Uncertainty is unpleasant and we work hard to talk it away
As a statistician, I make use of the mathematics of probability and variation every day. Outside of my work, though, I am very uncomfortable with uncertainty, whether in the personal or political realms. And I think most people feel the same way. Even in areas such as scientific research or economic and political forecasting where uncertainty is inherent (if you knew what would happen in science, you wouldn’t have to do research; if there was no future uncertainty, there’s be no need to make a forecast), a lot of effort gets put effort into avoiding or denying uncertainty, a “premature collapsing of the wave function,” to use an analogy from quantum physics. When a “statistically significant” result in an experiment is reported as a discovery, or when a non-statistically-significant difference is reported as a null result, this is a denial of uncertainty.
Collapsing of uncertainty reduces mental tension: it’s work to hold two conflicting ideas in your head at once, and a relief to be able to choose just one—especially if you are persuaded that this choice is justified by science. Hence the appeal of making strong statements, which also can get you some attention and respect if stated with enough of an air of authority.
But then if your predictions get tested against reality, things can go wrong. Embarrassments arose when prominent economists predicted a recession in 2023 which then never happened, and in the 2016 election campaign when some political journalists gave Hillary Clinton a near-certain chance of winning in the Electoral College, based on her narrow but consistent polling lead, not accounting for the possibility of systematic correlated survey errors. Discomfort with uncertainty is all too human, and it also comes with social costs.
The replication crisis in science is a product of systematic discomfort with uncertainty, with speculative results presented as settled fact, leading to distress when these findings do not hold up in later experiments: a scientific and emotional boom-and-bust cycle. Indeed, classical statistical methods seem almost designed to create this boom-and-bust behavior, when non-statistically-significant results are treated as if they were zero and statistically-significant results are taken at face value. I prefer a Bayesian approach in which estimates are partially pooled toward zero. There are also non-Bayesian statistical methods that do this sort of regularization. Whatever your statistical methods and philosophy, I recommend studying the process, not just the particular dataset. This is called the reference set in frequentist statistics or averaging over the prior in Bayesian statistics. In poker terms, the principle is to evaluate the strategy, not the play.
Those unusual people who thrive on uncertainty
In his new book, “On the Edge: The Art of Risking Everything,” Nate Silver explores the world of some people—notably, poker players and tech investors—who do not just accept uncertainty but thrive on it. Silver and these others thrive on uncertainty, directly because they can separate their wishes and fears from their assessments of risks and returns, and indirectly because everyone else’s irrationality leaves a lot of potential gains on the table. The messier and more complicated the game, the bigger advantage it is to have a cool head. I’m reminded of a passage from Frank Wallace’s classic “Poker: A guaranteed income for life by using the advanced concepts of poker” (which is pretty much devoid of any intentional literary merit but on its own terms is a kind of outsider-art masterpiece), where he advices the would-be sharpie to encourage games with lots of wild cards and unusual twists, because the more uncertainty, the more the suckers will get confused. Unlike Wallace, Silver is writing his book with altruistic goals: rather than offering readers tips on how to fleece the rubes, he wants to help them understand the world.
Silver characterizes as living in a conceptual country he calls “the river,” by analogy to riverboat gamblers, and, along with many interesting stories, he shares “Thirteen habits of highly successful risk takers.” The concept of “risk taker” is subtle, though: as recommended by the Kelly criterion of gambling, the optimal level to risk in a bet is proportional to your total financial resources—a point which is not invalidated by legendary gamblers who’ve gone to zero and picked themselves back up, as what is relevant here is lifetime resources, not just the stack you’re sitting behind at the poker table. The point is that being comfortable with risk is not the same as betting wildly. For that reason, I think the book’s title is misleading. A successful gambling strategy is not to live “on the edge” or to “risk everything” but rather to be aware of where the edges and risks are and act accordingly.
Vibes
One fun aspect of the book is the stories about some interesting people I never otherwise would’ve heard about. I was bored stiff with the retelling of the overexposed Sam Bankman-Fried—I don’t really need to read an analysis of four different theories of that pretentious plutocrat—but that stuff is easy for a reader to skip. Only in Nate’s book would we get a fun mini-anecdote about “a hand played by the legendary poker player Tom Dwan on the Hustler livestream, where he’d correctly called a bluff against an opponent named Wesley in a record-breaking $3.1 million pot. Wesley’s behavior had been similar to Friedrich’s: a quick all-in followed by a turtle shell in an extremely high-pressure moment where it might be hard to conceal your emotional state.” And Nate buried that one in a footnote! I love this sort of thing, which gives me the feeling that he was pouring everything he had into the book, not holding back.
Here’s another throwaway: “There is almost never such a thing as a sure thing. Even when you’re literally cheating, it may not be a sure thing. In the infamous Boston College basketball point-shaving scandal of 1978-79, when two teammates were paid by the mob to throw games, only four of the nine games the mob bet on won money, with three losses and two pushes.” Boston College . . . the mob . . . hapless crooks . . . this is prime George V. Higgins territory!
The flip side of Nate not holding back is that sometimes he writes things that seem like clichés. Here he is talking about an artist who was “in the right place at the right time” and made a ton of money from non-fungible tokens: “When I spoke with Winkelmann—a.k.a. Beeple—I was expecting someone with the self-important air of being a serious artist or at least someone whose success had gone to his head. Instead Beeple was extremely down-to-earth, dropping f-bombs about once every fifteen seconds in a thick Wisconsin accent.”
Hey, wait a minute! The macho regular-guy artist . . . that’s standard operating practice in the art world. You’ve heard of Jackson Pollock, right? Who was from Cody, Wyoming—that’s even more earthy than being from Wisconsin. Silver’s quote reminds me uncomfortably of the story from Freakonomics of an unnamed “academic” who says something stupid, only to be shot down by regular-guy “Chuck Esposito, a genial, quick-witted and thoroughly sports-fixated man who runs the race and sports book at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas,” which in turn reminded of the punchline of that joke from grade school: “Hey, man, the smartest guy in the world just jumped out of the plane wearing my backpack.”
I’m not saying that Beeple isn’t a smart, down-to-earth guy; I’m just resisting Nate’s dressing him in rogue’s clothing. In some ways, this sort of thing is almost necessary: Nate’s giving us a tour of a world that he loves, he’s writing about to his friends, and so of course he wants to present them in a positive light. If Nate were to describe Beeple as, for example, “the typical self-important ‘serious artist’ who signals his regular-guy status by cultivating a thick Wisconsin accent and carefully dropping f-bombs into his conversation,” well, what would be the point of that? It’s kind of like sportswriting: with rare exceptions, we like the athletes to be presented in a positive light. Similarly, we are introduced to “Will MacAskill, a boyish-looking Oxford professor of philosophy with an endearing Scottish lilt.” I have a horrible feeling that if I’m not careful I’d be described as a “shifty-eyed academic who speaks in a nasal east-coast suburban accent,” rather than, say, a “charming gray-haired statistician with many of the attributes of the absent-minded professor.”
