I can't speak to Nate's record as an analyst or whether the categories that he's setting up would stand up to academic review. However, the overall dynamics he's discussing line up well with my experiences. In particular his description of negative reactions to the type of reasoning he calls "decoupling" has been a major source of frustration for me when interacting with fellow progressives.
I'm seeing a lot of commenters disliking this article overall and/or the author. Are there any alternative articles/books/resources you would recommend that discuss the reasoning styles aspect of author's argument?
(Note, he no longer is affiliated with fivethirtyeight, but at the time this article was published he was, and he retains the rights to the politics models that are being tested, and potentially some of the sports models as well, although I'm less sure of that)
I mean the problem is there won't be any books directly refuting Nate Silver's argument because it's essentially just "people who disagree with me are irrational."
Right-of-center, "Wait But Why" by Tim Urban and "Rationality: A-Z" by Eliezer Yudkowsky (and LessWrong in general) are much better at talking about examining our own biases. LessWrong will be much better than the stuff Tim Urban wrote, which is still better than what Nate Silver is writing. LessWrong is arguably not even right-of-center.
Left-of-center, David Graeber's "The Utopia of Rules" does a good job of pointing out a lot of our society's quiet assumptions.
But I mean ultimately when you say that such-and-such a crowd has a problem with "decoupling," you're just talking about what it means to be human. I guarantee you anyone who claims they don't have a problem with "decoupling" is lying. It just takes a little bit of time and you'll find something which seems like a minor point of order to you which makes them fly off the rails.
My own biased and unhinged take is that the decline of religion in the West has given people total cognitive blindness to the idea that people might actually believe different things from you yet still be rational, i.e. that there are plenty of interesting and useful arguments that are valid but not sound.
I'm seeing a lot of commenters disliking this article overall and/or the author. Are there any alternative articles/books/resources you would recommend that discuss the reasoning styles aspect of author's argument?