Nate Silver

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

@barry I guess what I'm getting at here is how should a layperson assess competing expert claims, which is challenging. It would obviously be better to investigate this from scratch but I don't have the domain expertise. I see contradictory expert takes and I'm trying to evaluate them. — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

@florian_krammer I'm nervous that you're that confident but you've had a very good track record and I really appreciate you going on record with this. — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

Sure you can. In fact, people unavoidably do it all the time. It may not be a particularly robust estimate. But this is the whole basis of Bayesian thinking. — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

Maybe a lazy heuristic. But TBH, when the evidence is murky and there are plenty of experts lining up on both sides, but one side is excessively concerned with policing the discourse (see e.g. the tweet I cited), I tend to think that side is more likely than not to be wrong. — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

OK let's get this on record. What percentage chance would you assign to a lab leak? Because there are a lot of credible people I'm reading from and talking to that consider it reasonably likely (at least 50%). — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

@Herring_NBA Yeah I haven't lived in NYC in an era when the Knicks made a lot of deep playoff runs. The one Linsanity game I went to was fun and raucous but not quite as intense as the other night. Some NHL Playoff elimination games might get pretty close. — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

@Herring_NBA I went to Game 1 and definitely a Top 5 experience for me in terms of crowd intensity in any sport. — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

If life has taught me nothing else, it's that when there's an unusually long delay for your order at the coffee shop/restaurant/whatever, there probably was some snafu ("they forgot to put it in") and you're not being a jerk for politely inquiring about it. — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

This helps to explain some of what I see my role as having been re: COVID. I trust the experts. But I know how media works, and how media narratives can diverge from the (often more complicated) expertise. So I'll tend to highlight those incongruities. https://t.co/2kqU6momQj https://t.co/ZsSZRw2Tww — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

Not saying they should mercy-rule the Celtics but we're 7 minutes in and the entire team has been outscored by Joe Harris. — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

@pbump @mattyglesias Hashtag datajournalism — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

I mean... it's certainly not all of it, but a lot of the reason that elite discourse around the lab-leak stuff and some other aspects of COVID have changed is because there's more distance from Trump. — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

Just a pinch of a weird result. Emerson's last poll taken immediately after her NYT endorsement had Garcia at 8%. But, this poll itself could generate favorable attention for her. Adams, Garcia, Yang now a fairly clear top 3 in some order. — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

@MattZeitlin @conorsen That'd because Shor's ideas that got him cancelled are actually very popular with the liberal-leaning, upper-middlebrow, mainstream-media-reading audience, whereas his electoral assessment isn't necessarily. — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

I suppose one useful Bayesian question is: How many cities around the world house major research facilities into coronaviruses (especially gain-of-function research) vs. How many are close to potential animal reservoirs of coronaviruses? — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

p.s. Wouldn't surprise me if RCV polling is actually easier in the long run, at least in the sense of a poll predicting the right winner. It's arguably a more robust system given that a candidate needs to have broad support rather than e.g. flukishly winning with 21% of the vote. — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

If you're absolutely terrified of RCV then just do a first-past-the-post poll where you ask just about first preferences and compare it actual first preferences. That's *lame* and less useful than an RCV poll would be, but at least it removes the excuse that RCV is too hard. — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

If pollsters want to sit out high-profile races that's their prerogative. It may align with their incentives. Pollsters get a ton of crap when they're "wrong" but little credit when they're "right" and that's a deterrent to doing more polling. Don't give me this RCV BS though. — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

There's also been quite a bit of polling in the NYC mayor's race, just not much of it from the traditional "gold standard" firms. The same was true in the Georgia Senate runoffs and guess what happened? The polling did very, very well there. — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

Yeah, the claim that ranked choice voting is the reason that (some) pollsters are sitting out the NYC race strikes me as total bullshit, more or less. Rather, it's likely a fairly hard race to poll and they're afraid of being wrong. But that has very little to do with RCV. — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

But IDK ^^^ that's liable to be a pretty unreliable heuristic (trying to triangulate private beliefs from carefully-worded public statements). — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

Basically what I want to know is: what would experts say if you gave them truth serum? Given that many experts are now publicly entertaining the possibility of a lab leak when that would be a somewhat inconvenient conclusion, I assume their private belief might be higher. — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

Yeah, this is probably right. I wrote the other day how my priors had shifted from "natural origin slightly more likely" to "lab leak slightly more likely". But to me anyway, the evidence seems murky and inscrutable either way and I'm not sure it has *changed* that much. — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

RT @jacobdotgov: sensing a pattern https://t.co/6SOb0DDjpF — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

LOL https://t.co/cqE87pfI6T https://t.co/BpfsUID6SD — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

RT @ryanmatsumoto1: Biden's approval rating, per the @FiveThirtyEight polling average: Today (5/24): 54% One month ago (4/24): 54% Two mon… — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

@notdred Yeah, she moved from like 5% to maybe 10%, which is not nothing. But so far it looks like a one-off shift and it's not clear that she'll continue gaining ground. I thought there was some chance that elite opinion would coalesce around her as the non-Yang, non-Adams alternative. — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

I think one could deny that she has momentum. She got the NYT endorsement, which probably does matter in a New York Democratic primary. But endorsements since then have been all over the place and she's essentially tied with several other candidates for 3rd place in the polls. — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

@BenjySarlin I'm not sure "distrusted" is the operative term here. Yang, Buttigieg and Klobuchar all seemed trigger outsized hatred for having a sort of normie, dudebro appeal that culturally is pretty far removed from the trappings of left blog culture. — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

RT @mkonnikova: The paperback of “The Biggest Bluff” is out in just a few weeks. Excited to launch it into the word with the great @NateSil… — PolitiTweet.org