538 Silver Nate

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an 9 24

On Sunday, September 8, polling expert and FiveThirtyEight founder Nate Silver updated his presidential election forecast and gave GOP nominee Donald Trump a 63.8 percent chance of winning the Electoral College in November and Democratic Vice President Kamala Harris only a 36 percent chance.

But veteran conservative consultant Stuart Stevens — a Never Trumper conservative who is supporting Harris — is critical of Silver's forecast, arguing that there is a connection between Silver's FiveThirtyEight and billionaire Trump supporter Peter Thiel.

In a September 10 post on X, formerly Twitter, Stevens wrote, "Polymarket is Peter Thiel's creation. @NateSilver538 is being paid by Peter Thiel."

In May, Forbes reported that "controversial billionaire political donor Peter Thiel and Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin" had "raised about $70 million in funding for Polymarket."

According to Axios' Sara Fischer, the predictions market platform Polymarket hired Silver as an adviser in July.

Stevens is a veteran of conservative politics and has worked with many well-known Republicans over the years, including Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah). But he is a scathing critic of Trump who has been heavily involved in The Lincoln Project, a conservative anti-Trump group that is also supporting Harris.

Many national and battleground state polls have been showing a very close presidential race, with Harris slightly ahead in some polls and Trump slightly ahead in others. Stevens, however, believes Harris will enjoy a major surge in the weeks before the election that will recall Ronald Reagan's surge in the 1980 race.

https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/a-lesson-from-kyotos-failure-dont-let-congress-touch-a-climate-deal/

In 1997, more than 150 countries came together in Kyoto, Japan, to negotiate a deal

to reduce the greenhouse gas emissions driving global warming.

Back then, the negotiations centered around developed countries, like the U.S.,

Japan and Australia with the intention that richer countries would lead the way and create a legally binding treaty with emissions targets and reduction timelines.

Eighteen years later, the world is still trying to agree on how to tackle climate change. But this time around, the U.S. pledge does not require congressional approval. That approach echoes an important lesson from Kyoto: A treaty’s worth is directly tied to the president’s ability to enact it.

In Kyoto, one of the U.S.’s top priorities was to establish a structure and market for limiting and trading emissions. Elliot Diringer, who attended the Kyoto talks as communications director for the Clinton administration’s White House Council on Environmental Quality, told me recently that emissions trading had proved very effective for tackling acid rain and that American negotiators considered that problem a good model to apply to greenhouse gases.

But the agreement never went into effect in the U.S. After Kyoto, where Al Gore, then the vice president, spoke of setting “binding emissions limits,” the Clinton administration returned home to a Congress that refused to take part in the treaty.Before the conference, the GOP-controlled Senate passed the Byrd-Hagel resolution in a 95 to 0 vote; it resolved that the United States should not be a signatory to any protocol that mandated the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions unless it also required reductions from developing countries during the same time period. [also could not affect economy X% ?]That meant Clinton never got the Kyoto Protocol ratified, and George W. Bush never tried. The U.S.’s abandonment of the treaty didn’t kill it, but it severely limited its effectiveness.

The lesson of Kyoto was stark. “We learned the limits of what the U.S. can agree to,” said Rafe Pomerance, who went to Kyoto as deputy assistant secretary of state for environment and development. “Climate change policy is not fully dictated by negotiations,” he said. “They’re dictated by domestic political opportunities and constraints.” President Obama can pledge only what he can achieve through executive action, and that means that the agreement has to be a non-binding commitment that does not require congressional approval. “If the U.S. Congress won’t move, the U.S. is heavily constrained and therefore the world is constrained,” Pomerance said. Whether or not the U.S. is the largest emitter (China overtook the U.S. as the world’s biggest emitter in 2007), it’s still a major actor.

So the Paris negotiations have taken an alternative tactic.At Kyoto, actual targets were hashed out at negotiations run by Argentinian Ambassador Raul Estrada-Oyuela, who famously insisted on keeping the talks moving forward and even physically stopped the clocks at one point to ensure that a deal was struck. This time, the meeting is taking a bottom-up approach. Rather than negotiating their targets in Paris, countries submitted their pledges ahead of time, and there’s little expectation that these pledges will be negotiated further, as they were in Kyoto. (The U.S. arrived in Kyoto with a proposal to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to 1990 levels but left having agreed to reduce them to 7 percent below 1990 levels.)

