Opinion | Nate Silver on Kamala Harris's Chances and the Mistakes of the 'Indigo Blob' ... - 0 views
www.nytimes.com/...klein-podcast-nate-silver.html
shared by Javier E on 14 Aug 24
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silver risk chance mistakes election river village instinct pressure upside bet portfolio judgment probabilistic thinking time horizon tolerance psychology bias
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You’ve also called it the indigo blob in different ways. You began to see it as a set of aligned cognitive tendencies that you disagreed with. What were they?
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one of them is the failure to do what I call decoupling. It’s not my term. Decoupling is the act of separating an issue from the context. The example I gave in the book is that if you’re able to say, “I abhor the Chick-fil-A’s C.E.O.’s position on gay marriage” — I don’t know if it’s changed or not, but he was anti-gay marriage at least for some period of time — “but they make a really delicious chicken sandwich.” That’s decoupling
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Or, you can say, you know, Michael Jackson, Woody Allen, separate the art from the artist kind of thing. That tendency goes against the tendency on the progressive left to care a lot about the identity of the speaker, in terms of racial or gender identity and in terms of their credentials.
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In this other world that I call “the river,” the kind of gambling, risk-taking world, all that matters is that you’re right. It doesn’t matter who you are; it matters that you’re right and you’re able to prove it or bet on it in some way.
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And that’s very against the kind of credentialism that you have within the progressive Democratic left, which I also call the “indigo blob” because it’s a fusion of purple and blue. There’s not a clear separation between the nonpartisan centrist media and the left-leaning progressive media rooting for Democrats. Different parts of The New York Times have both those functions.
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You have the C.E.O. of OpenAI saying, yeah, this might destroy the universe, but it’s a good gamble to take.
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On the one hand, there are lots of signs that risk tolerance is going down, among young people in particular.
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They’re smoking less, drinking less, doing fewer drugs, having less sex — a different type of risk tolerance.
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They are less willing to defend free speech norms if it potentially would cause injury to someone. Free speech is kind of a pro-risk take in some ways because speech can cause effects, of course.
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On the other hand, you have various booms and busts in crypto. You have Las Vegas bringing in record revenue. You have record revenue in sports betting
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What you seem to be doing in the book is making an interesting cut in society between people with different forms of risk tolerance and thinking about risk.
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some people respond to that by saying, OK, I make my own rules now, and this is great and I have lots of agency.
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some respond by withdrawing into an online world or clinging on to beliefs and experts that have lost their credibility or just by becoming more risk averse.
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you spend time with people whose approach to risk you find sophisticated and interesting. One of them is Peter Thiel. What did you learn spending time with him?
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There’s a good book by Max Chafkin about Peter Thiel called “The Contrarian,” which is convincing that Thiel is actually quite conservative more than libertarian and probably quite religious.
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I mean, the amounts of wealth and success and power that Silicon Valley has — I do think some people pinch themselves and wonder if they have been one of the chosen ones in some ways, or been blessed in some ways, or maybe the nerdy version of it, think they’re living in a simulation of some kind.
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Peter Thiel is a sort of template of the V.C. mind, which is oriented toward being right in important and counterintuitive ways three out of 20 times and doesn’t care about being wrong 17 out of 20 times. You want big payouts, not a high betting average.
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The two things that you hear from every V.C. — one is the importance of the longer time horizons. You’re making investments that might not pay off for 10 or 15 years.
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No. 2, even more important, is the asymmetric ability to bet on the upside. They are all terrified because they all had an experience early in their career where Mark Zuckerberg or Larry Page or Sergey Brin walked through their door, and they didn’t give them funding and then they wound up missing on an investment that paid out at 100x or 1,000x or 10,000x. And so if you can only lose 1x your money, but you can make 1,000x if you have a successful company, then that changes your mind-set about everything. You want to avoid false negatives. You want to avoid missed opportunities.
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There’s a bias in the world you’re describing — an aesthetic around talking in probabilities. I see this a lot in Silicon Valley. I would call it faux Bayesian reasoning, where they’re given some probability, but they have no reason to base the probability. And it makes you sound much more precise. It makes you sound like you know what you’re talking abou
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SBF was known for always talking in terms of expected value, which is very appealing to the kinds of people you’re describing. But it can become a costume of sloppy thinking. I’m curious how you think about it.
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There’s two things here. One is there is a jargon, where there’re just a lot of shared cultural norms and unspoken discursive tendencies. It’s just the way we communicate, I think, in the river. But also, it’s really easy to build bad models.
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Look, in some ways, these V.C.s are obviously incredibly deeply flawed people. So why do they succeed despite that?
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I think because the idea of having a longer time horizon, No. 1, and being willing to make these positive expected value, high-risk, but very high upside bets and gathering a portfolio of them repeatedly and making enough of these bets that you effectively do hedge your risk, right? Those two ideas are so good that it makes up for the fact that these guys often have terrible judgment and are kind of vainglorious assholes, half of them, right?
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I want to end on a part of your book I found really interesting, which is about the physical experience of risk in gambling but in other things, too. You talk about pain tolerance, you talk about how the body feels when you’re behind on a hand and you’re losing your chips
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You’ve talked about being on tilt. But I see it in politics, too. There is a physical question that comes into the decisions you make. Tell me a bit about how you think about this relationship between the body and the ability to act under pressure to make intuitive decisions in moments of very high stress.
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Human beings have tens of thousands of years of evolutionary pressure, which is inclined to respond in a heightened way to moments that are high stakes, that are high stress moments. Your body will know when you’re playing a $100, $200 game where it really matters. You will just know
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You’ll experience that stress. Even if you suppress it consciously, it will still affect the way that you’re literally ingesting your five senses. So if your heart rate goes up, that has discernible effects.
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But actually your body’s providing you with more information. You’re taking in more in these short bursts of time. People who can master that zone — and I use the term zone intentionally because it’s very related to being in the zone, like Michael Jordan used to talk about — learning to master that and relish that is a very powerful skill because you are experiencing physical stress whether you want to or not
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How much is that learnable, and how much of it is a kind of natural physical intelligence that some people have and some people don’t?
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you can tone it up or tone it down. I mean, it’s terrifying the first time it happens, but when you start to recognize it and you make a conscious effort to slow down a little bit and take your time and try to execute the basics
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It’s not as much about trying to be a hero. It’s about trying to execute the basics. Because if everyone is losing their [expletive], if you can do your basic ABC blocking and tackling, then you’re ahead of 95 percent of the people.
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is gut instinct overrated or underrated? It depends on how much experience you have. The best poker players can have uncannily good instincts based on reading physical tells, just the kind of vibe someone gives off.
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I played a lot of poker in writing this book, and you develop a sixth sense for whether someone has a strong hand. And you can test it because you can say, I know that I’m supposed to fold this hand here, it’s a little bit too weak to call against a bluff, but I just have a sense that he’s bluffing. And lo and behold, you’re right, more often than you think.