Inside The Mind of Nate Silver

This week on the Next Big Idea podcast, a timely conversation with Nate Silver on poker, politics, Kamala’s prospects, and the art of risking everything. Listen to PART ONE our conversation on Apple or Spotify , and join the conversation in the comments below.

We'll be dropping PART TWO —?where Nate gets into the benefits of thinking probabilistically, the downfall of Sam Bankman-Fried, AI risk, and more — on Thursday. If you can't wait till then, you can listen to the entire conversation by downloading the Next Big Idea app: https://nextbigideaclub.com/app/

The last decade of American politics have been an emotional roller coaster for me, maybe for you too. Until recently, I found myself avoiding the news for stretches of time for my psychological health. The stakes feel incremental higher each election cycle. Sometimes it feels like the future of the world — at least a version of the world that we recognize — hangs in the balance.

In the midst of all this chaos, Nate Silver, the founder of FiveThirtyEight, and now the Silver Bulletin , has been a kind of collective therapist, a voice of reason. He has calmly predicted likely election outcomes and explained the math, soothing our histrionics with his statistical models.

In 2008, he correctly called 49 out of 50 states. In 2012, his model correctly predicted every one of the 50 states plus the District of Columbia. But then there was 2016. We all know how that turned out. When the election was called for Trump, I remember feeling sucker punched. I was in a state of shock and disorientation. What just happened? How could we get it so wrong? How could Nate get it so wrong? The next day, the Wrap ran an article with the headline “Nate Silver Blew It Bigly on the Election — Can His Brand Recover?”

It was a frustrating moment … not just for Democrats, but also for Nate.? His model, as it turned out, got it less wrong than everyone else. On election day, he gave Clinton a 71 percent chance of winning. Compare that to the Princeton Election Consortium which put her odds at 99 percent.

Furthermore, Nate didn’t set out to be an election soothsayer, let alone our collective therapist. He got his start playing poker, and to this day he’s more comfortable in a casino than at a political convention. Which is probably why last year he left FiveThirtyEight — now part of Disney — and this week is publishing a book about going back to his roots.

It’s called On the Edge: The Art of Risking Everything , and it’s … a big book. Ambitious. It’s a few different books in one. It's part memoir, partly a self-help book about risk-optimized life strategy, partly a book about the existential risks we face collectively, and partly an explanation of the divide that exists between two tribes of American intellectuals: the probabilistically inclined technologists and hedge fund investors and gamblers that Nate calls “The River,” and the liberal intellectuals at institutions like Harvard and The New York Times that Nate calls The Village. Who lives on The River?

“They’re basically people that have two sets of personality traits, one of which is strong analytical ability, so these are mostly quantitative risk takers, people in tech, poker, finance, crypto. But they pair that with being extremely competitive. You know, wanting to prove other people wrong, being a bit contrarian sometimes, but wanting to compete and be willing to take risks in order to do that.”

This is Nate’s tribe. “The other day,” Nate told me, “I played a poker game where I'm betting five figures per hand, right? I have a high risk tolerance and, and probably some thrill seeking tendencies. You know, I like, I like roller coasters. I like spicy food.”

He’s certainly more comfortable floating in The River than he is standing on shore with the Villagers, his term for the left-leaning academics, journalists, and politicians who, from the perspective of those on the River, prize emotions over facts and get off on moral superiority. “The village,” says Nate, “I've never quite gotten along with. And part of the self discovery in the book is trying to, trying to understand why.”

That’s not to say that Nate is blindly loyal to The River. He worries that their appetite for extreme risk-taking may put us all in peril when it comes to potentially world-ending technology like artificial intelligence. But he’s convinced that in the battle between The River and The Village, The River is winning, accruing more wealth, and more power. Like it or not, people in the River are increasingly running our world. We need to understand how people in the River think, both because it’s critical to our collective future, and because most of us can benefit from thinking more analytically. What should most of us do differently? Nate says:

• Take more risk – "I'd say 90 percent of people should take more risk, at least in kind of like a career financial base."
• Guess probability of outcomes - If you get in the habit of placing bets on outcomes, you will get better over time at quantifying uncertainty through probabilistic thinking.
• Trust your gut when you have a lot of life experience in a given realm. It turns out our gut intuitions call upon a lot of intelligence from our brains, as we’ve discussed in fascinating conversations with Antonio Damasio and Annie Murphy Paul.

Though it may not have been his original intention, On The Edge, scheduled to be released tomorrow, delivers both excellent life advice, and the political therapy that I have come to expect from Nate, this time with a more comprehensive explanation of how our world is changing. He articulates more clearly than anyone recently, why the parents are squabbling, and how we can all better understand one another, and more accurately forecast what the future holds.

Listen to our conversation on Apple or Spotify , and join the conversation in the comments below.?