Attitudes toward risk
To be fair, though, the above sort of descriptions work with one of the themes of the book: Nate’s take on Silicon Valley is that “to make all of this work, you need a symbiosis between two often-clashing personality types . . . risk-tolerant VCs [investors] . . . and “risk-ignorant founders.” This is an interesting idea that goes well beyond business-book platitudes of risk-taking being good in itself—one of my pet peeves is when funders say they want to support “high risk, high return projects,” but then in the proposal they never want you to talk about the risky part, and I don’t think they really want high-risk, they just think it sounds good—instead distinguishing between different attitudes toward risk: there are normies who don’t want risk at all and will pay a high price to avoid it; there are savvy forecasters who try to accurately assess risks and then make optimal decisions; and there are the obsessives who try things nobody else would do. The savvies and the obsessives are similar in their willingness to jump into the unknown—and, according to Nate, they get along pretty well, considering each other as fellow citizens of the River—but they thrive on risk in different ways.
I think all of us have all three of these attitudes in different aspects in our lives. At a personal level, I’m a risk-fearing normie: I treasure my secure job and secure family life, and I don’t borrow money. When doing statistics, I’m a savvy forecaster; assessing uncertainty for inferences and decision making is central to my theoretical and applied work. In my career, I’m an obsessive: I wrote Bayesian Data Analysis back when people were telling me that it wasn’t a savvy move, and more generally I throw myself into what I want to work on, and I try to persuade others to join me. There are other obsessives whose careers have not gone so well, which fits Nate’s typology that risk-ignorant founders can create social good even if they’re not making personally optimal decisions. The other point here is that these three often-clashing personality types don’t just power Silicon Valley; in some mix or another they power all of us. As memorably dramatized in the Inside Out movies, each of us is a sort of committee, and Nate’s portrayal of different people’s attitudes toward risk can perhaps give us a better understanding of our own incoherent selves and how this incoherence can be a strength.
Bringing this closer to home, this all reminds me of statistical workflow, how we bounce back and forth between scientific hypothesizing, design of measurement, data gathering, statistical modeling, and comparison and checking of models. When forming hypotheses and constructing models, it helps to have a damn-the-torpedoes “founder” attitude: don’t think about the risks, just do it. When designing an experiment and assessing model fit, it’s good to be risk-aware—not risk-averse, but clear-eyed about uncertainty. Tons and tons of unreplicable science has occurred from thoughtlessly-optimistic designs and analyses. By analogy to Nate’s description of Silicon Valley, empirical research needs the obsessive attitude for modeling and the savvy attitude for design and analysis. I’m not sure where the normie, risk-averse attitude comes in, but given its omnipresence in human behavior, I expect it serves some useful psychological purpose in keeping us sane, if for no other reason than that denial of uncertainty frees up our brain cycles to think about other things.
Ethics
A theme running through the book is the ethical question. If you’re a River dweller and can thrive under uncertainty, what do you do with this ability? I would say that Nate employs it for social good: for over a decade he’s supplied trustworthy forecasts for elections and sports, he’s participated in public debates, and he’s published two books which allow ordinary readers inside some important communities. Nate’s also made some money along the way, which is fine: we live in a capitalist society, and someone has to pay the bills for all these public goods. Some of the people promoted in the book though, I’m not so sure about. For example, Nate interviews Gary Loveman, an executive at Caesars who is famous for implementing schemes to extract fortunes from gambling addicts. Now, you could argue that Loveman just plays a role in society—if he weren’t destroying these people’s lives, it would be someone else—but that would contradict the other part of Loveman’s story, which is how innovative he has been. If you want to give credit to Loveman for being such a trailblazer, then he deserves the blame for the consequences of his actions, no? I don’t think Nate disagrees with me in general terms—he writes that when playing slot machines in Vegas, “one thing is certain: in the long run you’re going to lose,” and he writes that “there’s something about slot machines where the transaction between casinos and their customers feels fundamentally unfair.” This just didn’t come up when he’s interviewing Loveman.
Again, I’m not pure myself—just look at the list of sponsors of our research and I expect that, whatever your political persuasion, you’ll find two or three that you’ll object to—so think of the above paragraph not as a moral objection but as an intellectual objection. The River includes scam-infested waters, from Vegas casinos to electricity-guzzling cryptocurrencies. Arguably, scams are as an important aspect of the River as corruption is to the Village, and to not fully explore this is a missed opportunity, in the same way that it would be a missed opportunity to write a book about applied social science without checking in on the various prominent examples of fraud and unreplicable research that have been enabled by the culture of the scientific establishment.
Politics
Nate’s book is mostly about people who thrive on risk, and, as discussed above, I found lots to think about. He’s got good stories, interesting ideas, a personal connection, and a sense of history and the interconnectedness of society. The ranking of poker hands on page 42 was familiar to me, but even there I learned something—apparently, poker-heads write a 10 as T, for example, illustrating a full house with T♣T♠T♦8♦8♠. I’m guessing that this is standard notation now, and I’m wondering if it has something to do with modern poker thinking in which a 10 is just about as good as a face card? Or it may just have something to do with computerization: with so much of poker being online, it’s convenient to always use a single character to indicate the denomination.
Nate situates his ideas about risk into a theory of politics: as he puts it, successful governmental policies have “encouraged calculated risk-taking.” This makes sense, and it’s something that policy-makers have thought a lot about, not always with much agreement, as can be seen from the continuing debates about international development during the past several decades. There are no easy answers here, and I respect Nate for bringing up political issues rather than just treating risk-taking as a matter of individual behavior.
There’s one part of Nate’s book that puzzles me, though. He focuses on the River, which he characterizes as “an ecosystem of people and ideas” who “speak one language with terms such as expected value, Nash equilibrium, and Bayesian priors.” I’m pretty sure that I live on the River! I enjoy poker (OK, I haven’t played it recently, but still), I “have close ties to the tech sector,” and I’m one of those people with an “appetite for involving themselves in all sorts of problems and controversies.” Indeed, I think my River-dwellingness makes me a good reviewer for this book.
Nate contrasts the River with the Village: “people who work in government, in much of the media, and in parts of academia (although perhaps excluding some of the more quantitative academic fields such as economics). It has distinctly left-of-center politics associated with the Democratic Party.” Despite working in the news media himself, Nate writes, “I’ve never quite taken to the Village,” and I kind of know what he means, as I feel that way about academia, which can feel cringey in a way that isn’t quite what you see on the River.
OK, so here’s my problem. If the River is risk-takers who are skeptical about politics, with views ranging from the far left to the right and everywhere in between, and if the Village is normies who are center-left and who have some connection to political power or at least would like to wield it, then . . . where’s everybody else?
There are two kinds of “everybody else” I’m thinking about here.