The Paris approach is less ambitious, but it’s probably more realistic. The pledge that his administration submitted to the climate conference — to reduce emissions by 26 percent to 28 percent below 2005 levels by 2025 — relies on actions administered through the Environmental Protection Agency and Department of Energy, which gets around the need for congressional ratification. Republican members of Congress are already fighting these measures, and if a Republican takes the White House, the administrative actions could be undone.

While politicians talk about what to do, greenhouse gas emissions continue to rise.Since the Kyoto Protocol was negotiated, the number of weather and climate disasters worldwide has risen 42 percent, and the seas have risen nearly 6.2 centimeters, on average.

Christie Aschwanden is FiveThirtyEight’s lead writer for science.

"Blue wall" is a term that was used by some political analysts and pundits referring to the theory that in Presidential elections in the United States, the Democratic Partyhad, between the 1992 and 2012 presidential elections, established such an advantage in many states that the electoral map made a Republican victory an uphill battle from the start. The 2016 election showed this wall was not impregnable, when Donald Trump won 3 previously solidly Democratic states, as well as one electoral vote from a fourth state, in the area referred to as the rust belt.

The term "blue wall" and "red wall" refer to the colors associated with the Democratic and Republican Parties, respectively.

Creating of the Term:{:(style="margin-right:0.25em"):}:[edit:{]}:

The earliest description of the forces creating the Blue Wall comes from a Houston Chronicle blogger, Chris Ladd.^[1] A Republican, Ladd wrote in November 2014 that the seemingly impressive Republican win in that year's General Election had overshadowed another trend apparent in the results - a demographic/geographic collapse. The Blue Wall was a Democratic demographic lock on the Electoral College resulting from the GOP's narrowing focus on the interests of white, rural, and Southern voters. Ladd's analysis was popularized when it was picked up by MSNBC commentator Lawrence O'Donnell and featured on his show.^[2]

A similar "red wall," behind which lie states solidly Republican, also exists, but having fewer votes it is easier for a Democratic candidate to win without breaching it. The Republican party has won just 13 states in each of the last 6 election cycles, totaling 102 electoral votes.

States behind the blue wall:{:(style="margin-right:0.25em"):}:[edit:{]}:

Behind this "blue wall" lay states, many carrying a high number of electoral votes, which appeared to be solidly behind the Democratic Party, at least on the national level, and which a Republican candidate appeared likely to have to write off, seeking a total of 270 votes from other regions. States behind this wall lay generally in the northeast, and west coast, and included some of the Great Lakes states. In each of the 6 election cycles prior to 2016, the Democratic Party had won 18 of these states (as well as the District of Columbia), totaling 242 of the necessary 270 votes need to win. The "big three" Democratic stronghold states include California, New York, and Illinois.

States falling behind this blue wall generally included those the Democrats had carried since the 1992 election,^[3][4] and included (in order of decreasing population): California, New York, Illinois, Pennsylvania, Michigan, New Jersey, Washington, Massachusetts, Maryland, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Oregon, Connecticut, Hawaii, Maine, Rhode Island, Delaware, and Vermont, as well as the District of Columbia. The last time any of these states cast their votes for the Republican candidate before 2016 was when George H. W. Bush beat Michael Dukakis in 1988, and several of them go back to Ronald Reagan's landslide in 1984. One of these states, Minnesota, has not been carried by a Republican presidential candidate since 1972. (The District of Columbia has voted for the Democratic candidate in every election since it was admitted to the electoral college for the 1964 election.)

In the 2016 election, Donald Trump made major inroads into the wall, winning in Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Maine's 2nd congressional district, giving him victory despite not winning certain swing states such as Nevada, Colorado, New Hampshire and Virginia.

Red Wall:{:(style="margin-right:0.25em"):}:[edit:{]}:

The states which Republicans have won in the last 7 cycles include Texas, Alabama, South Carolina, Oklahoma, Mississippi, Utah, Kansas, Nebraska, Idaho, South Dakota, North Dakota, Alaska, and Wyoming, giving a total of 102 votes. States with a 6-out-of-7 Republican record include Georgia, North Carolina, Arizona, Indiana, and Montana for a total of 158 electoral votes. Much of the south is probably safely Republican as well, as 6 other states from that general region haven't voted for a Democrat since southerner Bill Clinton in 1996, and the Deep South is solidly Republican in their senators and governors.

