October 7th, 2014
The kids in Math class have formed a ring and are chanting “Nerd Fight! Nerd Fight! Nerd Fight!” while pushing Nate Silver into the circle to face off against Princeton’s Sam Wang. And Silver, for his part, seems exasperated by the spectacle. Meanwhile, Wang is either the most naive guy in Central Jersey–a real possibility, I grant you–or is disingenuously demurring that he’s just a poor suburban academic who didn’t understand public rules of decorum and thought that peer review snark was all part of the game.
I’m on record as being a Silver apologist. What he, and other modelers, do has value, even if it is not oracular. Further, what I like most about Silver is that (unlike some of his admirers) he definitively does not present himself as an oracle. He hedges just about everything with caution and qualifiers and seems highly aware of the limits of his work. Plus, he’s a clear writer. Any way you slice it, he adds value to our understanding of the dynamics of elections.
Enter Sam Wang, a Princeton professor of neuroscience who has emerged as the Baghdad Bob of Democratic modelers and has totally by accident carved out a space for himself in the public square by taking shots at Silver. Which would merely be cloying and hackish if Wang was selling something worthwhile himself. But he’s not. He’s not selling a “model”–he’s selling Democratic comfort food. It just happens that there’s a huge market for that right now and he’s the only vendor. Which makes him a cloying and hackish partisan.
All of which is fine. But what really grates is how smug he is. Because here’s Wang in mid-September telling the Daily Beast how easy this stuff is:
He is the author of two books on the brain and his recent work focuses on autism. Politics, he says, is just kind of a hobby. “It’s a relatively easy problem compared with the other things I do,” he told me.
Well, well, well. That’s quite a marker. So Wang has been running around, shooting his mouth off, taking shots at guys with bigger profiles, and trying to make a name for himself selling a narrative that runs totally counter to everything everyone knows about the election by claiming that Dems now have a 63 percent chance–down from 70 percent!–of holding the Senate–and saying that coming up with this divine truth is “easy”?
He better be right. Because if the Dems don’t hold the Senate, then Wang should be completely discredited. At least when it comes to politics.
And by the by, if Wang is doing important work in neuroscience and autism, then isn’t it kind of criminal for him to be wasting so many clock cycles on media fights and the quotidian stuff of election modeling? Goodness knows, we’d rather have a better understanding of autism than a better understanding of the midterm elections, which are going to give us a result one way or another, regardless of what observers write about them.
That is, unless Wang was just concerned with pumping up his Twitter numbers:
In a phone interview with TPM this week, Wang said that he had emailed Silver since the flare-up but has not heard back from him yet. He referenced more than once his relatively meager 6,500 Twitter followers versus Silver’s 959,000.
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Here’s something to remember about Sam Wang:
He was more or less alone then in saying that Democrats would retake the House after the shutdown.
It helps to remember that the political orientation of everyone in these fights is mostly liberal. Either liberaltarian, mainstream democrat, or borderline marxist (hai nate cohn!) Yet all of them seem to be able to figure out what’s going on here.
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I like when the same ivy-festooned famewhores sneer at “reality TV culture” because nothing else has quite the manufactured flavor of a week in American higher ed
FredR October 10, 2014 at 9:39 am
I’ve had a low opinion of Sam Wang ever since this surprisingly cheesy review of Nicholas Wade’s recent book: “http://election.princeton.edu/2014/07/08/race-and-mental-traits-nicholas-wades-third-error/”