Data and Opinions, or Leon Wieseltier and Nate Silver

Nate Silver has been promoting his new "data driven" news operation, FiveThirtyEight.com, by saying rather tendentious things like,

The op-ed columnists at the New York Times, Washington Post, and Wall Street Journal . . . don’t permit a lot of complexity in their thinking. They pull threads together from very weak evidence and draw grand conclusions based on them. They’re ironically very predictable from week to week. If you know the subject that Thomas Friedman or whatever is writing about, you don’t have to read the column. You can kind of auto-script it, basically. It’s people who have very strong ideological priors, is the fancy way to put it, that are governing their thinking. They’re not really evaluating the data as it comes in, not doing a lot of [original] thinking. They’re just spitting out the same column every week and using a different subject matter to do the same thing over and over.

Leon Wieseltier, predictably, is offended:

I wish to say a word or two in defense of “bullshit.” That is Nate Silver’s meticulously chosen term—he does nothing imprecisely—for opinion journalism. . . .

Since an open society stands or falls on the quality of its citizens’ opinions, the refinement of their opinions, and more generally of the process of opinion-formation, is a primary activity of its intellectuals and its journalists. In such an enterprise, the insistence upon a solid evidentiary foundation for judgments—the combating of ignorance, which is another spectacular influence of the new technology—is obviously important. Just as obviously, this evidentiary foundation may include quantitative measurements; but only if such measurements are appropriate to the particular subject about which a particular judgment is being made. The assumption that it is appropriate to all subjects and all judgments—this auctoritas ex numero—is not at all obvious. Many of the issues that we debate are not issues of fact but issues of value. There is no numerical answer to the question of whether men should be allowed to marry men, and the question of whether the government should help the weak, and the question of whether we should intervene against genocide. And so the intimidation by quantification practiced by Silver and the other data mullahs must be resisted. Up with the facts! Down with the cult of facts! . . .

The intellectual predispositions that Silver ridicules as “priors” are nothing more than beliefs. What is so sinister about beliefs? He should be a little more wary of scorning them, even in degraded form: without beliefs we are nothing but data, himself included, and we deserve to be considered not only from the standpoint of our manipulability. 

I might hold onto this paragraph as the perfect example of the Straw Man argument. Nobody I know thinks that statistical analysis can answer all questions, especially all moral questions. Nate Silver certainly does not think so. But I think and plenty of other people think that our political discourse suffers from too little connection to the facts. Our discourse is full of opinions about what are, in fact, technical questions which we have the data to answer. For example, Republican politicians are always saying that cutting taxes will increase economic growth, when it is possible to show, from looking at the data, that over the past 60 years this has not been true at all. Conservatives have been maintaining for 200 years that charity actually hurts the poor by sapping their will to work, but there is no evidence for this proposition and plenty against it. Just to be fair, many liberals still seem to think that better sex education reduces teen pregnancy when it clearly does not.

People have a habit of defending opinions that they hold for moral reasons by reaching for quantitative support whether it exists or not. As far as I am concerned, you are entitled to your opinion that the government ought not to help the poor, but you are not entitled to defend that belief by claiming that government help always makes things worse when it demonstrably does not. Wieseltier's shrill denunciations of Silver make me think that he resents pressure to tie his own arguments to the real world. He is, it seems to me, defending his right to say whatever pleases him whether it is true or not. I suppose he has the right to say it, but the rest of us are not obliged to listen.

As Wieseltier complains, Silver's protestations of political neutrality are a little strange:

Why would one boast of having no interest in the great disputations about injustice and inequality? Neutrality is an evasion of responsibility.

But in the current American political climate there is an urgent need for facts that everyone can agree on. If Silver regularly colored his data with his political opinions, half of America would refuse to believe anything he said. So I think that in this case the service he can provide in the way of really neutral data more than outweighs the dubious morality of having no opinions.

Up with the cult of the facts.