Criticism:{:(style="margin-right:0.25em"):}:[edit:{]}:

The Democratic "lock" on these states had been called into question prior to 2016, as several had been competitive in recent elections, and many had Republicans currently holding elected statewide office, generally either senator or governor.^[5] Blue wall states with a Republican senator included Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Maine. Those with a Republican governor included Illinois, Michigan, New Jersey, Massachusetts, Maryland, Wisconsin, and Maine. In addition to these 18 states, three others, Iowa, New Mexico, and New Hampshire, had only voted for the Republican once in the same 6 election cycles, giving their votes to George W. Bush in either 2000 or 2004. If included in the total, the votes behind the blue wall numbered 257, just 13 short of what is needed to win. In 2016, the blue wall was broken by President-elect Donald Trump.

Nate Silver had criticized the idea of the blue wall, pointing to a larger "red wall" of states that voted Republican from 1968 to 1988. He argued that the blue wall simply represented a "pretty good run" in elections, and that relatively minor gains in the popular vote could "flip" some of its states to Republicans.^[6] As seen in the 2016 election, where voters from manufacturing states and minorities traditionally behind the blue wall, voted for Donald Trump providing him the victory.

See also:{:(style="margin-right:0.25em"):}:[edit:{]}:

http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/there-is-no-blue-wall/

...

Nowadays, of course, it’s become common to hear talk about the “blue wall” — the set of 18 states that, along with the District of Columbia, have voted for the Democrat in each of the most recent six presidential elections, from 1992 through 2012. Together, they represent 242 electoral votes. Many pundits, ignoring the lessons of history, claim the “blue wall” or some close variation of it puts the Democratic nominee (likely Hillary Clinton) at a substantial advantage for 2016.

The error that these commentators are making is in attributing the Democrats’ recent run of success to the Electoral College. In fact, the Electoral College has been a minor factor, if it’s helped Democrats at all, and one probably best ignored until the late stages of a close presidential race.

But wait. Wasn’t Barack Obama’s margin in the Electoral College in 2012 — 332 electoral votes, to Mitt Romney’s 206 — awfully impressive given that he won the popular vote by only a few percentage points?

Actually, it was pretty much par for the course. The nature of the Electoral College is to accentuate small margins in the popular vote; Obama’s electoral vote tallies have been fine, but historically ordinary.

In the chart below, I’ve plotted the past century’s worth of presidential elections (from 1916 to 2012). The horizontal axis shows the Democrat’s margin of victory or defeat in the popular vote and the vertical axis how many electoral votes he received. (Totals are prorated to 538²(http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/there-is-no-blue-wall/#fn-2) electoral votes, the current total.)³(http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/there-is-no-blue-wall/#fn-3) Then I’ve drawn an “S”-shaped curve to show the long-term relationship.

Based on the past century’s worth of data, you’d expect a Democrat who won the popular vote by 3.9 percentage points — as Obama did against Romney — to win about 330 electoral votes. That pretty much exactly matches Obama’s 332.

And you’d expect a Democrat who won the popular vote by 7.3 percentage points, as Obama did in 2008 against John McCain, to claim about 380 electoral votes. Obama won 365 that year instead. By comparison, when F.D.R. won the 1944 popular vote by 7.5 percentage points, he won the Electoral College 432-99.

So when commentators talk about the Democrats’ “blue wall,” all they’re really pointing out is that Democrats have had a pretty good run in presidential elections lately. And they have, if you conveniently draw the line at 1992 (it doesn’t sound so impressive to instead say Democrats have won five of the 12 elections since 1968). During that time, Democrats have won four elections pretty clearly, lost one narrowly and essentially tied the sixth. This has been evident from the popular vote, however. The one time the Electoral College really mattered — that was 2000, of course — it hurt the Democrats.

Republicans, in all likelihood, would have won by similar Electoral College margins if they’d done as well as the Democrats in the popular vote, casting all sorts of cracks in the blue wall. Suppose, for instance, that Romney, rather than Obama, had won the 2012 election by 3.9 percentage points. What would the map have looked like?

...

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/collideascape/2014/07/28/roger-pielke-jr-fivethirtyeight-climate-critics

Kloor:Earlier in the year, Roger Pielke Jr. was named as a contributing writer for Nate Silver’s newly re-launched *FiveThirtyEigh*t site. Shortly after that, Pielke, a climate policy scholar and political scientist at the University of Colorado, in Boulder, published an article at FiveThirtyEight headlined, “Disasters Cost More Than Ever–But Not Because of Climate Change.”

