Noah Smith is like Gell-Mann amnesia personified. He's good at writing columns such that he sounds like he knows what he's talking about, until he opines on something you happen to be familiar with, and you realize he's completely full of shit and that his main talent is the ability to rapidly pump out a Wikipedia-skim-tier opinion on whatever happened to draw his attention that day. Would strongly recommend putting him on your mental ignore list.
The Noah Smith/Nate Silver axis of opinion-politics writers are — literally — Stephen J Smith and Skip Bayless for people who think politics is sports. They're in the entertainment business.
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Yeah I came here to post that, such a nonsensical statement
Noah Smith is like Gell-Mann amnesia personified. He's good at writing columns such that he sounds like he knows what he's talking about, until he opines on something you happen to be familiar with, and you realize he's completely full of shit and that his main talent is the ability to rapidly pump out a Wikipedia-skim-tier opinion on whatever happened to draw his attention that day. Would strongly recommend putting him on your mental ignore list.
The Noah Smith/Nate Silver axis of opinion-politics writers are — literally — Stephen J Smith and Skip Bayless for people who think politics is sports. They're in the entertainment business.
When you operate in the attention economy, you have to keep pumping out slop to keep visibility in the algorithm.