Who's Been Feeding Nate Silver Red Pills?
[Trivia: What titles correspond to 1- through 5-star generals in the Army and Air Force? (Generals in the Marines and Space Force have the same titles, except for the 5-star rank, which doesn’t exist in those branches)]
Nate Silver, for those unfamiliar, was a professional baseball statistician and online poker player before launching a statistics-oriented blog on elections and politics (and sports, and culture) called FiveThirtyEight. Silver also wrote a great book about stats and predictions, The Signal and the Noise.
I used to read FiveThirtyEight pretty much daily. That tapered off a while ago mostly because the numbers they marshaled were drowned out by left-wing framing and commentary. A quick sampling of that:
Sep. 2018: Ran an article entitled “Science Says Toxic Masculinity — More Than Alcohol — Leads To Sexual Assault.” The actual article detailed study after study about how “one study found that 53 percent of men who reported committing sexual violence met a diagnosis for alcoholism”—in other words, suggesting that alcohol is a driving factor. They eventually remark from one study how “The men whose rates of assault were going up, in contrast, reported a growing sense of peer support for forced sex, peer pressure, pornography use, and hostility toward women”—which isn’t exactly a smoking gun for “toxic masculinity” as that phrase is commonly and casually used. Oh, and this headline ran in the middle of the Kavanugh hearings.
May 2019: Ran an analysis explaining “Here’s Why The Anti-Abortion Movement Is Escalating.” This analysis didn’t even mention, as you might recall, the unprecedentedly pro-abortion legislation that had moved just that year in Vermont, Virginia, New York, and Rhode Island—either as a possible catalyst for a pro-life escalation, or as a freak show that needed its own explaining.
Nov. 2020 and since: Have spent an unending amount of time hyping the fears of “election deniers”—this from the same people who spent years hand-wringing and stoking doubts about Trump’s own legitimacy, e.g. “What Happens If The Election Was A Fraud? The Constitution Doesn’t Say” (July 2017) and “Is Trump’s Legitimacy At Risk?” (Aug. 2018). (That latter is an absolute banger of an article.) Then with a blue 2020 election this became “You can’t have a democracy if one of the main parties can’t admit defeat.”
It all got pretty old and tiring.
But Nate Silver himself—a gay man who once said that his favorite Republican was former Ohio governor John Kasich—remains an interesting voice, apparently keyed in to hard evidence and intellectually honest. If anything, he seems to have become more contrarian lately, voicing the sort of unpopular and uncomfortable but hard-to-gainsay truths that are called “red pills.” (Looking at the specifics of what he’s actually said, it does look like that’s just a testament to how far Left the public intellectual and journalism conversation has shifted.)
Here’s one from last June that I’m sure will resonate:
He’s right, of course. I once saw someone pull data from Politifact and show that Politifact fact-checks of right-wing people and statements were consistently around twice as long as their left-wing counterparts, on the theory (not hard to verify in particulars) that significantly more explanation is necessary if you’re explaining vibes, implications, and context rather than checking someone’s facts. (I once saw this analysis, but I can’t now find it. I’ll cite it in the future if I ever track it down.)
Here’s another gem from Nate Silver, from last August when monkeypox was making headlines (remember that?):
Last November he voiced some much-needed criticism of lockdown policies that discounted the importance of people spending time with other people in person:
Last December he called attention to how bonkers the ratfinking and surveillance scolding during COVID got, especially in Australia, as late as August 2021:
Then this bit on public health journalism from December:
And then today he said this, chiming in on one of the more flagrant abuses of science and science journalism from the recent past:
Remember that early on, the media decided that suggesting that the coronavirus even might have come from a lab from a “conspiracy theory” (that theory literally posited no conspiracy) that had been “debunked.” That’s the unapologetic confidence with which the Washington Post ran their February 16, 2020 headline,
“Tom Cotton keeps repeating a coronavirus conspiracy theory that was already debunked”
It was never debunked, and no media source was at any point in time justified in characterizing scientists’ skepticism of that theory’s plausibility as “debunked.” They ham-handedly quote a bunch of scientists in that piece saying things like “The possibility this was a deliberately released bioweapon can be firmly excluded” and “It’s a skip in logic to say it’s a bioweapon that the Chinese developed and intentionally deployed, or even unintentionally deployed.” Never mind that that was never the mainstream argument, and certainly not the theory espoused by Tom Cotton, who extremely reasonably noted: “We don’t know where it originated, and we have to get to the bottom of that . . . We also know that just a few miles away from that food market is China’s only biosafety level 4 super laboratory that researches human infectious diseases.” All of which is true.
But the media (and the Washington Post in particular) were not trying to present the truth. They were interested in presenting prominent Republicans (especially competent ones who’d been floated as potential presidential contenders, like Senator Cotton) as ignorant lying nut jobs. Or at least, if they had any other motivation, I’d love to hear a better explanation for this fact pattern and fictitious journalism.
Anyway—Nate Silver is a flawed but interesting gem.
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Answer: 1-star: Brigadier General. 2-star: Major General. 3-star: Lieutenant General. 4-star: just “General.” 5-star: “General of the [Army/Air Force].”