by Patrick Appel
Leon Wieseltier attacks Nate Silver’s new site:
Many of the issues that we debate are not issues of fact but issues of value. There is no numerical answer to the question of whether men should be allowed to marry men, and the question of whether the government should help the weak, and the question of whether we should intervene against genocide. And so the intimidation by quantification practiced by Silver and the other data mullahs must be resisted. Up with the facts! Down with the cult of facts!
An opinion with a justification may be described as a belief. The justification that transforms an opinion into a belief may in some instances be empirical, but in many instances, in the morally and philosophically significant instances, it will not be empirical, it will be rational, achieved in the establishment of the truth of concepts or ideas by the methods of argument and the interpretation of experience. A certain kind of journalistic commentary, when it is done rightly, is a popular version of the same project, an application of thoughtfully (and sometimes wittily) held principles to public affairs, and is therefore an essential service to a free society. The intellectual predispositions that Silver ridicules as “priors” are nothing more than beliefs. What is so sinister about beliefs? He should be a little more wary of scorning them, even in degraded form: without beliefs we are nothing but data, himself included, and we deserve to be considered not only from the standpoint of our manipulability. I am sorry that he finds George Will and Paul Krugman repetitious, but should they revise their beliefs so as not to bore him? Repetition is one of the essential instruments of persuasion, and persuasion is one of the essential activities of a democracy.
Michael Brendan Dougherty sticks up for Silver:
Wieseltier’s form of critique has been paraphrased elsewhere: Numbers can’t tell us everything. They cannot tell us what kind of policies we should have. They cannot tell us what to love or hate or aim for in life. This is a truism pretending to contradict something.
When Silver writes, “We’re trying to just do analysis. We’re not trying to sway public opinion on anything except trying to make them more numerate,” he is obviously defining the limited scope of his website’s mission; he is not revising downward the entirety of worthy human knowledge, judgment, and endeavor. Silver writes, “Our methods are not meant to replace ‘traditional’ or conventional journalism. We have the utmost admiration for journalists who gather original information and report original stories.”
Somehow after reading this “aw-shucks” manifesto in which Silver rather self-deprecatingly defines a niche for his site, Wieseltier has in his mind a totalitarian threat. Shortly thereafter he commands his readers to resist the “intimidation by quantification” by Silver and other “data mullahs.”
When FiveThirtyEight authors start writing articles titled “Math Wants Us to Commit Genocide,” then I’ll worry about them exceeding their intellectual remit. Until then, it seems long overdue that in a media world overpopulated with fluff projects, ideological anvil-pounders, outrage porn, and a million and one precious niches, one little corner would dedicate itself to numerical investigation, train some of its journalists in statistical programming languages, and run some data visualizations.
Jon Fasman piles on:
The unspoken attitude underpinning Mr Silver’s project—I will lay the facts as I understand them before you, explain why I think the facts matter, show you where I think they lead, and leave you to your own conclusions—surely is preferable to the unspoken attitude underpinning much American political discourse, which is: My opponents are imbeciles or racists who hate freedom and decency, and if you agree with them surely you must also be mentally deficient and hate the same things.
Second, some things that present themselves as moral questions are not, and are (or should be) amenable to factual suasion. There is, in fact, a near-total consensus among scientists that climate change is happening and is “unpredictable” and “highly damaging”. Many people deny this. Best to lay the facts before them, over and over again.
Krugman fears that 538 will commit the error of “letting the data speak for itself — because it never does.” Matt Bruenig shares those concerns:
It is a bit early to say whether Silver’s project will actually be worthwhile. With that said, people should be skeptical of anyone who says they can cover politics in a just-the-facts, data-driven way (and I say this as someone who heavily relies upon data crunching, probably more so than 95% of political writers). There are political and economic topics for which pure data is interesting and illuminating, but not very many. The rest are deeply entangled with normative judgments that you cannot avoid.
Perusing the site as it currently exists, things don’t look very promising at this very early stage.
Not every 538 post has been up to snuff, but the site’s batting average is respectable for a blog that just increased its staff significantly. It takes months for an editorial team to gel. And Silver’s analysis has always capitalized on big events; a relatively slow political news week probably isn’t the best time to size up the new 538’s editorial chops. Note that Silver himself has focused mostly on March Madness this week, a big story that the political blogosphere is relatively uninterested in and therefore gives him no credit for covering well. The greatest danger to any data-driven site is being too dull. The 538 crew has avoided that thus far by having fun with the content – applying data analysis to subjects like toilet seat covers. And this post on Hugo Chavez’s economic legacy was excellent. Drum worries that Silver’s model won’t scale:
My basic take is that Silver’s data-driven approach to journalism works well with subjects that satisfy two criteria:
- They lend themselves to analysis via number crunching.
- They are currently underserved by serious number crunchers.
Both sports and poll aggregation fit this model, and Silver made a reputation with both of them. But they’re the exceptions, not the rule. Economics? It doesn’t satisfy #2. Science? Ditto. “Life”? That’s a pretty broad category, but I suspect it mostly fails #1.
Alyssa Rosenberg, writing at her new digs, disagrees about that last point:
While I am not persuaded that data analysis is a substitute for criticism, there are an enormous number of subjects that fall under “Life” where data-driven journalism would actually be a profound public service. The entertainment industry holds up as sacred any number of assumptions that deserve a rigorous, numbers-based fisking, among them that female leads cannot carry movies and that international audiences dislike black actors (Will Smith and Denzel Washington are treated like, dare I say it, magical exceptions to an otherwise hard rule). In television, as the Nielsen ratings increasingly fail to capture Americans’ actual viewing patterns, a deep dive into those practices and the TV ad sales business that returns to the surface with viable suggestions for a new measurement that advertisers would trust and outside analysts could deliver would be high-level service journalism.
The Dish 