I appreciate many of his takes but you often get the feeling he has this constant, simmering need to be vindicated as the smartest person in the room.
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Can we stop the hate on Nate Silver / Fivethirtyeight.
- Thread starter jman1954goat
- Start date
nate silver has always online brainrot and can basically never logoff
haha, When Roxanne Gay of all people was hitting him with the flamethrower I knew it was through.
That said, it's interesting to see how someone like Nate slipped into conspiracy theory light (yeah, your the only schmuck to uncover these issues involving literally the biggest problem in the world right now, with documents that have been poured over a thousand times over by professionals and by quacks).
It reminds me of Greenwald's slide. At the core of it all it's hubris where you just can't not be the smartest person in the room, so you will change reality so you are.
i give up. i don't know how to twitter
I wondered what the context was for his statement and it isn't unreasonable.
" Age needs to be a higher priority than pre-existing conditions in vaccine rollout plans. Or a lot of people are going to die, unnecessarily. It really is that sample. "
Yeah he misspelled simple.
" am sorry to be a broken record, but it is completely indefensible that ACIP presents data like this showing that age is a FAR bigger risk factor for dying of COVID than pre-existing conditions & yet puts them on the same tier for vaccine prioritization. https://t.co/mdccG7VHXl?amp=1"
Who knows how well he thought this through because probability of exposure matters a lot when setting priorities but it's understandable why he wants the most vulnerable people to covid to get priority over the least vulnerable.
It's not that the idea is unreasonable—it's that it's so simple and obvious to consider that fucking *duh*, of course it's been discussed by experts, there isn't some gigantic blind spot for prioritizing strictly by age, so maybe there are actually some complicating factors.
He has a contrarian personality. Everyone else is always wrong, but he's right. He did the same thing with climate scientists a few years ago.
The level of absolute narcissism and self importance on display here by Nate silver is frankly sickening. What would compel someone without a healthcare degree in medicine of science to even remotely attempt to criticize experts who clearly have decades more knowledge than him on this topic is beyond my comprehension. The dude doesn't even have a degree in basic biology and has no knowledge of biomedical research, public health or medicine. There's a reason why PhD and MD degrees in this space take almost decades. Shit the fuck down and shut up.
After the 2008 election cycle the guy was showered with press as a political Nostradamus and wunderkind. He has ridden those fumes ever since. It's not hard to imagine how someone like that would become "Well actually..." personified.
ewww not just nate once again acting like he's smarter than everyone else about literally everything but also including matt yglesias in his bullshit
As a biomedical scientist, we know not to take subgroup analyses like these as pure fact. They riddled with inherent limitations and biases due to confounding variables. What he's missing here is that the highest age subgroup is likely on the far spectrum of bad outcomes because 90-95% of them likely have high comorbidities like hypertension, diabetes, heart disease, etc, so he's actually supporting the point he's attacking. It's evident he has very little knowledge in science and medicine. This is a rookie mistake in biomedical analysis.
at this point, he's like that character Adam Connover plays on his show, except mostly wrong and incredibly obtuse and dense.
"This looks shopped. I can tell from some of the pixels and from seeing quite a few shops in my time" - Nate silver
The beef is that he's bringing up a "no shit sherlock" point and is jerking himself off over it, and attacking professionals by going "why isn't anyone talking about this?"
This is it. People are too online and become
grandiose.
I think he's pretty wrong here when it comes to weighing age, they should be weighed the same to me I did some brief research modeling comorbidities and other factors and Age and BMI are almost always the highest risk factors for people but many times the morbidities are right there or are directly correlated anyway and many times age is over represented as a factor.
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Him thinking that he is pointing out some big brain critique that medical professionals are unaware of/not talking about is goddamn embarrassing.
Yep and he's screaming about something that is well known already and just looking at that without understanding the methodologies behind selection is kind of..dumb. Especially when in many cases elderly who are in facilities are the highest priority, but then it seems like they mix in elderly with at home care as lower risk based on comorbidities etc and elevate somewhat younger folks based on certain conditions. If you look at just age and weigh it so highly you kind of are missing the big picture when it comes to health. Age is over represented in that data all the time.
Sure, ok, 90 percent is not one hundred percent? What value are they of then?
The forecast is only as good as the polls, and the polls apparently aren't reaching people with "low social trust."
I guess maybe anything less than 80 percent should probably scare the crap out of us, so there's that.
The forecast is only as good as the polls, and the polls apparently aren't reaching people with "low social trust."
I guess maybe anything less than 80 percent should probably scare the crap out of us, so there's that.
ACIP's own data showed prioritizing by age would save 2%-6.5% more lives than other prioritization strategies. But ACIP then recommended other prioritization strategies:
ACIP actually updated their recommendation today to be more like what Nate suggested yesterday:
Good thing we had Nate to call out medical professionals and speak truth to power, otherwise the medical professionals never would have figured this out by themselves
he got glenn greenwald terminal always online contrarian, everybody disagrees and I'm always right
They hadn't figured this out for themselves.
