A nice take down of all the Nate Silver master debators
- Thread starter KOTK
- Start date
nice takedown? it's a bad article that spends too much time assuming that statistics are playful, boy-like and childish because elections aren't about numbers but consequences. The author had better know that if someone weren't paying attention to the numbers all her preferred consequences would be upended by someone who's working the data and thus winning the polls. And the piece is shot through with a type of gender essentialism that's 
PewPew
I came from nothing
nice takedown? it's a bad article that spends too much time assuming that statistics are playful, boy-like and childish because elections aren't about numbers but consequences. The author had better know that if someone weren't paying attention to the numbers all her preferred consequences would be upended by someone who's working the data and thus winning the polls. And the piece is shot through with a type of gender essentialism that's
Damn! Grand Opening/Grand Closing
no I mean the author is clearly intelligent but it's just one of those academic writing pieces that doesn't really have to prove anything it's suggesting... just put a lot of stereotypes together and call it cultural analysisFirst of all it's quite obvious she's employing a constructionist view of gender throughout the article.nice takedown? it's a bad article that spends too much time assuming that statistics are playful, boy-like and childish because elections aren't about numbers but consequences. The author had better know that if someone weren't paying attention to the numbers all her preferred consequences would be upended by someone who's working the data and thus winning the polls. And the piece is shot through with a type of gender essentialism that's
The bolded baffles me. I assume what you refer to as her "preferred consequences" would be liberal-minded outcomes to the series of questions she's referred to as having ''real ethical resonance''?
Okay, but I meant something else. The construction is simplistic. I don't actually buy that looking at polls is a masculine thing and she goes way overboard with it (innumeracy evokes castration anxiety)
It doesn't matter what her preferred outcomes are, she's calling both traditional analysis and poll analysis 'peurile', pointing to the empty meaning of statistics, when the fact is they are very concrete and consequential distillations of electoral reality. I don't think battling policy papers are more meaningful than votes in determining the reality of a governance future because often the former (here's what I'm going to do!) is much more of a lie/mirage than the latter (who's going to be doing it?)