The Women's 2018 U.S. Open final continues to act as a metaphor for all sorts of political and cultural debates going on in America. The latest involves Serena Williams' husband, Reddit founder,and guy who makes other husbands look bad in comparison, Alex Ohanian. He put out a Twitter thread mocking a recent New York Times article about how often men and women have been penalized at the U.S. Open over the last 20 years:
As any college statistics student or NBA Twitter fanatic will tell you, totals are pretty useless in comparison to averages. Ohanian, who knows a thing or two about data, gives a nice example why:
The co-founder of Reddit knows how to troll, too:
Instead of just whining about it, Ohanian put his money where his mockery was:
After The Intercept's resident Russia apologist Glenn Greenwald extolled the article, statistical svengali (something he used to do for the New York Times) Nate Silver, confirmed what Alex was pointing out about how useless the numbers cited in the article were for in supporting the thesis:
We'll probably be using this final as a stand-in for other cultural disagreements long after Serena has played her last U.S. Open.
