"I haven't been surprised by Krugman's criticism because I've fired some shots at the New York Times editorial page, of which he's a member," Silver told TPM in an email on Monday, adding that Krugman "was full of praise for FiveThirtyEight while it was part of The New York Times."
The turning point may have come earlier this month, when Silver told
New York Magazine that "op-ed columnists at the New York Times, WashingtonPost, and Wall Street Journal" are most like the hedgehog, a creature that the Greek poet Archilochus said knows "one big thing."
As Silver sees it, those hedgehogs run in contrast to FiveThirtyEight's
scrappy crew of foxes, who know "many little things."
"Plenty of pundits have really high IQs, but they don’t have any discipline in how they look at the world, and so it leads to a lot of bull####, basically," Silver said in that interview.
When Silver was asked to identify an exception to such criticism, Krugman's name wasn't mentioned. The stats guru instead named Krugman's conservative colleague at the Times, Ross Douthat, as "someone who shows some originality."
