Nassim Taleb calls Nate Silver totally clueless about probability: who is right about election forecasting?
Background
Perhaps lost in the whirlwind of presidential name-calling, a lesser-known multi-year old feud has resurfaced on Twitter this election season. Nate Silver is the founder of FiveThirtyEight and is a popular statistician frequently called upon by media members to give commentary and expertise on election forecasting. Nassim Taleb is a statistician/quant turned philosopher, perhaps most well known for authoring the book “The Black Swan”. He is second most well known for calling people names on Twitter. In this 2018 instance he seemed to take issue with FiveThirtyEight’s election forecasts, saying that “klueless Nate Silver” “doesn’t know how math works”, among a host of other insults. Silver responded that Taleb was an “intellectual-yet-idiot”, an phrase coined by Taleb himself. Ouch. A litany of statisticans, mathematicians, and data scientists came out of the woodwork to take sides. Taleb himself doubled down on Oct. 10, 2020, again calling Silver “totally clueless”.
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