First, there are all the people in the country and around the world who aren’t well connected. They’re not professional gamblers or hedge fund investors or tech developers or election-forecasting statistical analysts (hi!), nor are they politicians, journalists, Ivy League professors of cultural studies, or even bloggers. They’re just regular working stiffs. I’m not saying Nate should write a book about these people; it just seems important to recognize that the River people and the Village people he describes are two small tribes within a large society. To put it in crude terms, the Riverians want to make money from the masses and the Villagers want to boss the masses around. That’s a big area of disagreement (notwithstanding that many River dwellers want to boss the masses around and many Village residents would like to make some money); the key is that the battle between the River and the Village is taking place among the larger population and the larger economy.
The other group of missing people are . . . approximately half the people who run the country. Where’s Ted Cruz, for example? He doesn’t seem like a gambler, and he spends much of his time trying to tell people what to do. He works in that small village of Washington, D.C. But he doesn’t have “distinctly left-of-center politics”! And then there are the six Republican judges on the supreme court: not river-dwelling gamblers in any sense of the phrase, these judges have the most risk-averse career paths imaginable—but they’re not in Nate’s Village, as he has defined it. Now, you might say that individual Villager can lean right even as the Village as a whole has distinctly left-of-center politics, but that doesn’t really work given that the Republicans control the judiciary, half of congress, and a few years ago the executive branch of government as well. I think the only possible solutions here are: (a) redefine the Village as being divided between the two parties, or (b) define the Village as having left-of-center politics and then introduce a new entity—the Fort?—that has all the normie, risk-averse characteristics of the Village but on the political right. Ted Cruz and Samuel Alito are comfortably situated within the Fort.
I kind of like this River/Village/Fort thing. The Village is fighting against the Fort, and the River has to figure out what to do about it. Riverians are split: those on the left are in favor of growth in an environment of political equality, and they support higher taxes on the rich, government action on climate change, abortion rights, and other aspects of the Democratic platform; while those on the right are in favor of economic freedom and social stability, and they support lower taxes and spending, less business regulation, restrictions on abortion, and other Republican policies. People of all political persuasions can hate the River because they can find a group of people on the River who annoy them. If you’re on the right, you can hate smug successful Riverians who want to kill the capitalist golden goose that created the conditions for their success; if you’re on the left, you can hate greedy Riverians for whom all the world’s riches aren’t enough.
Who would be the Riverians’ ideal politician? There’s the Libertarian Party but they never get many votes, even in the seemingly ideal year for them of 2016. Considering major-party figures, I’d have to say the closest to a Riverian would be . . . Mitt Romney. He’s a risk-taker, he invested in businesses, he was a cross-party success as governor of Massachusetts, and his notorious “47%” statement (“There are 47 percent of the people who will vote for the president no matter what. . . . are dependent upon government . . . believe that they are victims . . . believe the government has a responsibility to care for them . . . these are people who pay no income tax”) is a hard-headed statement that sounds very River: it might not be how we want things to be, but it’s how things are.
I don’t have the impression that Romney had anything close to universal River support, however, and I suspect the reason is that in 2008 the River went all-in (as Nate would say) on Barack Obama, who was Romney’s opponent in 2012. Obama, as a liberal law professor and Democratic politician, is Village through and through, but he has various Riverian vibes: he’s a basketball fan, he’s a technocrat, and you get the impression that, if he doesn’t himself talk about “expected value, Nash equilibrium, and Bayesian priors,” that he’s friends with some people who do. Obama shares some characteristics with tech investors (who can also talk the talk of expected value and Bayes, even if they’re not actually crunching numbers themselves)—he’s even friends with Richard Branson!, and you can see how Riverian economics professor Steven Levitt and occasional promoter of climate-change denial wrote that in 2008 he thought Obama “would be the greatest president in history.” By 2012, much of that bloom was off the rose, but perhaps the Riverians of the center and right didn’t realize what they had in Romney. I think they should be happy with Romney’s religiosity as well. Nate writes that the River is a non-religious place, but my impression from reading various River-adjacent takes on evolutionary psychology is that, whatever they their own religious beliefs, many Riverites think of religion as a good thing for other people, in the same way that various elites would like abortion to be illegal but presumably think that anyone they personally knew who needed an abortion, would be able to get one.
Statistics and poker
One thing the book made me think about are the differences between what it takes to do statistics (or data science or “analytics”) and what it takes to play poker. Here’s my take: to be a good analyst, you need:
(a) some understanding of math and probability,
(b) the willingness to learn from data—to use data and analysis to come to new conclusions rather than just to confirm your existing beliefs—and
(c) the ability and willingness to apply subject-matter knowledge.
To be a good poker player, you need:
(a) and (b) as above,
(d) the ability to practice deception, and
(e) the ability to “read” people when they’re trying to deceive.
I’m a good statistician (or so think the people who pay me!) and I think I’m very strong on all of (a), (b), and (c) above. I’m just an OK poker player—I’m sure they’d clean me out at Vegas in short order—OK because I’ve got (a) and (b), but I’m weak on (d) and (e).
I don’t really know, but I think that Bill James is like me: good with (a), (b), (c), but not so much with (d) and (e). I’d want him as an analyst on my baseball team; I wouldn’t put him in charge of negotiations.
Nate is good at all of (a), (b), (c), (d), and (e), which has allowed him to become a world-class analyst and a world-class poker player. I do wonder if his strengths in all of these traits causes him to somewhat blur the boundaries between them.
In particular, I might argue that being bad at (d) and (e) might make me and Bill James better scientists than we would be, if we happened to be good at deception. I don’t say this because being good at deception means we would cheat—I think Nate’s good at deception in poker but I don’t think he cheats in any way in his analytical work—, but rather because, if you’re bad at deception, this kind of forces you to a more direct and transparent approach to science. There’s something brute-force about how I do science, and I think that brute force here is a good thing; I’m not in the habit of hiding things and so everything ends up naturally out in the open.
Or maybe this is just a rationalization. The relevant to Nate’s book is that there are different aspects of “Riverian” comfort with uncertainty. One aspect is the Riverian analysts’ traits of comfort with probability, willingness to learn from data, and integration of subject-matter understanding into analytics. The other aspect is the Riverian poker players’ traits of deception and ability to read through others’ deception. In mathematical terms, the (a) + (b) + (c) is decision theory and (a) + (b) + (d) + (e) is game theory. I don’t know how different these two sorts of River dwellers are; it’s just interesting to think that there are different ways in the River to be comfortable with uncertainty.
Summary
I enjoyed Nate’s new book. It had lots of great stories and an interesting take on risk attitudes, not just in themselves but how they interact. The book feels very honest; it seems like it’s written from the heart. I don’t think the political angle was fully thought through, but with a small extension (from River/Village to River/Village/Fort), it kinda works. The book is a kind of cultural tour of some people who thrive on uncertainty—Nate focuses not on people who take risks out of desperation but rather people like him (or me!) who would do just fine in the Village or Fort but choose to enter the River because it’s more exciting or just because it feels more real. How do these unusual people fit into the rest of society? It’s an interesting question that Nate takes some interesting steps to answer.
