Tarnished Silver

Re:Tarnished Silver by bluedevil2k on Sunday March 23, 2014 @12:00PM (#7453770)

Ironic, and telling, that Silver presents a viewpoint against Krugman's and backs it with data, while Krugman simply refutes his arguments by espousing on his same opinion with no data whatsoever.

This statement from Krugman, to me, flies in the face of scientific thought - "you should be very wary if your analysis runs counter to what a lot of professionals say." Not at all true - the "lot of professionals" should be wary if a scientific study runs counter to their analysis.

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Re:Tarnished Silver by berkay on Sunday March 23, 2014 @12:09PM (#7453807)

By the professionals Krugman does not refer to political analysts/hacks that spew opinion. He is referring to scientists. He is cautioning Nate Silver against dismissing the work done by scientists who use scientific methods. Nate Silver's crew ignoring scientific studies would be no different than political analysts ignoring Nate Silver's work based on anecdotes.

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Re:Tarnished Silver by craigyk on Sunday March 23, 2014 @12:36PM (#7453931)

Exactly. Statistics without purpose, ie. as a fishing expedition, is dangerous. Scientists use statistics all the time, but usually under the guidance of hypothesis driven experiments. Krugman is merely mentioning that if Nate Silver keeps drawing conclusions based on statistical analysis without a deeper understanding and grounding, it is highly likely that he'll come to some bone-headed conclusions.

The best value of statistical wizardry is when it works alongside domain experts.

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Re:Tarnished Silver by cgranade on Sunday March 23, 2014 @12:22PM (#7453874)

Krugman also backed his argument with data, notably the exact same data that Silver is disparaging by hiring people like Roger Pielke Jr. as staff writers. The data is in, and has been analyzed in a multitude of different ways: climate change is real. To ignore that is to ignore the role that expertise sometimes has to play in understanding and interpreting data.

While it's superficially true that this expertise can be used to enshrine unscientific dogmas in the trappings of science, to reject expertise period is to reject the role that knowledge can and must play in forming an understanding of our world. Data do not exist in a vacuum, but are collected in actual experiments, the complexities of which must be understood to gain insight from that data in a way that reflects reality. Not being wary of (or even intentionally misconstruing) how data is collected and represented leads to mistakes like normalizing away trends, then claiming those trends don't exist; this is precisely what Pielke Jr. did, and what Krugman was criticizing.

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Re:Tarnished Silver by yummyfajitas on Sunday March 23, 2014 @12:50PM (#7453991)

...climate change is real. To ignore that...

You are arguing against a straw man. Neither Silver nor Pielke claimed it wasn't.

...to reject expertise period is to reject the role that knowledge can and must play in forming an understanding of our world.

No, rejecting "expertise" is simply rejecting the idea that you must outsource your thinking to others.

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Re:Tarnished Silver by rejuvenile on Sunday March 23, 2014 @12:10PM (#7453814)

Krugman does, in fact, link to more detailed criticisms in his article, specifically this: http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2014/03/19/3416369/538-clim...

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