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The point was that selectively praising someone's accurate predictions without mentioning his failures is wrong.

Krugman is a partisan hack that has a Nobel Prize is one very specific area of economics. It does not qualify him to opine on all other areas.

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The poster was clearly congratulating Nate, and then pointing out something specifically that Nate had done well.

It's like if you're congratulating Steve Jobs on a successful iPad launch. You aren't obligated to also mention all of the products he has worked on that haven't done so well.

And I hardly doubt anyone was trying to convince you, or any other reader on HN, that Nate may have mispredicted something. In fact, I'm going to go out on a limb and say that there is no one on this planet who has not made a false prediction.

But since you're so adamant about this, could you put together a list of his complete record with links?

And sure, Krugman has a Nobel Prize, Clark Medal, Ivy League tenured job, nominated for a Pulitzer, but he'll have to live with spec calling him a partisan hack.

I'm not sure anyone would mind that tradeoff.

No, that poster was claiming that his coverage was "well-deserved" and I disagreed. He was not obligated to mention his failures, but I did, and that apparently troubles you greatly for some reason. Silver's whole reputation is based on his assumed accuracy and that's why it is important to provide a more complete record of his predictions (not that my post claims to do that or that I would care enough to do that; since you are so impressed by him, you're welcome to try).

Krugman's reputation as a partisan hack that opines on matter he is ignorant about is among other economists with no fewer accomplishments (but his reputation as a pompous ass is among everyone else).

Eerie success is impressive. Routine failure is not anti-impressive.

People treat Google the same way every time some Labs experiment like Wave fails. They think it means Google's lost their Edge and spinning their wheels. It's equal-and-opposite pessimism to go with the optimism.

This is why I do not treat your counterexamples to Silver's accuracy as a convincing slate of proofs. I don't have enough context to judge those failures against the background of his success or vice versa.

I do find Nate Silver interesting not just for his psychic abilities. He also brings a certain love of statistics and visualization that deserves the level of coverage he gets. Is he doing any better predicting than some quant or world-class stat guy? No, and you can probably find someone who has a better combination of predictions and historical accidents. But he's also bringing the science to the populace, and that is worth praising and talking about.

I do find this 2005 (!) opinion piece by Krugman calling the housing bubble to be an interesting datapoint.

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/08/opinion/08krugman.html

But between the Silver stuff and the Krugman stuff I do feel like I have enough context to judge that you have your own axe to grind.

> Krugman is a partisan hack that has a Nobel Prize is one very specific area of economics. It does not qualify him to opine on all other areas.

That seems to be a general feature of politically-engaged economists on both the left and right. I see Krugman as basically a mirror version of Milton Friedman: a blowhard whose statements on politics and policy preferences are usually wildly unsupported by empirical evidence, but who did also do some genuinely good economic work.

This is generally true of politically-engaged writers of any sort. Politics, at least popular politics (versus academic writing), is polarizing by definition. And generally the data isn't there to support any preference (or equally true... the data is there to support any preference).

This is why, I believe, that why someone supports a particular preference is almost as important as the preference. Although I should add figuring out why people have certain preferences is often difficult, since people are often not forthcoming with their underlying assumptions.

I read a piece on Krugman that was really interesting. For one, it challenged the exact perception that you're advocating: that Krugman takes strong stances on policy matters and uses strong language to defend them, to the detriment of the economics behind them. Interestingly, the piece pointed out that Krugman is usually the stereotypical economist -- quick to qualify and slow to make a strong policy statement without mountains of evidence. The writing style of Paul Krugman may be more the writing style of his wife, who encouraged him to advocate for more policy change. The article definitely painted Krugman's column as more of a cooperation between him and his wife than a straightforward economics work.

There is a very common fallacy committed by people outside economics in thinking that Krugman has something substantial to say in areas of economics outside of his very narrow focus of expertise. Let's say you founded a successful advertising-based Web startup from a scratch and you exited for 8 digits. People who are only vaguely familiar with technology and computers (let's say nurses, taxi drivers, high school teachers) will now think you are an expert in pretty much all matters related to starting a business and computers. However, unless you are a pompous egoist, you should realize that your opinions, even in seemingly very related matters, like running a Web store or creating an iPhone app, will likely be quite uninformed. Krugman's opinions are about economic matters much further away from his true area of expertise than your opinions about running a Web store.

That's a somewhat strange example to use on a site hosted by Paul Graham, who writes about a pretty broad set of things, not all of them very strictly tied to the things he's particularly famous for.

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