Nighttime Must-Read: Nate Silver Interview
Nate Silver Interview: The New FiveThirtyEight: “JC: So if you all are the foxes, who’s a hedgehog?
NS: Uhhhh, you know… the op-ed columnists at the New York Times, Washington Post, and Wall Street Journal are probably the most hedgehoglike people. They don’t permit a lot of complexity in their thinking. They pull threads together from very weak evidence and draw grand conclusions based on them. They’re ironically very predictable from week to week. If you know the subject that Thomas Friedman or whatever is writing about, you don’t have to read the column…. It’s people who have very strong ideological priors, is the fancy way to put it, that are governing their thinking. They’re not really evaluating the data as it comes in, not doing a lot of [original] thinking. They’re just spitting out the same column every week and using a different subject matter to do the same thing over and over. It’s ridiculous to me that they undermine every value that these organizations have in their newsrooms. It’s strange. I know it’s cheaper to fund an op-ed columnist than a team of reporters, but I think it confuses the mission of what these great journalistic brands are about.
JC: Are there any notable exceptions out of the crop you just named?
NS: There are some people I like more than others. I think Ross Douthat is someone who shows some originality. He seems to approach each topic freshly, where he has certain kind of semi-conservative views, but he doesn’t let this get in the way of thinking in an interesting way about a subject.
JC: So you’re on the record about hating most pundits and columnists and the big proclamations and narratives that come with them. There’s been no shortage of those directed at you in the lead-up to the site. What do you see as the big false narratives surrounding FiveThirtyEight at the moment?
NS: One thing that’s a little false is that people think this is all about predictions. That’s a part of it, but not most of it, really. That’s really just one tool in our arsenal. We think the first step in using data is that you have to collect data, you have to organize it, and you have to explain the relationships. Only then, in rare cases, do you feel like you have a good enough understanding to generalize it into predictions about the way the world really works. People also think it’s going to be a sports site with a little politics thrown in, or it’s going to be a politics site with sports thrown in. I understand why people say that — what we’ve been known for, plus ESPN, plus ABC News. But we take our science and economics and lifestyle coverage very seriously. We are repositioning FiveThirtyEight away from being a politics site. It’s a data journalism site…