Doesn’t playing (real) poker also require comfort with uncertainty **when you have (financial) skin in the game**?
Ben:
I’m assuming that in all the cases you have some skin in the game, whether financial or reputational or you just care about the outcome!
“You just care about the outcome” is decidedly NOT skin in the game!
A bit of elaboration on “deception” and “reading” in poker. It should not be understood as behaving a certain way. It mostly comes from the inherent nature of the game (you can’t see the opponent’s cards) and the way you play certain hands.
For instance, you often play very weak and very strong hands the same way — this is being called “polarized”. The idea is that unless you’re “balanced” between the two options, your opponent will “read” your actions as showing strength or weakness. He will not pay you off when you hold a strong hand; or on the flip side, will call your bluffs when you hold a weak hand.
You can call this “deception”. But the result comes straight from the theoretical aspects of poker. For a certain bet size, there is an optimal amount of bluffing. In poker, bluffing is a necessity, both theoretically and practically.
Paul:
Agreed. Reading hands is more about patterns in betting than traditional “tells” like someone scratching his nose when he’s bluffing. But it’s still deception! There’s also deception in chess, even in chess played over the internet where you can’t see the other players. Deception comes from making a sequence of moves that gives the other player the impression you’re planning strategy A, when you’re really planning strategy B.
There’s also the even more basic game theory of looking at the cards on the board and trying to figure out the other players’ options.
One poker idea that’s always interested me is the idea of “representing.” For example, I’m dealt a pair of kings but I don’t want to intimidate people, so I “represent” an unsuited king-queen; that is, I bet, at least for awhile, as if I was holding that KQ. The challenge here is that “representing” can lead to sub-optimal bets. The flip side of all this is that when other players are betting, you need to consider that they might be “representing” too.
Typically you can solve the “representation” problem by playing your strong hands in the normal way. So you *generally* play them aggressively and try to maximize your value, and generally don’t “slow play” them.
The catch is that you have to find an “appropriate amount” of bluffs which you play the same way — usually aggressively. And humans find it hard to bluff enough, or they choose the wrong kinds of hands to bluff with. Most people are too passive, partly because they’re risk averse. And therein lies a lot of the skill in top-class poker.
I agree that reading hands is usually far more about patterns than tells. When I play poker with my friends, I can pick up on what they have based on their actions and attempt to exploit that inference while they attempt do the same to me. This involves deception.
However, I do think at the highest level of the modern game (in online poker especially) things are different in a way that makes the “deception” framing less apt. Essentially, when the best players in the world play against one another (at well studied games, e.g., heads up texas hold em) it is a battle to implement a strategy as close to optimal as possible. Purposely deviating from the theoretically optimal strategy is only worthwhile to exploit an opponent’s deviation. So, if your opponent’s quality is such that you cannot be very confident in identifying when they are deviating, it ceases being worth making deviations yourself. To my mind, this removes most of the deception, since there is common knowledge about the overall strategy both players are trying to implement, and essentially no value in credibly signalling a deviation from that strategy (since purposely deviating from the closest-to-optimal strategy one can implement can only lose money in expectation).
A few fascinating things about poker solvers (software that estimate game theory optimal solutions using a constrained game tree):
1. They “prove” the correctness of having polarized (or probably more accurately, balanced) betting lines. In particular, the solver will always find bluffs to balance out their “value” (good hands) range. It is fascinating to see how solvers choose which hands to bluff with. Often these hands are the worst hands a player may still have (allowing someone to win money with hands that never win at showdown) or hands that make it less likely the opponent will have strongs hands (so-called blockers). A lot of this people had reasoned through, but Nash equilibria provide “receipts” for the reasoning used.
2. They disproved some common assumption people have. For example, holding the “nut blocker” in your hand (e.g., the A of hearts on a three heart board) often proves a good spot to bluff since your opponent can never have the best hand. However, in some situations, lower flush cards prove to be better blockers because of how those blockers interact with the opponents possible hands. These are things no one would ever reason out without the sims help.
3. Solvers are fearless. They do things real humans just don’t do, running huge bluffs with weak hands in order to find balance and using massive sizes that were once uncommon.
4. Certain lines are only optimal if you incorporate randomness into your long-term play. Again, this is for balance and deception. However, if you opted only for one line, good players will pick up on that and adjust accordingly.
5. The value difference in various is often nearly infinitesimal. Often the value of studying solver solutions is just to pick up the principles, not to try to remember them. Why is that line A has a marginally higher EV than line B? That’s the lesson.
There’s a lot of wisdom for people who use applied reason in their daily work. Conventional wisdom is often right, but keep your mind open. Many approaches are often sound and good, even if some of those approaches are better on the margin.
Perhaps the most useful piece of wisdom for research is the importance of fundamentals and making good initial decisions. We often find ourselves trying to find technical ways out of problems because of design and data decisions made earlier. In both poker and research it is far better to make great decisions early in the great tree and pretty good ones, rather than bungling the early decisions only to try to salvage some dignity later. The biggest EV losses come from screwing up out of the gate and playing hands one shouldn’t have, so to speak.
Thanks for the review, a lot of fun to read, I’ll get the book!
Your discussion of kinds of people brought to mind some of the lyrics in Ray Wylie Hubbard’s song, The Rabbit:
“There’s two kinds of people in the world
There’s two kinds of people in the world
There’s two kinds of people in the world
The day people and the night people.
And it’s the night peoples’ job
It’s the night peoples’ job
It’s the night peoples’ job
To get the day peoples’ money”
& earlier was
‘I said to the rabbit, “Are ya gonna make it?”
The rabbit said said, “Well, I got to.”‘
I think we rabbits are the normies without a lotta connections, that got to, as you pointed out.
Naturally, I got bogged down right at the beginning when Andrew wrote about the hypothetical, ” if there was no future uncertainty.” I prospered in the academic world because I learned (or thought I did) the subjunctive which indicted Andrew should have written, “if there were no future uncertainty.” But this is a learned audience and rules do change over the years and my memory is suspect. So, I scurried to find this
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https://twominenglish.com/if-there-was-vs-if-there-were/
The main difference between “If there was” and “If there were” lies in the mood of the sentence. “If there was” is used in sentences that talk about situations that happened in the past or are likely to occur. It deals with reality or specific instances. For example, “If there was a mistake, we will fix it.”
“On the other hand, “If there were” is used for hypothetical situations, ones that are imaginary, wished for, or unlikely to happen. This usage applies the subjunctive mood, which is for dreaming big or imagining different scenarios. An example would be, “If there were more hours in a day, I could finish my work.”
“In short, use “was” for real scenarios and “were” for hypothetical ones.”
