Nate Silver

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

If draft picks are worth up to 5x their slot value it seems like a draft pick such as [just to randomly pick a name out of a hat] 2x All-American and Golden Spikes Award finalist Kumar Rocker must be an especially great investment! — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

Not that anyone bothers to be logically consistent anymore. But imagine e.g. how liberals would feel about protocols that gave unelected "homeland security" bureaucrats powers to unilaterally enact sweeping changes to society because of perceived terrorist threats. — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

Because these aren't purely (and often aren't even primarily) health decisions so they should be made by elected officials who can take advice from their health agencies in the context of the overall situation. — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

It's entertaining to see certain Very Online Weirdos twist themselves into knots to come out against the idea that ... it's useful to apply cost-benefit analysis when making decisions. — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

RT @AnnieDuke: Do you take your child places in a car? If your answer is yes, then you agree with @NateSilver538 and @jonathanchait that ce… — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

Anecdotally, Elizabeth Warren was way more popular in my social networks than she was in the polls. The polls were right. — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

This is the single most important fact of the current stage of the epidemic. Vaccines are radically reducing fatality rates in counties that have vaccinated elderly and vulnerable people. It's way more important than whether there are slightly more breakthrough infections. — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

To be fair lots of people I talk to in real life seem to understand cost-benefit calculations under COVID just fine, but this website tends to amplify stupidity among a certain class of neurotic weirdos. — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

@notdred @samhorwich I'd assumed a few weeks ago that the debate had moved beyond closures. But there are enough panicky liberals who seem to be treating the Delta variant as the bubonic plague that I'm becoming less confident about that. — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

@notdred Oster was talking about the costs of isolation for kids and @samhorwich led the conversation astray with a non-sequitur argument about mitigation measures. He's also far from the first dude who's a lot dumber than Oster who made an ineffectual attempt to dunk on her. — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

RT @ScottGottliebMD: Study: post-vax delta breakthrough infections are infrequent and when they occur, they're typically shorter in duratio… — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

RT @SeanTrende: @NateSilver538 If I had told someone 5 years ago that I was pulling my kids from school, ending playdates and withdrawing t… — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

Is social isolation of tens of millions of children and huge disruption to their educational development acceptable? Under ordinary circumstances, of course not. But COVID forces society to pick between "unacceptable" options. I appreciate experts like Oster who acknowledge that. — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

There's a certain segment of public health people (not the majority but an influential minority) who are like physically incapable of cost-benefit analysis. — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

@peterstaley @sullydish You shouldn't feel any need to walk back, your point that this is a poor example to generalize from is both important and correct. — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

EXCLUSIVE (must credit @NateSilver538) * At least 35,000,000 unvaccinated Americans have tested positive for Covid. * Ken should take a course in statistics. — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

@danengber It kind of seems like you think the media should lie to people if it serves narrow utilitarian purposes? — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

I say "naive" because when you give media outlets a scoop, they tend to sensationalize its importance rather than put it into context. The NYT in particular has an editorial culture that will blow any proprietary info completely out of perspective, as they did in this instance. — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

Media coverage of recent Delta news has been terrible but the CDC also had a terrible and naive communications strategy of leaking details to e.g. the NYT instead of just of making them publicly available. https://t.co/fcL55ogtb5 — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

RT @ashishkjha: Lots of confusion about what Provincetown outbreak & CDC guidance mean Mainly: how to think about spread among the vaccina… — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

If the CDC revised all of its priors about COVID based on an analysis of spring break on Daytona Beach, people would have some understandable questions about that. But that's a pretty good approximation for Provincetown on a July 4 weekend. — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

Honestly @twitter should probably flag that @nytimes tweet for being misinformation. — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

One other point I'd highlight re: the current Delta Panic is that it's driven media innumeracy rather than by what the Actual Experts™ think. Here e.g. is the White House pushing back vs. an extremely misleading and harmful @nytimes tweet that NYT is too stubborn to correct. — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

Thread. One point I'd highlight is, it's HIGHLY dubious for the CDC to assume that 50% of COVID infections are currently being detected given how little testing we're doing (I've seen e.g. @ScottGottliebMD suggest <=10%) so that makes it hard to trust their model on other points. — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

RT @mattyglesias: 9/10 base rate fallacies are committed by right-handed people. — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

@JamesSurowiecki I think what happened is the CDC thought it would be pressed for "new" evidence to explain why the policy had changed so it wound up overemphasizing this rather tenuous data, but things got much worse by the NYT and panicky people on Twitter grossly exaggerating its significance. — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

@ZoeMcLaren Yeah. And I'm actually fine with the idea that we can do a little more masking in high-risk indoor settings. But the way the evidence was rolled out was not ideal, to say the least. — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

RT @ZoeMcLaren: @NateSilver538 If only they’d released this study two days ago or delayed the masking announcement by two day. It puts ever… — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

To take a self-selected, not-statistically-significant sample of ~200 nondiverse people during a party weekend that was an outlier in many respects, and use it to conclude that breakthrough infections are just as likely to transmit the virus, seems like quite the stretch. — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

Finally I'd note that the sample sizes here are tiny, leading to very wide confidence intervals. And the "real life" confidence intervals are likely even wider given that (as the study authors say) the sample isn't very diverse. (P-town = mostly affluent middle-aged gay men.) https://t.co/llLfxC1jhK — PolitiTweet.org