was worse than misinformed: it was corrupt and mendacious:
* like Toff’s blaming Silver for the “still more troubling development tied to the advent of the aggregators has been the media’s diminishing role as gatekeepers of opinion data”,
* like Haberman’s dismissing Nate Silver’s on-point criticisms of the New York Times as “gratuitous jabs at a former employer”,
* like Confessore’s now-very deleted tweets about Silver’s “cheap shots”,
* like Timm’s dismissal of Silver as a “Very Online Blowhard”,
* like Robinson’s claim that Silver had a “humiliating record”,
and so much much more. Surely the most ignorant and certainly the most embarrassing to the perpetrator example of simply not doing any real reporting or analysis was Dylan Byers’s claim on October 29, 2012 that:
> should… Romney win… it’s difficult to see how people can continue to put faith in the predictions of [a Nate Silver] who has never given that candidate anything higher than a 41 percent chance…
Overwhelmingly, the journalistic-pollster emperor had—and has—no clothes at all: grifters in the business of generating statistical noise and then getting the statistically ignorant to give them money by claiming it is signal. In pushing back against that, we all owe Nate BigTime. And that is one of the reasons that "The Signal & the Noise" is still a great book to read.
But there is also this Nate Silver:
> I’d been a professional poker player for… 2004 and 2007… the… Poker Boom… online poker… Chris Moneymaker, an accountant from Nashville… 2003 World Series of Poker… winning the Main Event for $2.5 million… an archetype for every office drone who wanted to break out of his cubicle and win the big jackpot…. Poker… at night, when your opponents are… drunk, sleep-deprived, or delirious…. I quit my corporate job…. It was a good living…. But… in late 2006, the GOP-led Congress, hungry for a victory with “moral majority” voters ahead of the midterms… passed… the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act… choked off payment processors… the shadow of illegality… friction of getting your money in and out, inexperienced new players avoided the games, making them much tougher to beat…. The bill had been tucked into an unrelated [bill] and passed during the last session before Congress recessed…. It was a shifty workaround, and having essentially lost my job, I wanted the people responsible for it to lose their jobs, too. And they did… Representative Jim Leach[‘s] thirty-year tenure in office ended partly because of poker players who had contributed money to his opponent…
Reflect on " inexperienced new players avoided the [online poker] games [in which I had won so much money], making them much tougher to beat..."
Nate Silver believes that he had an inalienable right to live in a world in which there are a lot of suckers in online poker games. And Jim Leach doing them a favor by making it harder for Silver and company to grift them was and is, in Silver's mind, Leach stealing something from him. The overall vibe is that of this scene from "The Magnificent Seven":
> CALVERA: Suppose I offer you equal shares?
> CHRIS: In what?
> CALVERA (embracing the village): Everything. To the last grain.
> CHICO: And the people in the village—what about them?
> CALVERA: I leave it to you. Can men of our profession worry about that? If God didn't want them to be sheared, he wouldn’t have made them sheep.
Let me repeat: In Nate Silver’s mind, Jim Leach of Iowa stole something valuable from him by adding enough frictions to online poker gambling to make “inexperienced new players avoid… the games” thus eliminating the inflow of suckers that kept his business profitable as the current crop of “losing players either went broke, quit, or got better, removing one sucker from the table at a time.”
Hard disagree. Trump hasn't delivered the economic outcomes he promised and has lost a bit of support from centrist independents as a result. But, in terms of the core program of implementing fascism in the US, he has delivered exactly what he promised, in full and more, and has retained overwhelming support from Republicans (including Republican-leaning "independents". And, if the economy turns around, he would easily be in a position to win a free and fair election (as defined under existing US rules). Of course, this isn't relevant, since his opponents will probably be in prison by the the time of the next election
I don't know anything about Enten, so if he is saying something different from one week to the next, that's bad. But he is right at the moment.