Nate Silver: belief

Transcript context

…I think that might be the right answer, to be clear. [laughter] I think in some ways, what has come out of academic circles has been interesting. I think effective altruism has been interesting, for example. Certainly, critical theory or whatever, the origins of wokeness have had a lot of influence on the discourse more broadly. But I don’t really read a lot of journal articles anymore. Also, a lot of it’s gone on Bluesky, I think, and I can’t tolerate Bluesky, really. It’s too much of a circle jerk. I think academics have maybe lost influence in that respect. Even though I have great experiences talking to academics, and I’ll do events at universities a couple of times a year. They also fall into this trap where it’s so reflexively anti-Trump, a lot of it. I’m anti-Trump, in most senses of that term, but something about it has melted the brains a little bit of the nuance and the subtlety. And the slow-cooking method of academia, where you’re supposed to take more time with things, is not always a good match — you being one of the major exceptions — for rapid-fire reaction to the news cycle. 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.…

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