this post was submitted on 26 Aug 2024
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Read through the whole thread. Man, I remember back when Nate Silver seemed smart and interesting and now I'm realizing that he probably was just my political Boss Baby moment.
If I had a dollar for every time it turned out some poller influencer went off on the deep end I would have two dollars, not much but etc. In the Netherlands we have a similar type of guy called Maurice de Hond, who also got famous for doing polls (which often slightly differed from other polls) but he has gone quite nutty nowadays, a man I knew who turned into an anti-vaxer was a big fan. (The Hond is also one of those 'I talked about polarization and nobody listened to me!' guys when he has been a regular person on the Dutch TV for ages, thankfully Nate doesn't seem that bad).
Strange how generating a slightly different type of poll causes people to go off into contrarian/bad epistemology land.
E: Me : "doesn't seem that bad" a few moments later A wild bsky skeet arrives (on why this sucks see this thread)
"yet"
and probably just in public. seems highly likely some of it is "just" in private at this stage, given employer and focuses
Fair enough, I just compared it to de Hond's twitter account which is just vax doubt going on and on atm. (He doesn't seem to be a hardcore 'don't vax ever' person, but he just feeds into the anti-vax conspiracy shit fulltime, and I don't see how he doesn't care about the effect he has on the people who listen to him).
Compared to that Nate seems to at least be 'normal', or constrain himself to being private, so that is good at least.
Of course compared to the Hond (77), Silver (46) is also younger, so I think we all will be amazed at how much crazier he will get when he gets older. As older age does seem to be a big factor in this, for some reason people who get pushed forward as smart/insightful lose their entire ability to listen to critical sounds/doubt themselves when they grow older and the crazy comes out. (See also how Cornel West (71) has gone a bit of the deep end lately apparently, and this. People on bsky talked about him as an example of this issue iirc).