Felix Salmon Is Very Unhappy with Superfreakonomics's Stephen Dubner...
Felix:
Felix Salmon: it’s possible that Dubner is unaware of Wonkblog, or of Klein’s Bloomberg View column, and therefore is unfamiliar with his actual mode of writing. Possible, but unlikely. What’s impossible is that Dubner believes that Klein’s rapidly-deleted tweet is in any way representative of his work as a whole.
It baffles me why Dubner would engage in a low and dirty and deeply dishonest ad hominem attack on Ezra Klein at all — let alone in the middle of a post in which he’s trying to defend his reputation. The only reason I can possibly think of is that, to coin a phrase, he seems to be in the business of attacking at any cost. Even when the cost paid is that people are sure to take him even less seriously now than they did before.
Some backstory:
American Scientist recently ran a column by Andrew Gelman and Kaiser Fung attacking the book’s m.o. And the book’s co-author, Stephen Dubner, has now responded to that column at astonishing and mind-numbing length (7,500 words). Dubner says at the top of his post that he tends “to not reply to critiques”. But buried further down you’ll find this:
Gelman-Fung write that our argument was “picked apart by bloggers.” Their American Scientist article includes only a cursory bibliography and no footnotes or endnotes, nor do Gelman-Fung cite any specific sources in this case, so it’s unclear who those bloggers were and what they picked apart. From what I can tell, this is the main critique; its author is reputable but he has also written things like this (NSFW!), so he too seems to be in the business of attacking at any cost.
To be clear: Gelman and Fung accused Dubner of some slightly intellectually-dishonest practices. And in his self-defense, Dubner engages in some of the most egregious and blatant intellectual dishonesty I’ve ever seen on a blog.
There are lots of ways that Dubner might have responded to Klein; most of them involve mentioning him by name. Only one of them involves exhuming a drunken and deleted tweet from January 2008…
