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.
> 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.