Unfortunately I agree with Krugman on 538. I’m a numbers guy, and I think our media do a poor job framing date/numbers-related issues usefully. The deficit, the minimum wage, food stamp benefits, gas prices, income in equality, crime stats, even our favorite athlete’s salary could be much better understood if they were properly framed or at least offered with some more understandable proportionality.

538 is supposed to that and more, but it hasn’t done anything insightful. Today they have a sports nugget on why the NBA “steal” is this super important predictive stat (to another stat), assigns it a huge multiplier effect that is laughable as causal, then cherry picks one team with small sample sizes to try to show impact on winning (that looks like noise to anyone that understands stats.) Someone tell me why Philly has two of the top 5 guys while playing for an historically bad team.

I thought they might have stocked up some great ideas for the start of their venture, but it seems they are already out of them. And to Charles point, Global warming is not a field that was, until recently, run by former jocks that need an intern to open up an excel file. So hiring an against-the-grain skeptic of conventional industry wisdom for a data-driven site is not progressive or provocative, it’s stupid.