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Even if I and the above website are correct, I would not be surprised that in the near future, due to so-called influencers, or merely the passage of time, this “nice” distinction disappears.
If you are in need of wasting a perfectly good afternoon, chase down the lengthy history of the word, “nice”.
Paul,
I’m afraid those of us who like the subjective are a dying breed. I knew the battle was lost when Obama didn’t use it. Change is not always for the better.
I’m having trouble parsing this one, “If it were done when ’tis done, then ’twere well
It were done quickly:”.
I think the ’twere is right, not sure about the second was, but the were fits well.
Mrs. Gelman, my English teacher, would patiently say, “Just go word by word, phrase by phrase.”
I think maybe the reason the Village is center-left is that post-2016 election a lot of the right in the US perceives or at least presents itself as fighting against the (post-1970 or so?*) Status Quo.
*I have no idea what politicians actually believe (R or D), but anecdotally from living in a deep red county in a fairly red state, everyday Republican voters see the country as moving left over their lifetimes.
I think this might be similar to Nate Silver’s other comments about “the Indigo Blob”; the center-left (in his argument as I understand it) has a significantly greater tendency to present itself as center/unbiased than its counterparts on the right. There does seem to have been a breakdown of truly neutral institutions over the last decade.
People probably think mostly about “social liberalism”… things like gay and trans people and marijuana legalization and living together before marriage and interracial marriage and such.
But when it comes to actual govt policy we have objectively moved right into fascist territory. Remember when un-marked un-announced federal agents snatched people at gunpoint off the streets of portland in vans? I do.
https://www.npr.org/2020/07/17/892277592/federal-officers-use-unmarked-vehicles-to-grab-protesters-in-portland
Remember when the US or state govts put up barbed wire and other physical barriers specifically to force people to attempt crossings at the most dangerous and drowning-prone spots? https://www.texasmonthly.com/news-politics/migrants-drowning-rio-grande/ and put children in cages?
Remember when the US created 2 trillion dollars overnight and gave it out to a crap-ton of rich people with little oversight? https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/justice-department/biggest-fraud-generation-looting-covid-relief-program-known-ppp-n1279664
Remember when we made it illegal to get sudafed over the counter? Thereby dramatically increasing both personal suffering of decongestant users (chronic sinusitis) *and* dramatically increasing the societal cost of methamphetamine whose availability went nothing but up and together with opioids put out by super rich pharma companies destroyed a generation of people? Yeah I do.
Remember when we invaded Iraq over lies about WMDs? remember when war criminals who invented outright lies to get their war like Rumsfeld and Cheney ran the country? Remember when we had a 20 year long war in Afghanistan and then after 20 years of nation building which primarily involved pumping money into defense contractor pockets, the entire country fell to the Taliban in 3 days?
Remember when billionaires admitted that they puppet the mayor of NYC via a personal Telegram chat to get him to send hundreds of police officers to break heads at Columbia university?
https://www.newarab.com/news/us-billionaires-urged-new-york-use-police-gaza-protest
Remember when we started practically giving away grenade launchers and armored personnel carriers to police across the country? https://www.marketplace.org/2020/06/12/police-departments-1033-military-equipment-weapons/
Remember when the president of the united states said of the american people: “Take the guns first, go through due process second,”
https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/376097-trump-take-the-guns-first-go-through-due-process-second/
Remember when President Trump asked the Defense Secretary ‘Can’t you just shoot them, just shoot them in the legs or something?’ about american citizens? https://www.npr.org/2022/05/09/1097517470/trump-esper-book-defense-secretary
Yeah, I remember all that stuff. All that straight up fascist stuff.
The US is not at the moment a fascist dictatorship, but it wouldn’t take THAT much to get all the way there.
Interesting comment on “the village.”
Silver did an interview with Ezra Klein of the NY Times this week. In the audio (but NOT the edited transcript) both Klein and Silver agree “the village” is broader than liberals. For example, they both agree a Republican White House such as that of GW Bush is in the village; Trump’s “may not be.”
In this discussion, at about 10:20 per my podcast app, they both seem to agree this term means “the Establishment” and not “the liberal Establishment.”
Ok, I think that agrees with what I was speculating above: the Village is center-left not fundamentally but because the current right has become more anti-establishment and thus largely left the Village.
Confused:
That sounds accurate from a political perspective, but then it’s only a political perspective and it entirely moves away from Nate’s framing of the Village as being people who are uncomfortable with risk. You could say that Ted Cruz, by choosing first to support Trump and then to support election deniers, has moved decisively away from the Village—but this has nothing to do with Cruz being a riverboat gambler or being comfortable with expected values or whatever. Rather, it seems like a straight-up political calculation by a politician who wants to stay in power.
Isn’t there an argument that the anti-establishment turn of current Republicans kind of is a high risk/high reward strategy vs Bush era Republicans? I think that’s part of why Trump ended up getting so much support – the feeling was/is that the old Republicans were kind of going along and not doing enough.
I haven’t read the book, so I don’t know how to reconcile Silver’s podcast discussion with what he wrote on this topic in the book.
Although from what I do know, Ted Cruz is an interesting example of an establishment politician. My understanding is that he was tremendously unpopular within the Republican caucus basically from Day One because he positioned himself explicitly as anti-establishment. Thus I would have never put Cruz in the Village category in the first place, so I wouldn’t think he “moved decisively away from” it.
One thing that struck me about that interview is how bland Silver is in expressing his own political preferences. He criticizes liberals for being unable to ‘decouple’ — to say that a person does some good things and some bad things (an example he gives is, the CEO of Chick-Fil-A is opposed to gay marriage, but the company makes good chicken sandwiches). He doesn’t fully connect the dots in that interview, but I think he’s implicitly saying that Trump does some bad things and some good things and that although he, Silver, prefers Harris, each of us should understand how another voter could prefer a different candidate.
To me, that reasoning works for most candidates most of the time, sure. But in the case of Trump we have a president who tried to stay in office even after losing the election. That’s not just an action I don’t like, it’s an action that — in my opinion, obviously — should disqualify him from future office, and indeed I think he should be in prison. Obviously I live in my own little bubble — everyone lives in one to some degree — but if there’s one thing I _thought_ just about all Americans would agree on, it’s that if you lose the election you leave office. This seems to me to be waaaaay bigger than any tax policy or immigration policy, or indeed any collection of typical government policies. At one time it seemed like only true Trumpers were willing to give him a pass on this, but now even people like Nate Silver seem to feel like “meh, OK, he tried to destroy American democracy, but someone might still prefer him because he promises to keep gas prices low.” I don’t know anyone personally who thinks Trump trying to stay in office after losing was an OK thing to do — maybe not preferred, just as you might not prefer his China policy or whatever, but not fundamentally wrong — so I have no one I can ask about this attitude.
But presumably some readers of this blog can enlighten me: if you acknowledge that Trump tried to stay in office after losing the election, but you don’t see that as disqualifying, could you explain why not? Is it a sense that preserving democracy is not all that important, or maybe it’s just another policy priority among many and you can’t have ’em all?
