Is London a little bit tame for Nate Silver? The stats expert known for his hugely influential US election model is in town promoting a new book about risk, and can’t help noticing all the ways in which we play it safe on this side of the Atlantic. “You go to the tube in London and they have guard doors, which they don’t have in the subway in New York.” (He’s evidently been riding the Elizabeth line). Or, “You’re in an Uber and you don’t put your seatbelt on in the back seat, and there’s like the very polite British beeping,” he says, with a disarming, high-velocity giggle. Not that he minds too much – you get the impression he’s fond of the city, where he spent a year as a student, and in any case “both countries are making different trade-offs” – the US has less regulation and higher growth, but lower life expectancy: the very definition of live fast, die young.
It’s clear, though, where he feels most at home. “I spent a lot of time in casinos over the course of writing this book,” he confesses in the opening pages of On the Edge, describing one in Florida that boasts “200 gaming tables, 1,275 guest rooms, 3,000 slot machines and a glimmering guitar-shaped hotel that shoots beams of neon blue light 20,000ft into the sky”. A far-cry from the sedate charm of the Royal Society of Arts, where he sits, in a baseball cap and T-shirt, munching chocolate brought by his PR for a much-needed blood sugar boost (“It’s eight hours of back-to-back stuff today”). To go by his new taxonomy of contemporary power, we’re very much in “The Village”; that dopamine-doused casino he described is part of “The River”.
This is a slightly confusing choice of image, but it works once you get used to it – the idea being that the River is free-flowing, disparate, full of exciting rapids and cataracts. It encompasses poker tournaments, Vegas, venture capital and Silicon Valley, and its inhabitants (he calls them “Riverians”) range from anonymous blackjack players to Elon Musk and cryptocurrency fraudster Sam Bankman-Fried – at least until the latter took up residence in a California correctional facility. Its mindset is highly analytical, somewhat contrarian and frequently thrill-seeking. But it’s more than a curious outgrowth of advanced capitalism, Silver says; in an era of breakneck technological change, it will play an outsize role in determining the shape of society, and our collective futures.
“The Village” is easier to grasp: stolid, slow moving, it’s home to norms and orthodoxies, legacy media, universities, government departments. Villagers read the Guardian and the New York Times. Silver, who studied economics before becoming a professional poker player, then a political forecaster, sees himself as having a foot in both camps, though he’s upfront about being a Riverian at heart. On the Edge is his guide to this landscape, and his attempt to bridge the divide. He tells me: “I want the Village and the River to understand one another better.”
His relationship to the former is complicated, though. Silver came to wider attention on the back of the 2008 presidential election, when his electoral model correctly predicted the winner in 49 out of 50 states, at a time when many still found it hard to believe an African American really would win the White House. In 2010 the New York Times brought him on board, and in the 2012 contest between Obama and Mitt Romney, he scored a perfect 50 (as well as writing an unlikely bestseller about statistical thinking, The Signal and the Noise). By the time 2016 rolled around, his website FiveThirtyEight.com had been acquired by the sports network ESPN and, in desperately anxious times, was treated as having prophetic powers. Indeed, worried liberals constantly refreshing his electoral college map helped make it “way too popular”, Silver has written, pointing out that analytics firm Chartbeat rated his forecast “literally the most engaging piece of content on the English-speaking Internet” that year (second place went to the BBC’s Brexit Liveblog). His model gave Clinton a 71% chance of winning – much lower than most others – but when she didn’t, well, “the reaction of many people in the political world … was: ‘Nate Silver is a fucking idiot.’” From his point of view, they simply didn’t understand what he was doing. In terms of probability, Trump’s victory wasn’t remotely out of the blue – if there was a roughly one in three chance of a storm, you’d probably put your raincoat on.
We now find ourselves in the middle of another highly uncertain election, and political junkies are once more turning to Silver for their fix – though this time the destination is his substack, Silver Bulletin. (The FiveThirtyEight brand is now owned by ABC, but Silver retains the rights to his model. “I make far more from the newsletter than from anything else,” he tells me, refusing to put a number on it.) His prognostications make an impact: a few days after our interview, Trump held a press conference at which he said: “If you look at the, uh, Nate Silver – very respected guy, I don’t know him – but he has me up by a lot.”
Does he worry that people are misusing or misinterpreting his forecasts this time around? “No,” he says, without hesitation. “No. I mean, people are going to interpret these polls however they can, and we have a way that’s empirically sound to do that, and has a track record over 16 years. I’m not paternalistic, right? We’re providing good information. We provide a lot of context about it … I’m old-school traditionalist, and I believe: provide people with good information, and that empowers them to make better decisions.”
On the morning we speak, a week before the presidential debate, the model gives Trump a 58% chance of winning the electoral college and Harris a 60% chance of winning the popular vote. This far out, however, it’s essentially a toss-up. Perhaps surprisingly, given the popular image of stats nerds as robot-like savants, On the Edge sets a lot of store by intuition, describing how poker players use a kind of spidey-sense to tell if their opponent is bluffing. “I give, I think, more weight to intuition and emotional judgment as actually adding value, rather than being something that you have to just push back against,” he tells me. This is a shift from The Signal and the Noise, which he says “was kind of naive about the idea that [if we’re just] more data driven, we’ll solve our problems”.