ACIP's interim recommendations were suboptimal, people gave them shit about it, and now ACIP's revised their recommendations in ways that will save lives.
Not sure why we're mad at the people calling out ACIP for publishing recommendations that were obviously misguided.
If you actually look at the document linked in the tweet, it states that the ACIP had 10 public meetings and 28 other meetings to arrive at these recommendations. They state that they took into account expert advice from various scientific communities, and took in public input from focus groups and population surveys (to which they provide links). They make these recommendations after a lot of analysis and thought and communication across the globe. Not because Nate fucking Silver cracked the code on twitter. It's still incredibly embarrassing for him to claim that he was the one looking at the data and not the actual professionals, when the actual professionals have much more data available to them than Nate has, and they debate other professionals in the field. This is just textbook Dunning Kruger syndrome of Nate not realizing how little he knows about the workings of the field and thus thinking he is much more capable than the experts in the field working tirelessly to solve very complex problems.
Are you seriously crediting him for this? He was criticizing months old draft and acting like health professionals weren't thinking about this
He's a moron who should stay in his lane
I've just learned that people like Nate Silver, Nate Cohn, and Dave Wasserman have a limited usefulness. There's only so many ways you can say "here's what the preponderance of evidence suggests, but there's off-chances of so and so happening." The one thing they seemed to agree on was that you can't gleam insights from early voting data, so they're not useful before election day, and only when election day arrives will you learn if an off-chance event happened.
Additionally, they may be subject matter experts in political polling data, but they can easily overestimate their own ability when branching out into fields that are not their own.
Nate has pundit brain and he should absolutely stay in his lane.
The gate keeping in this thread is astonishing.
While his tone is atrocious the question about the draft policy was substantive. Since the ACIP's finalized rule prioritizes age more than the draft rule, he wasn't wrong.
The suggestion that Nate cannot criticize the government is a weird take. Who gets to decide who can participate in the public forum?
For note, I had the exact same concerns reviewing the draft policy, I just didn't have my concerns criticized by all of Twitter since I have 200 followers instead of two million.
While his tone is atrocious the question about the draft policy was substantive. Since the ACIP's finalized rule prioritizes age more than the draft rule, he wasn't wrong.
The suggestion that Nate cannot criticize the government is a weird take. Who gets to decide who can participate in the public forum?
For note, I had the exact same concerns reviewing the draft policy, I just didn't have my concerns criticized by all of Twitter since I have 200 followers instead of two million.
If you look at the document ACIP had published when Nate posted yesterday's tweets, when ACIP had held 9 public meetings and 20+ other meetings... the output of all that work were suboptimal recommendations they revised this morning. Nate and others noticed they were suboptimal yesterday and called that out.
I genuinely don't understand the vitriol here. The recommendations were bad when Nate called out the recommendations for being bad, after months of work and public meetings from expert advice from various scientific communities.
I'm glad there are voices that call out expert advice when it's wrong, as it clearly was in this case.
I don't like Nate Silver because of how self important he is. Problem is ACIP had published sub-optimal guide lines and he was right to call them out for it even if it could have been worded in a less self aggrandizing way. The gate keeping on this is ridiculous, doctors and professionals make mistakes all the time.
Nate's hardly an idiot, but he should either stay in his lane, or actually try to talk to the people that are experts in that field first if he wants to play pundit. He's got the fame and platform, he should be able to do that. He's not some rando on a small forum like we are, and should do better with keeping his hot takes in check.
I mostly go to his site for polling related stuff, and some postmortums on the polling/probabilities and the results.
I mostly go to his site for polling related stuff, and some postmortums on the polling/probabilities and the results.
Developing a vaccine is entirely a scientific question, and Nate Silver would have no reason to speak to that process.
How a society chooses to distribute a vaccine is not solely a scientific question. As has been pointed out, it's also a political, ethical, and statistical question.
It's an important question and one that doesn't benefit from unnecessary gate keeping and calls to authority.
Well some people genuinely thought Nate was wrong and that the experts in their lane didn't make a mistake.So basically:
If Nate hadn't acted like an asshole maybe they would've considered his post better but ultimately at least the experts reconsidered their own data regardless of what made them revise it.
I will add that it is also a manufacturing, logistics, shipping, operational, and practicality question.
I am absolutely unqualified to discuss anything related to epidemiology beyond a 100 maybe 200 level, I am absolutely qualified to talk about everything else on these two lists. If that applies to me it certainly can apply to a qualified statistician as well.
Checking back in a few hours later, wasn't he basically right?
It may not be correct to say he was right since this question is extremely complicated*, but his concerns were not unfounded.
*For example, Pfizer's vaccine gets shipped in batches of about ~900 units. Assuming your priority list is frontline healthcare
/long term care facilities, then over essential workers/ over 75, then comorbidities, how do you identify an essential worker on the ground and how long do you wait before moving down the list at the local level so you dont risk wasting doses or opportunities to get someone vaccinated.