Nate Silver Vs. Paul Krugman Has Gone Nuclear

NYT columnist Paul Krugman has been critical of FiveThirtyEight. FiveThirtyEight founder Nate Silver has been critical of Paul Krugman’s criticism of FiveThirtyEight.com. Today, the stats guru, apparently not one for catty sub-tweets, retorted with his equivalent of a tire iron, a faux sober data analysis of Krugman’s column mentions of FiveThirtyEight.

Krugman’s mentions of FiveThirtyEight have become both more frequent and more negative since Silver left the New York Times for ESPN and relaunched his site. Fifteen of his 21 mentions of Silver before leaving the Times were categorized as “positive.” All four mentions in the last nine days were categorized as negative.

"While it can be easy to extrapolate a spurious trend from a limited number of data points, the differences are highly statistically significant. At his current pace, Mr. Krugman will write 425 more blog posts about FiveThirtyEight between now and the 2016 presidential election."

Zing. The real winner here? Sites that cater to media nerds.