Nate Silver

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

@zeynep @AlecMacGillis @davidzweig Yeah, fair points! I would argue you should impose restrictions on the singing rather than close churches entirely. Mostly I'm just surprised that the restrictions persisted so long (though SCOTUS eventually sided against them), that churchgoing wasn't considered more "essential" — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

@Noahpinion It's complicated because Asian-Americans have high rates of college attainment and college educated voters are shifting Democratic. I would guess working-class Asian-Americans are shifting pretty strongly GOP, see e.g.: https://t.co/ewgfMCvVrM — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

@sdbaral @davidzweig Yeah, this graphic sort of sums it up for me. https://t.co/opIKg8am88 https://t.co/z0OxCLgPAT — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

COVID decision-making is happening under very high stress and uncertainty. The right decisions aren't at all obvious. People (especially smart people) are rationalization machines. Partisanship is a helluva drug. It's going to be something to cling to *even if not intentionally*! — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

If we zoom back to spring 2020, the most salient fact is that it's an election year, and people making public health decisions are mostly progressive Democrats (public health is very left-leaning). So "do opposite of Trump" is the most powerful heuristic. — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

Yeah this is true. Not to mention public transit and public schools, where the pandemic is still having reverberations. So while I'm arguing that these decisions were influenced by "politics", it's complex because political or ideological commitments tug in different directions. — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

@Wertwhile Bars and casinos are open but not schools? Months of recommendations about staying at home are reversed for the George Floyd protests? There's more than one political vector in play here (e.g. interest groups vs. self-interest vs. ideology/partisanship) but c'mon. — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

@MattGlassman312 @jbview @kdrum Yeah it's like: what are our priors here? We're asking public health officials in conjunction with elected officials to solve a whole bunch of trolley problems. They're well-equipped for some parts of the job but others. *Of course* things beyond "the science" will be involved. — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

@politicalmath Yeah, people absolutely haven't looked at the data. Even in China the lockdowns eventually failed and they're going to wind up with tons of (mostly unreported) excess deaths after 3 years of sort of literally living in a police state. — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

@Wertwhile They were also asking essential workers to sacrifice for people with comfortable WFH jobs. And they made big and fairly openly hypocritical exceptions for the right sort of progressive political protests. — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

@Wertwhile There are a lot of competing factors, some of which argue in the other direction. Churches are often large and fairly spacious, you're sitting down as opposed to circulating, and you could have passed more narrowly-targeted measures (e.g. banning group singing). — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

@NickRiccardi It just seems like a product of a particular type of extremely progressive and secular bureaucratic regime to not define religious worship as "essential". — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

@NickRiccardi Then it seems like the instrumentally effective solution would have been to ban choirs (including e.g. a secular choir), not churches. — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

@DanRosenheck To public health officials in blue states? Of course. Public health is one of the most left-wing fields in medicine, per survey data. I really doubt that there very many regular churchgoers among them. — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

I just don't see how one can look at the totality of public health decisions during the pandemic and not see huge biases toward political "in" groups, as well as toward the preferences (political preferences, risk-tolerance preferences) of the people making the decisions. — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

You ever been to the Louvre, The Vatican or even the MoMA? And it wasn't just museums that were more open than churches: in some states, it was casinos! https://t.co/H5VT7dghD8 — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

@davidzweig @ewinsberg Thank you! I think COVID exposed the lack of any coherent moral philosophy. Which was to be expected, I guess. But what substituted for it was bias toward people who were making the rules and/or affiliated interest groups, partisanship, and "make those dashboards turn green". — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

@davidzweig Yeah. It's a hard to *prove*, but I think most of the evidence suggests that extended lockdowns and closures were bad from a utilitarian/consequentialist standpoint. But they were *also* bad from a civil liberties standpoint, especially when we're talking about religious worship. — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

It's kind of crazy (and tells you a lot about who was writing the restrictions) that churches in some jurisdictions were subject to more restrictions than museums! Not even attempting to follow any sort of epidemiological principles. https://t.co/bo8WWJgzCL https://t.co/d2ykUjcxM6 — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

@Noahpinion OK let's say I have a low-confidence belief that YIMBYs are Good with P=60%. I see that Noah has written a blog saying YIMBYs are good, so I update to 70% because I generally trust your judgement. But then I read your post and it's full of logical errors. So I go down to 55%. — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

@Noahpinion IDK I think I'm looking more toward examples where the person purports to be authoritative, e.g. an academic study that makes big claims in the abstract, a blog post framed as an epic takedown, a 20-post Twitter THREAD more than a one-off reply. — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

@Noahpinion Do you ever update in a positive direction after hearing someone's argument, i.e. you're persuaded? If so, I'd argue it's necessarily the case that you also have to sometimes update negatively instead. Otherwise you'll just ping-ping around based on which argument you read last. — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

@lastpositivist I guess I'd posit a distinction between having trouble explaining the intuition behind something, and purporting to offer extremely convincing evidence for something but the evidence is poor. — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

"Winning the debate" can be accomplished by tactics such as being extremely annoying so the other party quits, but that's very much not the same thing as having made the better argument. — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

@WashburneAlex Not that you needed it with this particular person but hard to have a bigger tell that someone can't think rigorously than to assign a one-in-a-million probability in an environment of intrinsically high uncertainty. — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

Another nerdy and probably obvious tweet. But it's important to keep in mind that when someone makes a big claim but presents poor evidence for it, you should adjust your beliefs *against* the claim and become more likely to assume the claim is false. — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

The NYT literally has the leaps-and-bounds best election night team in the business (Upshot) and they obvioisly didn't even consult them for the story! Juicy narrative though. — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

It obviously doesn't justify Fox's indulgence of election denialism but the call of Arizona was premature and the NYT probably ought to have talked to a few practitioners about that for their story. — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

@jbarro They didn't have a better model. Making calls on election night is really hard. It's a thankless job. But there wasn't an adequate basis to call it early on Nov. 3. Not particularly close. They fired too early and got lucky. Narratives to the contrary should be viewed as dubious. — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

@Neil_Irwin @felixsalmon Yeah to Felix's point, I'm pretty sure (as a person for whom restaurants is a big spending category and has some degree of public notoriety) that I already get "lucky" more often than average with things like table selection or maybe an extra appetizer. — PolitiTweet.org