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.
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