Critics pounced immediately in blogs and on Twitter. That harsh reaction was then reported and commented on atSalon, Huffington Post, Slate, theColumbia Journalism Review, and elsewhere.

I recently conducted a Q & A with Pielke about this episode and the aftermath. The links in my questions are from me. I asked Pielke to provide his own links.

KK: It’s been noted on Twitter that you are not listed on the main contributors page for FiveThirthyEight. Does this mean you no longer write for the site? If so, can you explain what happened?

RPJR: That is correct, I no longer write for 538. Last month, after 538 showed some reluctance in continuing to publish my work, I called up Mike Wilson, the lead editor there, and told him that it was probably best that we part ways. I wished them well in their endeavor going forward. I remain a fan. Since then I have joined up with SportingIntelligence, a UK-based website that focuses on analyses of economic and other quantitative aspects of sport. It’s a great fit. And of course, I continue to publish in places like USA Today and the Financial Times on a wide range of subjects

KK: What do you make of the uproar your FiveThirtyEight piece generated? I know it quickly degenerated into an ugly pile-on, which I and some other journalists found unseemly. But did critics have any legitimate points you want to acknowledge?

RPJR: Well, that first piece was written on a subject that I have written on many times before (and perhaps as much as anyone) – disasters and climate change. The short essay was perfectly consistent with the recent assessments of the IPCC. The fact that some folks didn’t like it was not surprising — most anything on climate change is met with derision by somebody. What was a surprise was the degree to which the negative response to the piece was coordinated among some activist scientists, journalists and social media aficionados. I think that took everyone by surprise. I learned some new things about certain colleagues and journalists — both really good things and some really pathetic things. Seeing a campaign organized to have me fired from 538 also taught me a lesson about the importance of academic tenure.

KK: If you could write the piece over again, what would you do differently, if anything?

RPJR: Looking back, probably the main thing I would do differently would be to simply not write about climate change at 538. When I was originally hired there was actually zero discussion about me focusing on climate or even science, but rather covering a wide range of topics. I made clear to Nate and Mike that I was looking to at least partially escape from the climate change wars by focusing on other issues. The climate change piece was an obvious place to start even so because the IPCC reports had just been released and the topic is also covered so thoroughly in the peer reviewed literature. Clearly, that judgment was wrong!

KK: Have you and Nate Silver talked about this ordeal? What was his reaction?

RPJR: I have not spoken with or corresponded with Nate since that first piece. Of course, I do wish that 538 had shown a bit more editorial backbone, but hey, it is his operation. If a widely published academic cannot publish on a subject which he has dozens of peer-reviewed papers and 1000s of citations to his work, what can he write on? Clearly Nate is a smart guy, and I suspect that he knows very well where the evidence lies on this topic. For me, if the price of playing in the DC-NYC data journalism world is self-censorship for fear of being unpopular, then it is clearly not a good fit for any academic policy scholar.

KK: The condemnation of your 538 piece quickly spiraled into ugly personal broadsides painting you (incorrectly) as a climate skeptic. This happened in various high profile venues, such as Slate. How did you feel when this happened?

RPJR: If you are engaged in public debates on issues that people care passionately about, then you will be called names and worse. It goes with the territory. It is not pleasant of course, but at the same time, it is a pretty strong indication that (a) your arguments matter and (b) people have a hard time countering them on their merits. Even so, it is remarkable to see people likePaul Krugman and John Holdrenbrazenly make completely false claims in public about my work and my views. That they make such false claims with apparently no consequences says something about the nature of debate surrounding climate.

KK: You say you were surprised by “the degree to which the response to the piece was coordinated among some activist scientists, journalists and social media aficionados.” But this response did not happen in a vacuum, either. For years, your work–or more specifically–pointed statements you’ve made about the climate science establishment–have been heavily criticized by a number of outspoken climate scientists and widely read climate bloggers. Looking back, it appears that animosity directed towards you stems more from sharply-worded commentary on your blog and elsewhere, than your research.

For example, in his recently published book, “Reason in a Dark Time: Why the Struggle Against Climate Change Failed–and What it Means for Our Future,” NYU’s Dale Jamieson wrote about you. Here’s an excerpt that wasposted at Salon:

In a 2010 book, Roger Pielke Jr. claimed that “[c]limate science is a fully politicized enterprise, desperately in need of reform if integrity is to be restored and sustained.” “Climategate,” the episode in November 2009 in which thousands of documents were stolen from the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia, revealed scientists “who saw themselves as much as activists as researchers,” … “plotting to corrupt the peer review system.” According to Pielke Jr., the theft exposed a “clique of activist scientists” engaged in a “coup against peer review.” He went on to accuse a broad range of scientists and public figures of trying to scare people into taking action on climate change or advocating such scare tactics.

