Nate Silver Derangement Syndrome

They hated him because he spoke the truth

(Selzer, for those who don’t know, was the pollster who released a poll showing Harris ahead in Iowa).

Nate Silver

is a fairly milquetoast, nerdy, centrist liberal, a bit like if the median Cal Tech student became slightly smarter and wiser and then went into political forecasting. He rose to prominence for having a highly accurate election model that correctly predicted 49 states in 2008 and all 50 states in 2012. He called the 2024 election a toss up, much to the anger of those predicting a Harris victory, and forecasted the actual result as being the single most likely result. While he didn’t do as well as the inimitable

Glenn

, who confidently predicted that Trump would win every swing state, he’s an impressive guy with a very good forecasting record.

Silver is among the most influential slightly awkward nerds in the world (though I hope to usurp him)—he’s not particularly good on camera, but he’s brilliant and never obviously wrong. He masterfully avoids partisan hackery and thinks in terms of likelihood. Rather than saying “X will happen,” he’ll say “X has a 75% chance of happening.” His blog has long been one of my favorites.

Weirdly, millions of people seem to hate Nate with a fervor generally reserved for child rapists, Trump cabinet picks, and Margaret Thatcher.

People call him a “globalist shill…providing “data” to support what the establishment wants NPCs to believe,” “the worst election prognosticator in history,” and a Thiel shill (because he works for a company that Peter Thiel gave money to. By this standard, I am a Thiel shill because I got money from emergent ventures which Thiel funded).

There are too many criticisms of Silver to address them all. But they are, almost across the board, extremely stupid. They’re lazy and reek of hackery. They’re the sorts of criticisms that an ingroup repeats over and over again, yet would never convince anyone dispassionately thinking through the issues. They tend to be so manifestly irrational, so brazenly unthinking and hatred-filled, that they constitute a bizarre performance art.