Nate Silver

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

It's a weird skill set that probably leads me to an above-average number of weird—and no doubt, sometimes wrong or misinformed—takes. And there's ample room to criticize generalists/jacks-of-all-trades. But that's the correct critique, not a "pollster straying out of his lane". — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

Venting but I sort of get frustrated when people refer to me as e.g. a "pollster". I started my career as a management consultant. Quit to play poker and build baseball forecasting models. Spent 4 years writing a popular science/economics book. (I've been *extremely* fortunate.) — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

@DavMicRot @ABC I'm sorry if this makes me seem too traditional, but my job is a journalist is to analyze public opinion and public policy as honestly as I can. I think the FDA's decision will probably lower public confidence in the vaccines. It's not my job to do clean-up for them. — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

@conorsen It's all tied together in some sense though. I think NYC's superior art/culture scene to SF makes it a more robust proposition. — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

@conorsen I'm sort of long NYC and short SF. — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

@davidshor I was talking with a friend last night who comes from a family of doctors but went into finance and a lot of this is that economist-brain and doctor-brain are pretty different. As someone with a severe case of economist-brain, I sometimes have trouble understanding doctor-brain. — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

@thehowie I hope so too. — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

@notdred I certainly not a perfect precedent, but generally I'm a fan of the idea that n=1 >> n=0 in low-information situations. — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

COVID-19 is a unique enough circumstance that *everybody* is just making educated guesses. But it surely seems relevant that hesitancy about the AZ vaccine greatly increased in EU countries that paused administration of it, but not in the UK which didn't. https://t.co/GnN8ilIrg2 https://t.co/9F4IVvTLKq — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

RT @JamesSurowiecki: It is ridiculous to say that Nate Silver is not qualified to speak about how a government action might shape public op… — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

I also have a lot of fairly unique first-hand experience in trying to communicate complex statistical information under intense public scrutiny. I'm all for expertise but these are incredibly complicated questions and it should be defined broadly and not narrowly. — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

Also, the most important aspect of whether the the decision to suspend the J&J vaccine is correct is the effect it will have on public opinion about the vaccines, so having a background in studying public opinion is pretty relevant. — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

I guess I'm old-fashioned but I tend to think that when your first instinct is to attack someone's credentials, you don't have a good argument, especially when it comes to complex multidisciplinary policy questions that it's good to have different perspectives on. — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

@MattZeitlin @PatrickRuffini Plus, the subset of people who are on the fence about vaccines are mostly not super-high-information voters. They're not reading the NYT or 538. They're busy people who are going to rely on headlines, local news coverage and word-of-mouth. — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

@MattZeitlin @PatrickRuffini I hate to say it but both local and national outlets that don't have health/science reporters have often been poor when it comes to COVID. So they're a big concern. And lots of people are just going to see the headlines anyway with words like "FDA", "vaccines" and "side effects". — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

@zeynep Yeah, plus there's the dirty little secret that not *that* many people were getting vaccinated with J&J anyway because of the manufacturing delays. But that's all the more reason to think about the signal it would send abroad, etc. — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

@apoorva_nyc I don't understand the secrecy argument at all. The UK announced they were investigating but that the benefits outweighed the risks so people should keep getting vaccinated. That worked perfectly fine. FDA could have done the same. https://t.co/Yk49aSnffk https://t.co/olKdoYopLY — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

@apoorva_nyc We have some extremely relevant empirical evidence here, though. The EU countries paused AZ delivery to investigate clotting, the UK did not, and AZ vaccine hesitancy greatly increased in the EU but not the UK. https://t.co/SxWZicJSWL https://t.co/0WDkt4V74k — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

@apoorva_nyc But many people will read the closure as "there must be a very serious risk of shark attacks, worse than they're letting on" and not "authorities are merely being careful". The pairing of the phrase "abundance of caution" with strong, decisive action is a fraught one. https://t.co/Bb0oE5zTAM — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

There are some other options: * Say you're continually monitoring complications and this rare event doesn't warrant a pause at the current time but of course you'll investigate further. * Pause only for 16-49 year old women. * Quietly investigate and *then* announce the results. — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

I'm obviously in the "it's a negative" camp. And obviously, I could be wrong. But given how much COVID is a political/media focal point, both groups have relevant expertise. Does the FDA have a process to consult with broader, more varied types of experts on questions like these? — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

Interesting that people in the public health sphere seem to be pretty agnostic on what effect the J&J pause will have on vaccine hesitancy (maybe leaning toward it being a slight positive) while the sentiment of people who cover politics/media is toward it being a clear negative. — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

@kakape Some of this is coming in the context of broader critiques I have of decision-making on COVID, which I'm going to be writing about in longform at some point in the future. So it's less of an off-the-cuff reaction than it might seem. — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

@kakape @FiveThirtyEight Also take this with a large grain of salt, but as someone who studies public opinion and media in the US, I tend to think this will be seized upon by anti-vaxxers and will lead to more skeptical coverage of vaccines from the media and be harmful on net. — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

@kakape @FiveThirtyEight A blanket pause seems harder to justify, though, and that's what we got. On ii) the AZ polling and uptake data from Europe strongly suggests this will increase hesitancy on balance. — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

@kakape @FiveThirtyEight On i) since young women are both at lower risk of death from COVID and (possibly) higher risk of clots, the decision could be close for that group. Of course there are other complications: they can pass the disease to others, they can get long COVID, etc. — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

@kakape @FiveThirtyEight I really appreciate the civility here. I think the two main differences are i) that the FDA did a blanket pause rather than a targeted one for say women aged 16-49 and ii) I think we *can* make some educated guesses about the effects on vaccine hesitancy. — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

@ashishkjha If it's for a few days, it mostly comes down to the effects on vaccine hesitancy, which I tend to infer are strongly downside-weighted, although weren't part of the calculation I was going for in that thread. — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

@ashishkjha I do 100% agree though that I should have used a lower IFR given that we've done a good job of vaccinating older/vulnerable people. (Although, I'd note that figures into a lot of cost-benefit calculations and not just this one.) — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

@ashishkjha This is tricky because if you pause for 3 days and then get the J&J dose anyway, you bear the same risk of clots but do take the small but nontrivial risk of 3 days of exposure to COVID. I was assuming a longer pause where people ultimately wind up taking a different vaccine. — PolitiTweet.org