The New Right-Wing War on Data

I've been watching with growing incredulity the escalating series of attacks on Nate Silver of 538 (http://fivethirtyeight.blogs.nytimes.com), all because he's refused to go along with the ever-increasing "Ro-mentum" meme from the GOP, and his analysis of aggregate poll data (the basis for which is freely available) doesn't show the race is running away in Mitt's favor. In fact, he has the audacity to show Obama as a narrow favorite.

Recently these attacks have evolved from disagreements over how Silver crunches the numbers to more deeply cogent and intellectual commentary on Silver … such as Dean Chambers of "unskewedpolls.com" describing Silver this way. "Nate Silver is a man of very small stature, a thin and effeminate man with a soft-sounding voice that sounds almost exactly like the 'Mr. New Castrati' voice used by Rush Limbaugh on his program. In fact, Silver could easily be the poster child for the New Castrati in both image and sound." (http://www.examiner.com/article/the-far-left-turns-to-nate-silver-for-wisdom-on-the-polls)

Great example of "unskewed" analysis, Dean!

I would normally simply lean back and let my house professional statistician (my wife) defend Silver's work, but Nate managed to do so in an even more entertaining fashion. After noting the above analysis by Chambers, he summed it up (https://twitter.com/fivethirtyeight/status/262077837564076032) as:

"Unskewedpolls argument: Nate Silver seems kinda gay + ??? = Romney landslide!"

Embedded Link

Nate Silver Addresses Accusation That He’s “Too Effeminate” To Accurately Predict Election « Alan Colmes’ Liberaland

Google+: View post on Google+