One remarkable feature of Pielke Jr.’s discussion is its shrillness. “Clique,” “coup,” and “plotting” are the kinds of terms usually reserved for organized crime syndicates, terrorist organizations, and other conspiracies against the public good. The repeated use of the word “activist” mobilizes a characteristic trope of right-wing ideologues. The term is typically applied to judges, who like scientists are supposed to be neutral when carrying out their duties, but all too often, on this view, betray their professional responsibilities. Even someone who is sympathetic to the claim that political considerations sometimes find their way into climate science might shrink from Pielke Jr.’s characterization of climate science as “a fully politicized enterprise.”

Perhaps you take issue with how Jamieson has characterized your statements. But even still, he appears to have identified the reasons for much of the animosity towards you that has built up over the years. This is the larger context that I think informs the ugly brouhaha over your 538 piece. What are your thoughts on this?

RPJR: Anyone following these debates over the years and has observed whose arguments have actually been vindicated will no doubt understand why some of the louder critics of mine have resorted to bitter personal attacks. More generally, however, there is a common strategy of delegitimization used in the climate debates. It seems that labeling someone a “denier” offers a convenient excuse to avoid taking on arguments on their merits and to call for certain voices to be banished.

I’ve known Dale Jamison for about 25 years, dating back to the time that he was a philosophy professor at Colorado and NCAR. I have always got on well with him and learned a lot from him during the years that we were colleagues. I am perfectly comfortable with my claim that parts of the climate science field are indeed “fully politicized.” At the same time, as I have often said, there are many brilliant and hard-working scientists in the field. It just so happens that some of the most fervent ideologues find themselves in positions of authority. I don’t think that this is at all controversial.

What is controversial is the question whether the ends justify the means. That is to say, is the climate issue so important that we should look past issues of scientific integrity among those whose heart is in the right place? Jamieson suggests that we should:

“I’ve known Roger for a long time, and he’s done a lot of work that I respect. Part of why I called him out in the book is because he’s not a climate change denier. He’s somebody who knows better, but the rhetoric that he’s used against scientists and the exaggerations and the kind of personal fights that he’s gotten into around the issue have really distracted from the broad consensus that actually exists around doing something.”

First, I’m flattered to see that Dale thinks that my views are so influential so as to distract from a broad consensus. I’d just disagree with that conclusion. As I document with evidence in The Climate Fix, there is a very strong and stable consensus in the US and worldwide about doing something on climate. But more generally, should an academic really be measuring his arguments by who they favor in a political debate? Or should I call things like I see them? I’ve chosen to call things as I see them, and I am quite happy with that career choice.

Second, many of the public debates that I have been involved in are associated with efforts to discredit or misrepresent my own academic work. The 538 episode is just one such example. I document in my book an episode when back in 2001 a leading climate scientist asked me to underplay my work for political reasons. Not only do I believe this to be unethical, I also think that it will be counterproductive for those calling for action. Trying to trick policy makers or the public to believe that — say, disasters are getting worse because of climate change or that we have all the technologies we need for deep decarbonization — will only backfire in the end. I am a big fan of playing it straight with the science, because over the long term that reinforces public trust and leads to more reliable policy recommendations.

KK: I should say that I am in no way excusing or rationalizing the behavior of climate bloggers and others who have previously used slanderous language in an attempt to discredit you. But I guess what I getting at here is this: Do you feel in any way responsible for provoking the deep-seated anger directed at you over the years, which seems to have culminated in this mob-like attack on your reputation after publication of the 538 piece? I just wonder if you feel like, given the chance to go back in time, might you have phrased your own criticisms of the climate science community differently?

RPJR: It is a fair question. Hindsight is of course 20/20. But let’s say that all the criticisms Jamieson levies are accurate: I have been hard on some climate scientists. I have criticized some of their work in public, and even accused some of exploiting scientific authority for political ends. Sometimes I have used colorful language (“coup against peer review” — though for actual “shrillness” I would point Jamieson over to Joe Romm!). Some people have disagreed with my arguments. I have even been critical of the IPCC at times. Also, I have popularized my work on carbon pricing, decarbonization, energy, disasters, and the politicization of science. My work has occasionally been cited by the bad guys. I have also challenged claims that are seemingly widely accepted, but which my work shows to be wrong. I believe that policy debates deserve a plurality of voices, not a harmonization of views. I do not focus obsessively on the skeptics and deniers.