Phil –
The most obvious reason for disagreement about him refusing to leave office after losing the election would be the belief that never happened, because he didn’t lose the election. Thus, Trump was preserving democracy against voter fraud.
Keep in mind that a large % of the American population thinks the election was stolen.
Yes, a substantial number of Americans _say_ they believe the election as stolen, although I suspect many of them say that to justify supporting Trump even though they know he lost.
But in and cast there’s no way Nate Silver thinks the election was stolen. What really baffles me is the attitude of a lot of people who acknowledge that Trump wrongly tried to stay in office but who don’t care much about that.
Phil –
I don’t share your skepticism about whether they really believe the election was stolen.
Some, sure, will just day they believe it to support Trump but I suspect the belief that “the media” and the Dems (in particlar black voters in Philly, Detroit, and Atlanta) colluded to commit massive voter fraud is very heart felt for many. They’re entirely convinced by material such as the video clips presented in 2,000 Mules.
As for Silver, I dunno – he’s pretty all in on the “Dems and mainstream media” explanation for a lot of things. For example, he’s pretty all in on the “Covid came from a lab and ‘they’ are hiding it” narrative. He’s prolly not all the way there on voter fraud but I wouldn’t be shocked if he’s at least “mass voter fraud” adjacent.
As for Trump supporters who don’t think voter fraud took place, and think his refusal to accept defeat is no biggie – I have often seen those two beliefs reconciled by a combination of (1) they support the policies they he claims he’ll implement – like mass deportations and, (2) they think he’s such a victim (of Dems, the deep state, and “the media”) that his righteous anger justifies his belief that the election was stolen.
“but you don’t see that as disqualifying, could you explain why not? ”
Because he current alternatives will make the country worse off. Not complicated.
So few words, but this reveals so much. You have no moral bearing. Even if I agreed with your assessment (which I don’t), the idea that trying to steal the election can be justified by the alternatives being “worse” is abhorrent. By that logic, you seemingly would allow for almost any behavior by a public official if the alternatives are “worse.” This is transactional politics at its worst.
chipmunk –
Because he current alternatives will make the country worse off. Not complicated.
A very large percentage of Trump supporters reject the very idea that Trump lost the election. Perhaps a fact about those who might be your ideological compatriots, that you’d prefer to ignore?
Anyway, Phil already addressed your answer:
…or maybe it’s just another policy priority among many and you can’t have ’em all?
Dale –
Even if I agreed with your assessment (which I don’t), the idea that trying to steal the election can be justified by the alternatives being “worse” is abhorrent. By that logic, you seemingly would allow for almost any behavior by a public official if the alternatives are “worse.” This is transactional politics at its worst.
As un-inclined as I might be to leap to the defense of chipmunk’s moral bearing…
First, chipmunk may think that the election was stolen, making the question of the morality underlying stealing the election moot.
Second – I dunno. We all have different moral calculations. If someone feels that preventing abortion is a moral absolute, the “threat to democracy” of a Trump administration being a lower priority doesn’t, imo, mean a bearingless moral world view. It’s just one different from my own.
And of course, even as someone who in no conceivable way has a fiber in my being of support for Trump, I acknowledge that democracy didn’t end with his first administration and while there’s a greater threat to democracy from a 2nd Trump administration, I certainly recognize there’s a lot of uncertainty as to how existential the threat from a 2nd administration might be.
I do think there’s a countervailing danger from over-estimating that threat. First, in the real world, I think, over-estimating that threat (generally, but by an individual such as yourself) increases his electoral viability. I think it’s a strategic mistake to focus on the threat to democracy. For that reason, I agree with the apparent strategic shift in the Harris candidacy as described here: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/11/opinion/kamala-harris-trump-attention.html
Second, just at a personal level, I think there’s a danger to my psyche and emotional state to catastrophizing a 2nd Trump administration. Of course, it’s easy for me to say that because I’m far less likely to feel it’s effects than a woman trying to get an abortion, or someone who’s on a lower rung of the economic ladder.
That should be “not at an individual level” not “but at an individual level.”
Joshua
I think you miss my point. There are plenty of reasons someone can find to support Trump. Chipmunk offered the justification that the alternatives are worse. It is that reasoning that I reject – and I do think it is devoid of a moral bearing. If we accept that type of logic, then we could excuse all sorts of things – imagine justifying falsifying data because the resulting study is better than the alternatives. Chipmunk’s reasoning is a purely utilitarian approach. I agree that some people view that as an ethical paradigm, but I think it is the absence of one. Nothing is wrong on its own, only in relation to the alternatives.
I should probably be more open to viewing utilitarianism as an ethical standard, and it is often presented in philosophy books and courses as one moral standard. But most of what I’ve read reveals philosophers use it as a benchmark to show its deficiencies compared with other moral standards. It is those deficiencies that I am reacting to. I should add – I don’t find utilitarianism devoid of value. Indeed, it is often a necessary way to approach decisions. But I find its application to choosing between the current presidential candidates misplaced.
Dale –
Thanks. Intersting response. I’ll give it some thought.
“and I do think it is devoid of a moral bearing.”
Dale, this might surprise you: I disagree. It’s remotely possible – I know there’s no dataframe or statistical analysis to prove it – that we don’t share the same “morals” (you seem to believe you have some). If you support Kabama Obiden, you’re at least tacitly supporting the murder of Israeli civilians and supporting Irans efforts to – to say the least!! – murder Israeli civilians, not to mention Chapelle’s ignoramus garden variety anti-semitism. I find that not just immoral but disgusting and revolting.
So I guess you can choose your morals how you want, but don’t think your choices are the only options available.
I guess if your support of anybody who shows any ambiguity when atrocities occur, then you are “tacitly” supporting such atrocities. Unfortunately, that standard means that there has never been, and will never be, anybody you can support according to your moral code. A moral code with a null set doesn’t seem like a moral code to me.
Dale –
I guess if your support of anybody who shows any ambiguity when atrocities occur, then you are “tacitly” supporting such atrocities. Unfortunately, that standard means that there has never been, and will never be, anybody you can support according to your moral code. A moral code with a null set doesn’t seem like a moral code to me.
Ironically, chipmunk’s response to your first comment really helped me to understand your first comment in a way I hadn’t quite understood previously. And your follow-on response to his response, confirms my understanding.
That chipmunk apparently thinks I’m “tacitly” supporting the murder of Israelis if I vote for Harris – or prolly shutter to think, strongly oppose Bibi or think negotiating with Iran over nuclear weapons – really does explain how his flattened, cartoonish moral construct, indeed, doesn’t translate to any meaningful moral bearing in the real world.
I withdraw my earlier comment.
Should be… think negotiating with Iran over nuclear weapons [makes sense].
Surely the River’s ideal politician is Jared Polis! He’s a serial entrepreneur and a self-described libertarian, while being a socially liberal Democrat.
