Saturday, March 15, 2014

Nate Silver Rips Thomas Friedman: Not Much 'Original Thinking'



Nate Silver Rips Thomas Friedman: Not Much 'Original Thinking'

by John Nolte 14 Mar 2014, 8:55 AM PDT
In a wide-ranging interview with New York Magazine, Five-Thirty-Eight's Nate Silver mocked New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman as a "hedgehog" who "only knows one thing." When asked to describe what a hedgehog is, Silver pointed to Friedman specifically and the op-ed columnists at the Times, Washington Post, and Wall Street Journal:

Uhhhh, you know … the op-ed columnists at the New York Times, Washington Post, and Wall Street Journal are probably the most hedgehoglike people. They don’t permit a lot of complexity in their thinking. They pull threads together from very weak evidence and draw grand conclusions based on them. They’re ironically very predictable from week to week. If you know the subject that Thomas Friedman or whatever is writing about, you don’t have to read the column. You can kind of auto-script it, basically.

It’s people who have very strong ideological priors, is the fancy way to put it, that are governing their thinking. They’re not really evaluating the data as it comes in, not doing a lot of [original] thinking. They’re just spitting out the same column every week and using a different subject matter to do the same thing over and over.

You can read the full interview here.

Thomas Friedman
Thomas L. Friedman is a columnist for the New York Times, a member of the Clinton Global Initiative, a member of the Council on Foreign Relations (think tank), and married to Ann B. Friedman.

Note: George Soros is a member of the Clinton Global Initiative, a member of the Council on Foreign Relations (think tank), and was the chairman for the Foundation to Promote Open Society.
Foundation to Promote Open Society was a funder for the Aspen Institute (think tank).
Ann B. Friedman is a trustee at the Aspen Institute (think tank), and married to Thomas L. Friedman.













No comments: