Nate Silver

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

@saletan @mattyglesias Yeah and now imagine it from say the NYTs point of view. They love #1 and it's a good way to acquire customers. But they are ambivalent at best about #2. And while they like the idea of #3, they'd prefer to capture the value themselves, e.g. in a comments section for subscribers. — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

@mattyglesias I tend to agree FWIW and I also think Twitter is performing 2 or 3 semi-distinct functions (1. Very good newswire/aggregator; 2. Forum for elite-to-elite conversation; 3. Forum for elite conversation with "the audience") that could become divided. — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

@Protentialmn @AllenKessler There are a lot of really terrible chip kits though where colors are hard to distinguish from one another. In those cases a lot to be said for announcing bet sizes as a default. — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

@conor64 At some point it's like "Silicon Valley contrarians buck liberal consensus by announcing they like ice cream". — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

@aedwardslevy This is nonjokingly a good skill to have in both personal and journalistic contexts where it's important to get an honest opinion. — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

@tomscocca I'm pretty good at sportsbetting actually. — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

@JamesSurowiecki There are lots of electric vehicles at this point so I think Tesla's market tends to come more from people who just think their cars are Really Cool. But most people are terrible at prioritization including especially most people who work in politics. — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

@JamesSurowiecki He's very much a normie that way, though I'd suggest a lot of "sophisticated" political news consumers *also* focus on the Argument Of The Day as opposed to the highest impact long-term issues. — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

@SeanTrende @mattyglesias I also think Peak Blog Era was one of those times when it was less clear that Democrats were moving left and the asymmetric argument was stronger. A lot of moderate Ds got elected in 2006, then Obama had a very broad coalition of the center and left in 2008. — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

@mattyglesias @SeanTrende I mean some of the solution is just good "traditional" journalism practice, e.g. a) rarely rely on one study, just as you'd rarely rely on one source; b) be alert to the possibility of explicit or implicit bias if the study addresses a hot-button political topic. — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

@SeanTrende It's true that people don't understand the details behind DW-Nominate or why it's an imperfect measure of left-right ideology. But I can think of *much* worse expert or academic work that has been memeified into "science proves the liberals are right!". — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

@SeanTrende IMO it's a sign of a different problem: confirmation bias. If you look at a bundle of quantitate and qualitative measures of ideology, most of them say the left is moving leftward. DW-N is the exception, and so people use it to argue "science proves polarization asymmetric". — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

@JamesSurowiecki @dandrezner I think this gets complicated because there's a pretty big gap between senior Silicon Valley VCs/founders/thought-leaders and junior employees of the tech companies and I'm referring to the former group. — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

@dandrezner Probably right. But one other irony is that *pre-Musk* Twitter is much more left-wing than "the left" overall, *especially* on issues (free speech/wokeness/cancel culture, tech regulation, COVID) where the left is misaligned with libertarian-ish tech world thought. — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

@micsolana I tend to put a lot of weight in the fact that the GOP has become more authoritarian and hostile to democracy. They *have* moderated on some economic and foreign policy issues. But in the past few years there are renewed attacks on abortion, and on LGBTQ people. — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

DW-Nominate is useful for some purposes. Congress members who break party lines more often tend to perform well electorally, for instance. But there are much more direct ways to study ideology, such as by looking at surveys of voters, or party platforms. https://t.co/wngIRDBxAf — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

This is based on DW-Nominate, an algorithm that measures clusters of voting patterns in the U.S. Congress without knowing anything about the content of the legislation. It is an OK measure of *party-line voting in the US Congress* but NOT a very good one of left-right ideology. https://t.co/q507fOaVwl — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

But what Elon is encountering on Twitter is not the Democratic Party but left-leaning "thought leaders" (e.g. media, academics, experts, activists) and the leftmost of those folks have moved to the left especially in the *public* sphere (maybe privately not as much). — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

You can, of course, complicate the story as much as you want, including by noting that the *Democratic Party* is not synonymous with the left and the Republican Party is not synonymous with the right and the *GOP* has probably radicalized more than the Democratic Party. — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

Folks, it's not that hard, the left has moved to the left in the US *and* the right has moved to the right. — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

@MattZeitlin Wait until they find out about her Secret Service detail! — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

@mattyglesias One thing I'm pretty sure Twitter does is make mainstream media coverage more left-leaning, and an interesting question is whether this helps the left's political goals by controlling more—but my no means *that* much of—"the narrative", or hurts them by reducing trust in the MSM. — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

@NickRiccardi @daveweigel @jbarro Definitely think you're right that a lot of people are agnostic or indifferent. I do worry, though, that polls are much more likely to be responded to by highly politically-engaged people and they're more likely to have strong opinions about masks. — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

@NickRiccardi @daveweigel @jbarro Maybe, but the people who fly most frequently are affluent people in cities, and they're a pretty D-leaning group who claim to be *more* likely to wear masks in this poll. — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

This is like saying the fans at a basketball game are more important than the players. The elite-to-elite interactions are what make Twitter distinctive, and those interactions are mostly of a political nature. For following your favorite celebs other platforms are way better. — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

Putting free speech in quotation marks (i.e. "free speech") has quickly become one of those things that reveals a lot about your political affiliation, sort of like referring to the "Democrat Party". — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

@jbarro Sorry meant to say court testimony not Congressional testimony, that's what happens when you tweet thoughts that are 30% finished! — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

@jbarro Greene has also been in the news a lot due to her Congressional testimony. This feels like a story that got published when it was about 30% finished and there was a lot more reporting to do. — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

@mattyglesias I think some of the issue is there's little reasoning from first principles in Politics Brain these days (all super ad-hoc) whereas there's lots of abstract "principled" thinking in Tech Bro Brain but little domain knowledge of politics so the application of principles is naive. — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

@mattyglesias Yeah, I think there's a pretty straightforward case that Twitter has hurt the left? Among other things, it encourages a lot of clout-chasing, and that clout is sometimes earned by adopting unpopular positions and/or dunking on people who seek to dissent from them. — PolitiTweet.org