Eerie success is impressive. Routine failure is not anti-impressive. People treat Google the same way every time some Labs experiment like Wave fails. They thi

Eerie success is impressive. Routine failure is not anti-impressive. People treat Google the same way every time some Labs experiment like Wave fails. They think it means Google's lost their Edge and spinning their wheels. It's equal-and-opposite pessimism to go with the optimism. This is why I do not treat your counterexamples to Silver's accuracy as a convincing slate of proofs. I don't have enough context to judge those failures against the background of his success or vice versa. I do find Nate Silver interesting not just for his psychic abilities. He also brings a certain love of statistics and visualization that deserves the level of coverage he gets. Is he doing any better predicting than some quant or world-class stat guy? No, and you can probably find someone who has a better combination of predictions and historical accidents. But he's also bringing the science to the populace, and that is worth praising and talking about. I do find this 2005 (!) opinion piece by Krugman calling the housing bubble to be an interesting datapoint. http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/08/opinion/08krugman.html http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/08/opinion/08krugman.html But between the Silver stuff and the Krugman stuff I do feel like I have enough context to judge that you have your own axe to grind.