What part of the above would I change? Not much at all.

To be very clear, it is only a few climate scientists who have engaged in the “mob-like attacks” (it was actually mostly journalists and bloggers). Almost all the feedback I get from colleagues in climate science is overwhelmingly positive. Those climate scientists engaged in the climate debate are all big boys (mostly) and girls. If they cannot take the rough and tumble of public debate, then they should not be in public debate. There is “deep-seate anger” because of colorful language and apparent thin skins? Right. Tell me about it.

Ultimately, what I learned from the 538 episode is how small and insular the community of self-professed “climate hawks” actually is. Sure they made a lot of noise online and got John Stewart’s attention. But that was because of Nate Silver’s fame, not mine. Back in the real world, outside the climate blogosphere and the NY-DC data journalism circle virtually no one knew or much cared about the 538 brouhaha, even within academia. I found that encouraging.

I do wish the 538 folks all the best going forward. They were put in a difficult position. I have no hard feelings. There are some brilliant people there and they will no doubt have some great successes.

But in conclusion, let’s take a step back. Disaster losses continue to increase worldwide. Carbon dioxide continues to accumulate in the atmosphere. The world continues to demand ever more energy. Climate policies in place or proposed are not up to the task. In short, we need more ideas, more debate, more disagreement if we are to make intelligent progress. Efforts to demonize or silence unwelcome voices probably don’t move the dial very far on any of these issues Was this campaign to have me removed from 538 a victory for the climate movement? Was it the right battle to wage? I hope the climate hawks ask themselves these questions.

CATEGORIZED UNDER: CLIMATE POLICY, CLIMATE POLITICS, CLIMATE SCIENCE, GLOBAL WARMING, SCIENCE

MORE ABOUT: CLIMATE CHANGE, CLIMATE POLICY, CLIMATE SCIENCE, DALE JAMIESON, FIVETHIRTYEIGHT, GLOBAL WARMING, NATE SILVER, ROGER PIELKE JR., SCIENCE JOURNALISM

he posted to 538:

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/collideascape/2014/07/28/roger-pielke-jr-fivethirtyeight-climate-critics/

http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/disasters-cost-more-than-ever-but-not-because-of-climate-change/

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CJR:

The internet hates Nate Silver today—at least the small quotient closely following the launch of his new site, FiveThirtyEight, this week—and with ample reason. When Silver wrote, “It’s time to make news a little nerdier,” in his site-launch manifesto, he was issuing a call to arms against the mainstream press. Because by nerdier, he really meant better. “Plenty of pundits have really high IQs, but they don’t have any discipline in how they look at the world,” he told *New York magazine* last week, promising to produce a site free of such “bullshit.”

But it’s always risky to bite the hand that publicizes you, and those “bullshit”-ridden pundits have delighted in tearing into the site launch, poking holes in weak pieces’ logic and arguing that, perhaps, reporting is still best served by the deductive analysis of the opinion reporters that Silver so detests.

Still, data-driven journalism has appealing possibilities, and if the public interest could be served by FiveThirtyEight, the opportunity lies in itsscience section—which tackles an intersection, after all, that is underserved by the media. The big “data-driven” investigative journalism sites, places like ProPublica and The Center for Investigative Reporting, tend eschew explanations and deep dives into scientific research and instead focus on policy or business. (Similarly, Silver’s New York Times vertical focused on politics and sports.) While some of the slack is picked up by specialized press, places like the pulitzer-winning Inside Climate News, interpreting the realities of a scientific discoveryrequires analyses that go beyond the standard several-source standard news story, so science journalism could be well served by a vertical of Nate Silvers, “asking the right questions of the data,” as he promised in his manifesto.

But, unfortunately, though the headlines of Silver’s launch articles aspire to paradigm-shifting grandeur, their content falls flat, failing in exactly the same way as Silver’s detested opinion journalists.

