Nate Silver

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

@notdred @thehowie It's hard to know what their original intent was. But clearly they were subject to some wishful thinking about how much seropositivity had been achieved. — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

@kmedved Yeah, it's hard to know what the right answer is. Intuitively I'd be inclined to give the other Nordics a fair amount of weight. OTOH, the other Nordics are pretty major outliers relative to the rest of Europe or "The West" generally. — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

@thehowie I think there was a lot of hocus-pocus around how the Swedish strategy was sold when it would have been more honest if they'd just said "we're not willing to trade off quite as much freedom/quality-of-life as other countries, even if it means higher mortality". — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

I sorta feel like people should hold off on strong Sweden COVID takes unless they preregistered their view on whether it should be compared only to other Scandinavian/Nordic countries (compared to which, it had far more deaths) or say to all EU countries (about average). https://t.co/rsT2DF5wDq — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

RT @TheSimpsons: Probability that @GStephanopoulos and @NateSilver538 have a 50/50 chance of being correct? 100%. https://t.co/JclpTOFEhE — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

One thing to remember about social media is that some people are completely crazy (whether they're merely crazy on social media or also IRL is somewhat beside the point) and it's important not to trick yourself into thinking otherwise. — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

RT @ThisWeekABC: Is a lack of access to social media a barrier to a possible future political campaign? @fivethirtyeight's @natesilver538 b… — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

@notdred @conorsen For sure, so interesting to watch the places that both have decent vaccine uptake and which have decently high seropositivity from natural infection, e.g. NYC, LA, Miami-Dade. — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

@conorsen I mean in NYC 46% of the population (58% of adults) have had at least one dose + an estimated 40% of the population had COVID by late February per @youyanggu. That's a lot of immunity of some form or another. — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

@conorsen Without getting into a debate about how one ought to define herd immunity or a prediction about what might happen, it was kind of silly to see articles this week claiming that the notion of herd immunity in the US was *off the table*. — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

@Noahpinion I think it's complicated. First wave, there was lots of staying at home, but tests were very hard to come by and messaging around masks was mixed. 2nd and 3rd waves, better masking and testing, and more of an understanding that outdoors was safer, but much less staying at home. — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

We're at 45k cases/day with a week to go here so should wind up being fairly close between the bottom two categories. Good job by the wisdom of crowds here as most correctly saw cases declining by this point despite a lot of media consternation about a "fourth wave". — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

@joshtpm I haven't, although we're probably at the point now where even in blue states, it's mostly red people who are vax-resistant. — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

@joshtpm It's the sharp, nonlinear nature of the decline and the exact timing of the decline with the J&J pause that implicates it. You would have expected a much more rounded peak under normal conditions. — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

@davidlazer No one was expecting a drop-off in first doses that looks like El Capitan and everyone would have conceded that the pause was a terrible idea if they'd seen that graph in advance. — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

@joshtpm And the drop in first doses was considerably larger than the amount of J&J doses that were being supplied, so I'm suggesting there was both a direct impact (no J&J appointments) and an indirect one (increasing hesitancy). — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

@joshtpm Universal eligibility should increase uptake, so the fact that eligibility was continuously expanding and vaccinations were still plummeting makes the pause look even worse. — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

BTW, vaccine hesitant people are likely to be hard to reach in surveys. Mostly non college educated, conservative, young, low social trust. That's kind of a perfect storm of people who it's hard to get to complete a poll. — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

Maybe instead of trying to heroically interpret ambiguous survey data, we should look directly at the variable of interest: how many people are getting vaccinated. It underwent a huge nonlinear plunge timed *exactly* to the J&J pause and has never recovered (see below). https://t.co/pC7OhdVq1h — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

@williamjordann FWIW it's a pretty good but somewhat overpriced and not particularly beloved restaurant. Not a journalist or foodie hangout I wouldn't think. — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

It would the the Congress elected in 2024 (not 2022) that decides this. Nonetheless, it's sort of shocking that Democrats don't seem to have much of a plan to make this harder (e.g. through new legislation) while they have their majorities. (H.R. 1 doesn't really address it.) — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

RT @galendruke: 🎧 New pod 🎧 How Partisanship Explains Our Pandemic Behavior w/ @NateSilver538, @maggiekb1 & @emmaogreen https://t.co/RA… — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

RT @NateSilver538: If you've appreciated 538's coverage amid a very tough year—and I've certainly appreciated reading from and learning fro… — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

@mattyglesias Maybe to some degree. But there's still a lot of work being done here to keep the lab-leak hypothesis at arm's-length as standing apart from the "mainstream" theory of natural origin, even as the article also provides reasons to be critical of the WHO. https://t.co/j9SWXluG5U — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

@mattyglesias Papers like the NYT have the resources to interrogate these questions on their own too, rather than just passing on what others are saying. — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

@mattyglesias The tone of some of those articles is strange though (see below). They're written in such a way as to imply it's vaguely unseemly to ask these questions before grudgingly acknowledging the scientists asking them might have a point. https://t.co/jpuW5Ezd60 https://t.co/l6tlPGwHjc — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

...both special elections and the generic ballot. Tried a bunch of different model specifications, etc. The special election results added nothing, contradicting my priors. They're sort of fool's gold. — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

I'll confess I believed the opposite until a few years ago, when I actually did the work to study this in updating our Congressional model in 2018. We collected a ton of special election results, were excited to have an metric of the political environment that incorporated... — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

This isn't true, though, empirically. Special election results don't add predictive power in forecasting Congressional outcomes once you have polling data (e.g. generic ballot polls). Certainly an *individual* race doesn't tell you much. But even collectively they don't add much. — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

@DouthatNYT I feel like I'm totally ill-equipped to know what to make of the lab-leak claims, but I also think mainstream media coverage of this issue has been rather cursory. — PolitiTweet.org