I ran into a BlueSky thread started by the very sharp Jacob Levy that made me think I should preach this particular gospel once more…
I have preached this a lot in the recent and in the more distant past, and yet I feel I must do so again. Yes, even though I just wrote a snarky and relatively mean review of Nate Silver’s new book On the Edge:
Time to Write My Negative Review of Nate Silver’s New Book “On the Edge”!
I find that once again need to say that, in the context of American public reason today, Nate Silver really is a national treasure:
Here we have an interesting BlueSky thread:
Jacob Levy: ‘The preemptive surrender of billionaire newspaper owners is somehow scaring me more than the polls. I can remain agnostic about how good the polls are and how to interpret tiny fluctuations around a coin flip; the other signal is unambiguous about what they think is going to happen…
Jamelle Bouie: ‘It is an ominous sign of what is to come if Trump wins, but rich guys are also notoriously bad at forecasting political outcomes, in my opinion…
Ned Resnikoff: ‘I assume Bezos is making the (rational) calculation that a Trump administration would penalize Amazon if he endorsed Harris but that a Harris administration will not retaliate if he declines to endorse. He’s not making a prediction so much as he’s choosing what he considers the no-lose option…
Robby: ‘Also we can’t overstate the fact that billionaires aren’t that knowledgeable about the conditions the average American lives in, or knowledgeable about anything really…
Scott Imberman: ‘I think it’s more of a hedge. He doesn’t have any more insight into what’s gonna happen than we do. It’s just that the risks to him (that is his $$$) are asymmetric and so he’s trying to reduce risk in one of the (equally likely!) outcomes… <https://bsky.app/profile/jacobtlevy.bsky.social/post/3l7efg3ilqm2j>
My first reaction is that it confirms my view that, all in all, in balance, Nate Silver is a national treasure—when, cough, cough, he stays in his lane, and does not get hoodwinked by crypto, “AI”, or other grifters.
A lot more people should take him seriously when he talks about and shows how to think probabilistically and statistically. Jacob Levy—who is very smart—doesn’t do this. And so Jacob Levy is wrong here. It is the commenters who are right. Bezos’ obeying-in-advance and neutering what influence the Washington Post may have in trying to keep the world from becoming worse tells us nothing about who is going to win the election. Jacob does not get this because he is not thinking probabilistically and statistically. He, instead, sees himself as receiving two different streams of valid information—(a) the polls and (b) the billionaires—telling him (a) nothing and (b) Trump, respectively. And so he thinks: probably Trump.
This is an easy error to avoid making if you think like Nate Silver (or, I should say, Bob Rubin: think about what the real information is and where it is coming from.
Bllionaire behavior isn’t a good election predictor because their is no path by which billionaires could have acquired special knowledge, or indeed new knowledge about anything relevant to the election other than how vengeful Trump plans to be. They have learned that he plans to be very vengeful. They think (rightly) there is a substantial (and not changing) chance he will win. And so they are hedging their bets. They are not signaling inside info. Theyare playing it safe. They are protecting their business interests, not predicting winners Think probabilistically, not anecdotally. The polls, while noisy, remain our best window into electoral outcomes. Remember: Sometimes a hedge is just a hedge.
