Nate Silver: belief

Transcript context

…If there were a paper you wish someone would write — is there such a thing? Something you’d like to know, but you don’t know now, and in principle, an academic could do it. Yes, maybe papers is the wrong part of the curve right now, where a Substack newsletter that you take a couple of days with, or a blog post. Or a book — I’m still a big believer in books, where you go into a conclusion more in depth than anyone has before. Or investigative journalism. I was just listening to that on the way over to the Ross Douthat podcast with the woman who helped to break the story of Jeffrey Epstein for the Miami Herald. She’s like, “This was a major story featuring all types of people that are extremely well known and notorious internationally.” People are lazy. There were not a lot of reporters really pursuing every detail of that case. I think that 90 percent of academic papers would work perfectly fine as blog posts. Including the tone of like, “Okay, I ran some regressions” instead of having Greek symbols and things like that, and the pretense of all of it. You can say what you think and let the world sort it out.…

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