Nate Silver and the Krugman Embarrassment

(This article was originally published at No Hesitations, and syndicated at StatsBlogs.)

I'm happy that Nate Silver and his FiveThirtyEight are back. Nate generally provides interesting and responsible predictive modeling journalism for the educated layperson. (Of course he sometimes gets in over his head, but don't we all?)

Now all of a sudden Krugman starts to dislike Silver; see his "Tarnished Silver" post. It's very interesting that Krugman never complained much when Silver worked at the New York Times (the trough where Krugman feeds), but now that Silver has moved elsewhere, Krugman's vitriol erupts. Perhaps Krugman always felt that way but was mum so as not to offend his NYT. Or perhaps he now wants to punish Silver for defecting. Perhaps it's a little of both. In any event it strikes me as an embarrassment. Let's call it the Krugman Embarrassment.

I'm not the only one who's noticed the Krugman Embarrassment. See the recent post from Big Data, Plainly Spoken, which I think gets things right in labeling FiveThirtyEight-bashing "premature and immature." Also see the chart at FiveThirtyEight's Data Lab, which speaks for itself.

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