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Nerds under attack!
Paul Krugman is calling out National Review Online for their attempted takedown of Nate Silver for biased methods and somehow cooking the books. Krugman writes:
This is, of course, reminiscent of the attack on the Bureau of Labor Statistics — not to mention the attacks on climate science and much more. On the right, apparently, there is no such thing as an objective calculation. Everything must have a political motive.
Now more commentators on the right, including Jay Cost (The Weekly Standard) and Jennifer Rubin (Washington Post), are getting in on the act. Wow, dogpile on the rabbit!
A popular approach to undermining technical knowledge is to throw mud, assert expertise, make picky points, and sow doubts among the less savvy. In this case, what’s the argument? The NRO writer, Josh Jordan, makes this core criticism:
...
Partly because of this risk, I have stayed with simpler rules such as
Accept all polls for analysis (with a preference for likely voters).
Use median-based statistics to prevent outliers from taking over the show (“A nonpartisan statistical approach to Rasmussen data,” Aug. 6).
Combined with a probabilistic calculation, these rules guided our Meta-Analysis to the exact EV outcome in 2004. It missed by only 1 EV in 2008. Such simple methods are easy to make transparent. You (or Jay Cost, I guess) could download my code in an instant.
http://election.princeton.edu/2012/10/29/nerds-under-attack/#more-8151
This is, of course, reminiscent of the attack on the Bureau of Labor Statistics — not to mention the attacks on climate science and much more. On the right, apparently, there is no such thing as an objective calculation. Everything must have a political motive.
Now more commentators on the right, including Jay Cost (The Weekly Standard) and Jennifer Rubin (Washington Post), are getting in on the act. Wow, dogpile on the rabbit!
A popular approach to undermining technical knowledge is to throw mud, assert expertise, make picky points, and sow doubts among the less savvy. In this case, what’s the argument? The NRO writer, Josh Jordan, makes this core criticism:
...
Partly because of this risk, I have stayed with simpler rules such as
Accept all polls for analysis (with a preference for likely voters).
Use median-based statistics to prevent outliers from taking over the show (“A nonpartisan statistical approach to Rasmussen data,” Aug. 6).
Combined with a probabilistic calculation, these rules guided our Meta-Analysis to the exact EV outcome in 2004. It missed by only 1 EV in 2008. Such simple methods are easy to make transparent. You (or Jay Cost, I guess) could download my code in an instant.
http://election.princeton.edu/2012/10/29/nerds-under-attack/#more-8151