Have you heard the ancient proverb: The hedgehog knows one big thing; the fox, many little things …?

Nate Silver sure has. Mr Silver is relaunching his FiveThirtyEight blog this Monday, 17 March 2014, with this old proverb in mind. For those of you who can’t wait until Monday (like us), here is Mr Silver (in this recent interview) on the importance of empirical data and his scathing critique of hedgehog-like pundits in the moribund world of print and TV journalism:

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 bullshit, basically … We take a foxlike approach to what data means. It’s not just numbers, but numbers are a big part of this. We think that’s a weakness of conventional journalism, that you have beautiful English language skills and fewer math skills, and we hope to rectify that balance a little bit. * * * We think the first step in using data is that you have to collect data, you have to organize it, and you have to explain the relationships …

Moreover, Mr Silver is willing to name names:

… the op-ed columnists at the New York Times, Washington Post, and Wall Street Journal are probably the most hedgehoglike people. They don’t permit a lot of complexity in their thinking. They pull threads together from very weak evidence and draw grand conclusions based on them. They’re ironically very predictable from week to week. If you know the subject that Thomas Friedman or whatever is writing about, you don’t have to read the column. You can kind of auto-script it, basically.

We love Nate Silver’s point-blank critique of such self-important op-ed pundits. The analyses of these pundits are indeed highly predictable, unoriginal, non-rigorous, and stale. But we would add the following two comments to Silver’s critique:

1. First, we think the main problem with pundits is not so much their hedgehog-like devotion to a single idea. After all, some of the greatest thinkers in science were hedgehogs (like Charles Darwin or Karl Popper). No, the main problem with pundits is their inability or refusal to update their ideological and normative priors.

2. Furthermore, notice that Mr Silver’s critique of pundits (and bullshit generally) applies not just to TV or op-ed pundits but also to traditional legal scholarship, except for the “beautiful English language skills” part.  That is, most legal scholars not only have super-strong ideological or normative priors, priors which they are loathe to reevaluate or update; worse yet, most legal analysis is written in bad English, cluttered with footnotes and an obscure and archaic citation style, as Yale professor Fred Rodell noted many years ago in his classic essay Goodbye to Law Reviews.