It starts with the piece that headlined the section at launch: “Finally, a formula for decoding health news.” The article serves as a piece of media criticism, advocating a formula to assess whether a news report about a study is actually as groundbreaking as the journalist purports. It’s a noble task, and writer Jeff Leek, an associate professor of biostatistics at Johns Hopkins, should be up to the task. Leek’s formula is based off of Bayes’ rule, a system of correcting for measurement errors and predicting the likelihood of the findings outcome actually occurring. Correcting for subjective beliefs is a statistical tool, but Leek does everyone a disservice when he describes these priors as an

“initial gut feeling” before assigning numbers to a checklist, seemingly at random:

Was the study a clinical study in humans?

Was the outcome of the study something directly related to human health like longer life or less disease? Was the outcome something you care about, such as living longer or feeling better

Was the study a randomized, controlled trial (RCT)?

Was it a large study — at least hundreds of patients?

Did the treatment have a major impact on the outcome?

Did predictions hold up in at least two separate groups of people?

It’s a decent list of things to keep in mind when reading news coverage of a study. The problem is, plenty of people have already produced such checklists—only more thoughtfully and with greater detail. Here’s one.Here’s another. Here’s a whole bunch.

Not to mention that interpreting the value of an individual scientific study is difficult—a subject worthy of much more description and analysis than FiveThirtyEight provides. Last January, David H. Freedman devoted 4,000 words on the subject in a CJR cover story which meticulously traced the fluctuations of findings on weight loss studies throughout the press. (You can find a checklist for evaluating health studies midway through the piece.) The problem, Freedman assessed, isn’t that the press is incendiary, but that there’s a limit to what can be gleaned from a single scientific study—so “articles written by very good journalists, based on thorough reporting and highly credible sources, take stances that directly contradict those of other credible-seeming articles.”

In short, it’s very difficult to evaluate the merits of an individual study, and Leek’s formula—which for the record is: Final opinion on headline = (initial gut feeling) * (study support for headline)—isn’t going to help the reader very much. As Paul Raeburn wrote at the Knight Science Tracker, “Leek is a statistician at Johns Hopkins. And he’s dishing out a lot of quasi-statistical nonsense.”

The rest of the science section follows the same patterns. A pieceassessing the freezing weather this winter as compared to historic temperatures isn’t wrong, but it’s a confusing version of a storypublished by other outlets during polar vortex hype in January. Other stories, like this one, on calories burned during sex, for example, have been covered well enough by other publications—if they needed to be covered at all.

One of the dangerous things about purporting objectivity because your journalism uses data is that even data can be conveyed with prejudice. “In a perfect world the data would just speak for itself, but that’s never the case,” the economist Allison Schranger wrote at Quartz following FiveThirtyEight’s launch. “Interpreting and presenting data requires making judgments and possibly mistakes.” That’s why so many writers have been concerned about FiveThirtyEight’s climate writer, Roger Pielke, Jr, a University of Colorado professor, who ThinkProgress once called “the most debunked person in the science blogosphere, possibly the entire Web.”

Though Pielke has a deep pool of knowledge about climate change, as The Week has chronicled, he also has strong personal opinions and a history of using data to back them up against the larger scientific community. President Obama’s science adviser, John Holdren, has “accused [Pielke] of selective quotation and obfuscation,” and though Pielke claims to believe in climate change, Foreign Policy has included him on its list of climate skeptics. (He also has a shaky history with data, having once included the results of the filmmaker Michael Mann when analyzing the inflation of news coverage of a study by the scientist Michael Mann.)

Pielke’s first post for the site covers the link between climate change and extreme weather—or lack thereof: “Disasters Cost More Than Ever—But Not Because of Climate Change.” In the post, he first shows the rising rate of global disaster losses, then adjusts the figure for the rise in global GDP—showing that global disaster losses have actually flatlined. “We’re seeing ever-larger losses simply because we have more to lose—when an earthquake or flood occurs, more stuff gets damaged,” writes Pielke. Which is an interesting point, but not relevant to climate change.

The shame is, there are plenty of subjects that could use a parsing from FiveThirtyEight: Silver could suss out the actual climate impact of shipping oil by rail, or give hard numbers on how decreased public research dollars effects disease funding—a subject the The New York Times specifically said was missing “[comprehensive] tracking [of] the magnitude and impact of private science.” Even a rigorous look at how to parse out acceptable health coverage would be welcome.

FiveThirtyEight has ample opportunity to burst into this space and produce what Silver promised all along: an improvement in the level of analysis required by the general press. But you can’t take down journalism without first abiding by its best practices.

Alexis Sobel Fitts is a senior writer at CJR.