Nate Silver's claim to fame was building a statistical electoral results model that correctly predicted a lot of the results in 2012. But since then, a lot of his commentary has shifted from technical details about building statistical models (such as working out which factors are more or less likely to drive changes in the results) towards the political punditry of "let me react to $POLITICIAN's latest speech," with the insight one might expect from such punditry.
I don't read his substack, so most of what I see of him is what gets passed on social media, which is definitely in this vein (even if it is perhaps a collection of the worst of Nate Silver).
It's also worth noting that you making your comment on a thread about an article by Nate Silver on why people like him are great that makes almost no reference to statistical modelling and is instead heavy on some sociopolitical views are better than others, which is exactly the kind of writing that has caused many people to sour on him.
The question was why do so many people dislike Nate Silver. He claims - correctly - that lots of people are exposed to Nate Silver's very dumb commentary on politics. Whether that's a "representative sample of his work" is irrelevant to the question if it's what people are exposed to.
I dunno, I make a lot of effort to not hate people, especially people I don't even know
However, I think right now a lot of society broadly is turning against people who market themselves as misunderstood contrarian geniuses, mostly because this is a bullshit archetype in the first place, but partially because viewing oneself this way has become a tribal signifier of a certain crop of industrialists who use this image and a philosophy that glorifies it to justify business and policy decisions that, as people are faced with the consequences, seem less like 4D chess and more like ponzi schemes and mafia shakedowns. People don't like the corporate hellscape where their fundamental autonomy is increasingly restricted by technological and techno-legal fiat even as their economic opportunity seems always to be shrinking, and so as humans generally do, they start to also not like the tribal signifiers of the people they (mostly correctly, though with a bias toward publicly visible figures regardless of how ultimately influential they are) view as responsible for this state of affairs.
I actually view Silver as kind of a misfire from this perspective, in that he hasn't particularly caused the immiseration people are actually reacting to and so his bad PR year seems like people picking up on aforementioned tribal signifiers, though by publishing stuff like this it really seems like he wants to lean into those
Absolutely spot on! I haven't thought about Nate Silver in years, and after seeing people hate on him I went and read the article, and now I also get the ick from him. Here are some of those "I'm a complete asshole" tribal signifiers that set off alarm bells in my own brain:
> Democratic-aligned “Village” elites.
Such a worn out strawman. Wealthy Republicans and Libertarians are successful because they earned it, but wealthy Democrats are corrupt "elites". Give me a break.
> those of us who understand the algorithms hold the trump cards.
So he's separating the world into "idiot sheep" and "cunning wolves", and he's of course one of the wolves. He's talking about "trump cards" like the purpose of life is to win over weaker, stupider people. He sounds like a psychopath.
> their ties are deep, they speak one another’s language, through terms like expected value, Nash equilibriums and Bayesian priors.
Another "people in my tribe are smart because they know how to manipulate the behavior of people in the other camp". When most people learn what these things are, they go "oh cool, a sometimes-useful model for making better decisions", not "OMG this is the key to finally being able to ruthlessly manipulate others!". Nate is assuming that if someone is not playing The Psychopath Game, it's because they're too stupid, not because they don't want to.
It looks to me like Nate is doing the thing where he gets successful, which allows him to say more of what he's really thinking, and when he starts to get negative feedback from that, he doubles and triples and quarduples down. Prediction: he's going to get worse, with his public writings getting more and more overtly hateful and persecution-complexed, until he suddenly realizes he's scared of his own fanbase. We see lots of people on this curve: Jordan Peterson, J.K. Rowling, Elon Musk.
I think it's a combination of him complaining about "woke" and how those crazy lefties are an authoritarian threat (i.e. being one of these "river" people he's written about) and downplaying genocide in Gaza on Twitter.
Though he was always a controversial figure in certain circles, so there may be lingering anger over his polling averages not saying what people thought they should say.
