sydnor wrote:Hey td, did you lead the charge against nate silver's "despicable" posts?

http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/20 ... -leak.html

that nate had to apologize for this is appalling. liberal bullies on twitter amirite?

it's nice to have a lil puppy dog fan boy follow me around the board.

i had no idea about the nate silver thing... that's adorable! looks like twitter didn't even need me on this one, heh

Barry Jive wrote:the Silver thing was hilarious. Saw a number of people telling him to just shut up and chill out when he said he was going to write up a long apology

silver is more of a bot than our own Ed

it was pretty inconsequential but it came right in the middle of people furiously checking for Ferguson updates. The mix of awkward lack of awareness and poor timing made it pretty mockable. Maybe it reads differently the next morning because the dust has settled.

right on, barry. doesn't seem that hard to figure out.

also I'm kind of gauging this from my timeline, upon which the most vocal members think 538 has become a really bad site analytically

also it looks like most of the backlash was just humorous pokes at him pointing out the complete lack of self awareness. i think nate silver is gonna be ok

what does your timeline, or my timeline, know what is good or isn't good analytics? would these people think ezra chartklein's site is banging out the hits?

nate silver is an extraordinarily smart man and he's got some really great people on his site. I do question whether there's enough need in the world for a site dedicated to analytics, but that's separate.

I just trust the academics I talk to, many of whom work with economics to a large degree. I'd have to go searching for examples but 538 has blown up some miniscule sample sizes for the sake of pumping out interesting content. The journalism field already suffers from prioritizing interesting content at the expense of extrapolating statistics properly and it's disappointing that a site run by Silver wouldn't be on its game in that regard.

I haven't read much of Vox largely because I hate some of the writers Klein brought along, but fittingly the reasons I hate a guy like Matt Yglesias is that his condescending centrist bullshit is exactly Vox's big picture, dumbed-down explainer style.

I'm still cool with Silver, but those tweets were bad and 538 sucks. I've basically thought so from the beginning but the goddamn burrito bracket kind of sealed it.

karn wrote:Much different tenor to this evening so far, MHP captain and officers now in charge aren't combat clad and are interacting peacefully with the protestors

Ironically enough, I recently read an account of a military person who was thrust into a leadership role in an Iraqi province during the US-led transition period. He said the M.O. there was to not look like threatening military and to interact casually with the locals. So in essence our police aren't even emulating our military anymore.

A little TOO ironic

what does "those tweets were bad" really mean though? Lame? Certainly not apology worthy.

Barry, those academics are haters/jelly. It's the smartest journalism out there, why Nate would be the enemy is beyond me. (note: i'm biased as I successfully interviewed with him and use that as my fun fact whenever meeting new analysts - I can't have him fail).

Finally, I don't really view Yglesias as a centrist at all. I know centrists. Dude's a liberal.

he has an anti-union bent to his writing every time there's some kind of nationally significant labor dispute, so that's why I see him that way. He comes across as a corporate shill at times.

sydnor wrote:(note: i'm biased as I successfully interviewed with him and use that as my fun fact whenever meeting new analysts - I can't have him fail).

you fuckin dweeb

for the record I was happy about the burrito bracket til Los Gallos got bounced in the first round

Barry Jive wrote:for the record I was happy about the burrito bracket til Los Gallos got bounced in the first round

for me it was like why does this and 90% of the other stuff on here deserve a story?...and i like burritos. between that, most of the stories seeming to be vague proof of anecdotal truths and other quasi-statistical novelties, i got a bit bored of it. it's not like they had a ton of great content and a burrito bracket.

political things are pretty decent.

the coverage was extremely bloated and spotty. as a burrito fan I respect the ambition of its scale but it coulda used a little trimming and probably something more exciting than a bracket format

they had articles where the dude just does a search for how many times a certain tag appears in the IMDB.com database, puts it into a table, and calls it a day.

http://fivethirtyeight.com/datalab/noah ... lm-and-tv/

and that wasn't even the first or only article where that was all he did

but yeah, definitely the smartest journalism that's out there right now

td11 wrote:
but yeah, definitely the smartest journalism that's out there right now

Definitely, he's part of the solution, not the problem.

"Successfully interviewed with him..." What does that mean?

Hello Mr. Silver, I am here to interview for my newsletter Message Boarding. First question: As a gay stats nerd, how do you feel about men wearing shorts?

I'm really impressed with Ron Johnson, the Missouri Highway Patrol captain who was put in charge. What a difference from last night.