Joseph:
A few years ago, maybe. But with the current levels of political polarization and the right half of the River all-in on the Trump version of the Republican party (including the social conservative agenda with Vance etc.), that I think the only way they’d consider Polis as a legitimate possibility is if he were to switch parties.
I’d imagine that the Musk-style Trump supporters are simply the loudest and the majority still lean Democrat, given that we are talking about a highly educated group that are disproportionately likely to live in urban areas. I’m also not sure that Romney is particularly popular among those who have gone all-in on MAGA anymore. We’re probably looking at a political polarisation where the right section (e.g., Thiel and Musk) gave us Vance, but Polis would probably be the quite representative of everyone else in this River, with both having little cross-over appeal.
Just curious not having read the book: what percentage of people written about are women?
Currently about 60% of the way through the book.
He discusses several different female poker players.
Multiple different times he brings up how the demographics of the ‘river’ aren’t representative of the larger population, specifically more male, white and asian.
If you want me to put a percentage on it without going through and counting it, maybe 15-20%????
Almost certainly female interviewees are overrepresented relative to the population of the ‘river’, and underrepresented relative to the population as a whole.
Great review! Love “the Fort”.
I don’t know, I think overturning some pretty well-established precedents with little thought to the (social, political) consequences could be described as River-like behaviour.
If we wanted to play with the analogy, I would describe left-of-center as the Commune (or maybe the Co-opt). The Village seems to the hallmark of right-of-center conservatives. I’m not sure if there’s a Fort right now — I think it works for people who saw themselves as fighting against the liberal tide (like Buckley or Buchanan). But given how much Trump has transformed the Republican Party and the Supreme Court, I don’t think they see themselves as merely fighting against the tide.
I think there’s still a strong feeling of fighting against the tide. I think Democrats see recent Republican victories as more fundamental/game changing than Republicans themselves do, and current more anti-establishment Republicans (vs Bush era) still see “the establishment” as stacked against them. But that is very anecdotal.
I refuse to accept that anything someone who grows up a centi-millionaire like Mitt ever does qualifies as a “risk” as a normal human would understand the world.
Nkh:
Nate discusses this in his book—not about Romney about about other people who were born wealthy and then had even more success, people like Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos. Nate emphasizes that a savvy, risk-comfortable investor should use something like the Kelly rule, under which you’re never going “all-in.” That is, being comfortable with risk is not the same thing as risking it all.
As noted in my review above, there’s a misleading quality to Nate’s book in that it’s called On the Edge and it has stories about risk-loving gamblers, but then its heroes are risk-savvy investors. They’re taking risks in one sense but not the other.
Haven’t read he book, but listening to Silver on two different podcasts (he was also on the Bulwark, and I thought that Tim Miller did a better job interrogating Silver’s views than Klein – who has spoken in the past of Silver as a friend) is that Silver’s whole taxonomy is self-serving to advance his self-aggrandizement.
I say this in part because while I respect Silver’s work at 538 on polling a great deal, his whole substack’Twitter contrarian schtick is, imo, pretty broken epistemically. It’s really no better than run of the mill heterodox contrarianism – which has its place but invariably, they fail to see their limits. He’s better than Joe Rogan and Bret Weinstein, but not by a whole lot, IMO.
His whole dichotomous framing of these two elite mindsets looks to me the same old same old confirmation bias. The discussion of attitudes towards risk is interesting but it really doesn’t hold up. Take his whole confident determination that Harris picking Walz was the “safe bet.” Klein did a nice job of showing just how facile that framing was. Entirely subjective, yet Silver treats it as if it’s fact and a function of his whole dichotomous world view construction. (to his credit, Silver didn’t push back that hard when Klein dissected his argument).
Joshua:
I enjoyed Nate’s book and can’t comment one way or another on the “self-aggrandizement” thing: if he communicates well and makes money off it, I can hardly criticize, as I do the same thing.
But I agree with you that, when Nate steps away from data analysis and moves into opinion, he can get overconfident. A notorious example from a few years ago was when he shared his view that NYC mayor Eric Adams could be the future of the Democratic party. It would be convenient if Nate were to label his takes on a A-to-F scale, the same way he rates pollsters, with A representing the results of careful analytics with high-quality data, B and C conveying some unavoidable gaps in the analysis, D and E where he’s just processing stuff he’s been reading in the news lately, and F where he’s going full contrarian without any evidence. As it is, we just have to make those judgments ourselves. One relevant predictor here is whether the claim comes with data and graphs; another is whether he posts it on his blog or on twitter, another is whether he responds to criticism in a careful way or just ignores it or brushes it off.
But Andrew, his overconfidence feeds back into his whole theory about how the people like him with an enlightened attitude towards risk are systematically better at evaluating probabilities.
That’s exactly why I question his self-elevating, dichotomous taxonomy.
I will also add that in the Klein podcast he does suggest that he kind of uses online interaction to try out concepts that he may not really have much conviction in, and I respect that. I do that a lot.
Thinking about this more…
So my take on Silver is that he’s arguing that he and his fellow enlightened contrarians have basically hacked cognitive biases.
But my problem there is that theories of cognitive bias predict that because of cognitive biases, people will think the group to which they identify is less vulnerable to cognitive bias.
My view is that cognitive biases are a function of the basic human psychology and human cognition that we all share. The best we can do is, maybe (and I’m not sure about this) use the scientific method to help control for our biases. Critical to applying the scientific process is awareness of just how prone we ALL are to cognitive biases, an awareness that we all think our own group is less vulnerable to bias, and and a recognition that it’s critical to integrate feedback from others as to our biases.
I think Silver is good at applying the scientific method to his polling methodology. From what I can see from his public engagement, I think he’s often pretty closed off to interrogating his own biases when he steps out of that domain, and integrating feedback into that process.
My view is that his anti-woke, anti-lib/Dem focus – while I’m sympathetic to some of its validity – creates an obstacle to his access to his own ideological biases.
Of course, as always, my view is influenced by my own biases. Always. That doesn’t make it wrong.
I’m going continue on with my discussion with myself a bit more – hoping to get a bite. .
Andrew posted a while back about research being done (by his sister?) into “essentialism.”.
I was thinking about Silver’s dichotomous taxonomy and his politics. I think there’s something there that connects to a kind of gender essentialism.
The River is macho, swashbuckling, individualistic, courageous risk takers. You know, like tech bros and poker players. Hard to imagine a much more male dominated group.
The village are more meekish, risk aversive folks who look collectively for approval before deciding to do something. You know, kind of like women, right?
And I think this connects to Silver’s politics, which overlaps more generally with tech bros and their embrace (not Silver’s) of a Trumpish, Elonish macho conservatism.
I’m it making a super strong argument here. Silver’s taxonomy is certainly not an overt or explicit gender essentialism. And I’m not saying it’s uniformly gender essentialist. But I wonder if there isn’t an elemenrhere.
