Friday, November 02, 2012

America's fucked up pundit culture in a paragraph

A thoughtful post on Deadspin about Nate Silver and the conservatives who must not accept statistical analysis ... they do not like:
In fact, we’ve reached the point in our screwed-up political media culture where the polling companies and forecasters—not the pundits, not the spokespeople, and certainly not the candidates—are the only people being evaluated rigorously on the substance of their arguments. If Nate Silver and Sam Wang screw up, their popularity will suffer as a result, and they’ll have to reconsider their models. Meanwhile, if Brooks, Jordan, Scarborough, Rubin, or Byers make another poor argument, they’ll continue to collect their paychecks as if nothing had happened.

4 comments:

pansypoo said...

if history can be rewritten, so can statistics.

gratuitous said...

And just wait: Come Nov. 7, as the highly-paid teevee people come on to report on election results, watch and see just how friggin' condescending they can be to those foolish people who thought the election was too close to call.

Why, they knew *all along* that Obama was going to blow Romney out of the water, even though the popular vote totals were kind of close. Be prepared for earnest instruction on this thing called the Electoral College, which was only just now discovered, and how it makes popular vote totals kind of irrelevant. Romney can win Utah by five votes or five skabillion votes, he still only gets five electoral votes for winning that state.

Anonymous said...

Don't think of right wing pundits of prognosticators of truth who should be measured by the accuracy of their predications and observations.

They are like tribal storytellers for a powerful tribe that worships ignorance and violence. They are highly paid to tell stories to pacify the livestock of the tribe (the low-income dumb religion-addled rube trash who keep voting for their own economic rogering) and to flatter their paymasters.

Firing them for making inaccurate predictions would be like firing a fiction writer for writing stories that aren't true.

Jennifer said...

if history can be rewritten, so can statistics.