Editorials & Other Articles

Yo_Mama_Been_Loggin

(128,748 posts) Sun Aug 3, 2025, 02:59 PM Aug 3

Nate Silver - Trump's jobs data denialism won't fool anyone

If you’d asked me 20 years ago, when I made a living playing online poker and running projections for Baseball Prospectus, I would have told you that, of course, I’m a Data Guy. Treat the numbers with caution, because it’s easy to build bad models or otherwise screw up in umpteen ways when working with complex statistical data under deadline pressure. But at the end of the day, we all have to make decisions based on incomplete information. Businesses particularly face this problem: new hires or capital investments typically have a long time horizon. If you’re not going to make these choices based on your best estimate of the situation, given the relevant uncertainties — well, what exactly are you going to base them on?

These days, I’d say my relationship with the Data Guy label has become more fraught. In one of my particular subfields, election forecasting, there’s been a lot of bad work, which probably did more to misinform the conversation than contribute to it. And more broadly, I do buy to some extent that “science has been politicized”. Sometimes I've seen the admonition “just trust the numbers” used as a blunt insturment to suppress legitimate dissent. Data is collected by and interpreted by humans, and human error and bias play a role at every step of the process.

The important thing is to be right, and probably 90 percent of the time, going through the rigor of kicking the tires on the data2 and then explicitly modeling a situation helps you get there. But I’ll give a little more weight these days to the mesoscale rather than the micro. Having a good bullshit detector — heuristics honed by life experience — comes in handy that remaining 10 percent of the time.

When it comes to economic data produced by the United States government, however, people play that 10 percent “get out of jail free” card far too often. And usually, they’re the ones producing the bullshit, often to spin away politically inconvenient data.

https://www.natesilver.net/p/trumps-jobs-data-denialism-wont-fool

2 replies

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Highlight:

Nate Silver - Trump's jobs data denialism won't fool anyone (Original Post) Yo_Mama_Been_Loggin Aug 3 OP

Nate Silver is a corrupt failure Fiendish Thingy Aug 3 #1

Trump's Efforts to Control Information Echo an Authoritarian Playbook (NYT gift article) LetMyPeopleVote Aug 3 #2

Fiendish Thingy

(20,812 posts)

1. Nate Silver is a corrupt failure

Reply to Yo_Mama_Been_Loggin (Original post)

Sun Aug 3, 2025, 03:38 PM

Aug 3

In one of my particular subfields, election forecasting, there’s been a lot of bad work, which probably did more to misinform the conversation than contribute to it.

Silver made significant contributions to the misinformation he references, by choosing, as then-head of 538, to include clearly flawed and biased polls favouring republicans that deliberately manipulated 538’s aggregate averages and forecasting model. Silver admitted it when confronted, shrugged and said “Dems could have done their own shitty polls, but didn’t”

His opinions should be ignored.

LetMyPeopleVote

(169,885 posts)

2. Trump's Efforts to Control Information Echo an Authoritarian Playbook (NYT gift article)

Reply to Yo_Mama_Been_Loggin (Original post)

Sun Aug 3, 2025, 03:58 PM

Aug 3

In firing the head of the agency that collects employment statistics, the president underscored his tendency to suppress facts he doesn’t like and promote his own version of reality.

Link to tweet

Trumpâ€™s Efforts to Control Information Echo an Authoritarian Playbook www.nytimes.com/2025/08/03/u...
— Jane Mayer (@janemayer.bsky.social) 2025-08-03T14:43:25.797Z

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/03/us/politics/trump-bls-jobs-facts.html?unlocked_article_code=1.bU8.uevb.5cZlTEaDzRQn&smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare

An old rule in Washington holds that you are entitled to your own opinions but you are not entitled to your own facts. President Trump seems determined to prove that wrong.....

The message, however, was unmistakable: Government officials who deal in data now fear they have to toe the line or risk losing their jobs. Career scientists, longtime intelligence analysts and nonpartisan statisticians who serve every president regardless of political party with neutral information on countless matters, such as weather patterns and vaccine efficacy, now face pressure as never before to conform to the alternative reality enforced by the president and his team.

Mr. Trump has never been especially wedded to facts, routinely making up his own numbers, repeating falsehoods and conspiracy theories even after they are debunked and denigrating the very concept of independent fact-checking. But his efforts since reclaiming the White House to make the rest of government adopt his versions of the truth have gone further than in his first term and increasingly remind scholars of the way authoritarian leaders in other countries have sought to control information.

“Democracy can’t realistically exist without reliable epistemic infrastructure,” said Michael Patrick Lynch, author of the recently published “On Truth in Politics” and a professor at the University of Connecticut.

“Anti-democratic, authoritarian leaders know this,” he said. “That is why they will seize every opportunity to control sources of information. As Bacon taught us, knowledge is power. But preventing or controlling access to knowledge is also power.”....

“It’s a post-factual world that Trump is looking for, and he’s got these sycophants working for him that don’t challenge him on facts,” said Barbara Comstock, a former Republican congresswoman from Virginia.

But firing the messenger, she said, will not make the economy any better. “The reality is the economy is worse, and he can’t keep saying it’s better,” she said. “Joe Biden learned that; people still experience the experience they have, no matter how much” you tell them otherwise.

We can no longer trust any numbers from the trump administration

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