I honestly don’t know there. I mean, what you’re saying makes sense, but mapping pretty much any binary divide/dichotomy onto male/masculine vs female/feminine has a long and deep history (e.g. yin/yang associations).
On the other hand, I do think there are more male risk-takers than female (there’s a reason car insurance is more expensive for young male drivers than young female drivers)
On the other other hand, that’s more marked in *young* men, much younger than even Musk much less Trump.
“People want certainty, but they cannot have it” assumes you present results in a certain way. This applies to poker players or pollsters.
An approach I have pushed for a while now is to look at how results are presented. If instead of focusing on one outcome you develop alternative representations, some with similar meaning (we quality them as Meaning Equivalence, ME) and some with a different meaning, although looking similar (we quality these as having Surface Similarity, SS). We now have a boundary of meaning (BOM) distinguishing between ME and SS.
This provides a way to communicate findings not (less) affected by the yearning for certainty. Somehow people do not consider this and ignore our ability to present results in a way that improves communication. Nat Silver is doing exactly this….
1. typo correction: “we qualify them…”
2. reference: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3035070
see also: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3862006
You are so wrong it is almost unbelievable. You bought into a false narrative hook line and sinker and repeated it. Mitt Romney is *extremely*, laughably, “tail-between-his-legs” risk-averse. https://www.nashuatelegraph.com/uncategorized/2012/07/21/klein-romney-not-a-big-risk-taker-by-trade/
No doubt the same is true for many of these other so-called “River” characters. For anything that might actually affect their own quality of life or that of their family, their professional reputation among people they care about, their ability to buy a home and a few vacation places in popular neighborhoods and to send their kids to private schools, they have absolutely *zero* risk appetite whatsoever. They will of course encourage this kind of risk-taking in others because that is the principal means by which they juice their score! The book gets that more or less correct. But the idea that these people like Mitt Romney are, on a personal level, risk-loving or even anything remotely close to risk-neutral, is pure fiction and a manipulative lie, and it’s sad to see so many people once again hoodwinked by this baloney.
Jeff:
When mentioning Romney above, I’m not talking about his personal characteristics; I’m talking about how he could be perceived by Nate or other “River” people. Romney’s “47%” statement seems like the kind of tough-talking, quantitative-sounding thing that would appeal to people who attribute their success in part to their ability to take risks and see the world the way it really is.
As discussed in my post, there’s a fundamental incoherence within the “River” concept in that it is connected to (a) riverboat gambler types who either love risk for its sake or ignore risk because of their obsessive pursuit of otherwise unattainable goals, and (b) savvy investors who understand risk from a probabilistic perspective and make investments or decisions which might appear risky from the outside but are actually sound, Kelly-like investments. Also mixed in are (c) people like Gary Loveman who take zero personal or financial risks themselves but who know enough math or psychology and are in the right place at the right time so that they can exploit others’ misunderstandings of risk. I think you’re getting at this incoherence in the second paragraph of your comment. In his book, Nate celebrates all three of these kinds of people, often conflating them but in some places making interesting distinctions between them.
Thanks. I’ve read your comment about the “47%” statement several times and I don’t get the take away that it is “hard-headed” or “tough-talking.” No one in the audience was getting dressed down. Other than the fact that it superficially cites a number, I don’t see what is quantitative about it–the number actually makes it even more disingenuous given how much of the audience would have been well aware that a society where the majority of the population pays any direct tax at all is an outlier in history.
That said, I think the statement is very relevant to this discussion, just not in the way you are portraying it. The behavior of the “47%” in trying to secure their basic needs is no different than the behavior of Mitt Romney in trying to secure (what he viewed as) his. Everyone is risk-averse when it comes to what they think they “need.” The real point of the statement was to tacitly acknowledge that much of the population lives in precarious circumstances and to reaffirm that he would brook no compromise on the narrative that their lack of options is their own fault. Everyone else in the room was more than able to connect the dots to the unstated conclusion–when people’s basic needs are under threat their actions are very predictable, and one person’s predictable actions are another person’s profit opportunity. He was telling his sponsors that he sees an opportunity to de-risk their investments by ratcheting up the precariousness of the population one notch. They were the words of one “risk-savvy” person to other “risk-savvy” people, but suggested the exact opposite of some mythical “Riverian” policy that seeks to “encourage calculated risk-taking.”
Wonderful review! This was one of your most personal and absorbing posts.
“Even when you’re literally cheating, it may not be a sure thing” reminded me of this classic scene from The Sting:
https://youtu.be/_mrNhIxOGzw?si=TTCTVzD5CPQfMCUW
Reading this article, I thought of Silver’s self-indulgent dichotomy pitting the brave smart numbers guys against the foolish, risk averse, villagers.
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2024/08/race-science-far-right-charlie-kirk/679527/
It describes in part how the “race science” folkskmewizs see themselves as just cold hard analysts, I afraid of whatever the statistical truths might lead them.
I’m not making a direct link; I doubt Silver goes along with their viewpoints – but there is certainly a lot of crossover with tech bros who no doubt, are at least “race science” adjacent.
Sometimes blog commenter, Steve Sailer gets mention.
Another review of Silver’s book:
https://thepointmag.com/politics/the-bookmaker/
It could be edited better, but for the most part it fits my “priors” given my reactions to Silver. It takes a political angle and is, like me, skeptical of Silver’s self-interested, dichotomous taxonomy. Even uses the word “swashbuckling” as I did above.
I don’t agree with the review entirely, but it does capture the sense that I feel there’s a malignant aspect to Silver’s whole framing (none the least because apparently Silver ignores the deliteruous societal impacts of glorifying gambling).
That said, I do still like Silver’s stuff on political election predictions.
Joshua:
That is a good review. Weatherby and Recht agree with me that the poker stories are the best part of the book, and they agree with me about the moral concerns of people who manipulate problem gamblers. They put it well when they distinguish between gamblers and casino owners.
They’re wrong about one thing, though. They write that Nate “is a devout Bayesian statistician.” That’s not true! Nate’s election forecasting method is not Bayesian. I don’t think Nate gives code or exact details of his method, but from what I’ve seem of the descriptions and results, it’s pretty clearly not fitting a Bayesian model. Now, you might say that his approach is conceptually or spiritually Bayesian in that it updates with new information—but there are a lot of ways of combining information and deciding on weighted averages without expressing data and uncertainty within a joint probability model. I’m not saying that it’s bad that Nate uses non-Bayesian methods—there are many roads to Rome—; I just reject the automatic association of probabilistic forecasting with Bayesian statistics.
But, yeah, I think their political take makes sense. In my review, I argued that in his River/Village construction, Nate was ignoring the Fort—that is, the roughly half of the government and government-connected industries that are on the right side of the political spectrum. Weatherby and Recht point out that Nate is ignoring all the normies too (except to the extent that they provide value as suckers, consumers, or voters).