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Comment by kenjackson | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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