Does he have a gut feeling, then, about who’s going to win? “Maybe,” he says, before embarking on a characteristically intricate explanation of how it would be less trustworthy in this context because “everyone’s brains get very politicised during an election campaign”, and he’s a Harris supporter. Perhaps he’s reluctant to undercut his model with a statement either way? “If I had a strong intuition, I’d tell you, right … but I don’t, for the time being.”
Just how useful is a forecast in a knife-edge election like this one, anyway? Even the insight that it could go either way is useful, Silver argues. “One potential advantage of having a forecast that says … it’s 50/50, is that people should be making their contingency plans, like, right away. It doesn’t mean you need [to stockpile] ammo and peanut butter” – that giggle again – “but it means, you know: what’s your strategy to protect American institutions in the event of a Trump second term? Or, in 2028 [or] 2032, a Trump-like Republican who maybe is more effective than Trump? If I were a liberal donor, for example, I would want to begin funding now … to protect institutions in that eventuality, instead of giving another $100,000 to Kamala Harris, who has more money than she needs.”
And while he fears a Trump win – “There were a lot of guardrails in place last time that prevented complete and utter disaster, but those guardrails have been weakened, right?” – he warns against painting it as an existential threat to democracy, at least as a political strategy. “The notion of basically holding voters hostage in that sense is very unappealing … Biden was like: ‘OK, sure, I may be running for president until I’m 86 and can barely form a complete sentence, but if you don’t vote for me, the country gets it’ – that’s a very unappealing message to swing voters … whereas Harris brings more joyfulness and is obviously a very talented woman”. He worries, though, that she has “retained too many of the Biden people who thought it was a good idea to keep running [him]. I guess she kind of had to.”
Not all Riverians are as enthusiastic about Harris’ candidacy. Among them is Elon Musk, who, commenting on Trump’s adoption of his idea of a “government efficiency commission” to slash spending and regulation, told followers “I look forward to serving America if the opportunity arises”. In Silver’s view, buying Twitter, now X, has gone to his head. “I think [it was] a pretty bad financial bet. But in terms of cultural influence, it has shifted the discourse rightward in the US among elites quite a bit. But, you know, you get on a winning streak, and I think you tend to get a bit cocky… I wish that Elon Musk weren’t the most identifiable Riverian,” he says, cringing slightly. “The era when Elon could say, ‘Oh, I’m just a moderate’. I mean, we’re well past that… He’s been very pilled by right wing memes, some of his own making.” (Pilled, if you don’t know, is an extremely-online bit of jargon that here means something like “converted”.)
As a very high-frequency user of the site, how does Silver feel about the way it’s changed? “I think it’s less terrible than the pandemic era version … where it was used by the Village to police dissent and really criticise people who had very reasonable positions.” His stance on Covid was pro-vaccine, lockdown sceptical, which sometimes put him at odds with the consensus. “In the pre-Elon era, there was a ton of group thinking. You got absolutely pilloried for it. And this is at least more pluralistic.” He also thinks “the whole misinformation thing is bullshit, at least to a first approximation”, with too many “labelling ideas that are inconvenient politically as misinformation”. He cites kneejerk dismissal of the Covid lab-leak theory as well as attempts to “label concerns about Joe Biden’s age as misinformation or deep fakes”.
But is this really the Village? Or just hand-to-hand combat on social media? I point out that the lab leak theory was investigated with an open mind by mainstream academics. The FBI – hardly a Riverian outpost – concluded that it was the most likely explanation. “They correct after about a year or two,” he says of Village institutions, noting that the Democrats also eventually replaced Biden. “That’s a good sign” – but he clearly feels a certain nimbleness is lacking.
And on misinformation, what about Musk’s tweeting of an inflammatory – and counterfeit – Daily Telegraph headline during the recent UK riots? “This is why you need people that are capable of understanding political partisanship, and turning the lens on themselves, and not paternalism, right?” Keeping the threshold for dismissing something high actually increases trust, he argues. “So false videos about these riots, or election conspiracy theories in the US, or QAnon or vaccine conspiracy theories, I think those are things that are properly labelled as misinformation. Dismissing a perfectly plausible lab leak theory, or saying, ‘Oh, Hunter Biden’s laptop’ … that’s very damaging to the credibility of the Village.” (Initially dismissed as Russian fakes, incriminating emails discovered on Hunter Biden’s abandoned laptop were later found to be authentic).
Silver is notably spiky on X, getting aggro with people who disparage his model or practices. When Stanford professor Justin Grimmer made a fairly common criticism of political forecasting – that elections happen too infrequently for us to calculate probabilities with any kind of accuracy (or, as he put it: “The paucity of outcome data means that election forecasters have to make educated guesses about how to build their statistical models”), Silver batted him away as one of those “boring academics who can’t model for shit”. He varies the charge slightly when we meet, calling him instead a “boring-ass academic who has, like, no actual skills in statistical inference”.
Isn’t this kind of thing quite corrosive of human relationships? “I think if people took Twitter less seriously, it would be better. Like, we’re just goofing off and having fun here ... It’s very American and un-British of me, right? I don’t believe [in] acting in fake good faith toward people that make these lazy bad faith criticisms – 80% of the time you ignore it, but 20% of the time you counterpunch.”
Call me British, but I do think the fact that so many people – and Silver may be one of them – seem about 80% nicer in person than on X should give us pause. And while social media clearly isn’t the biggest problem facing humanity, Musk’s stewardship of it does speak to an inherent problem with Riverian power. It’s one Silver alludes to in his chapters about jailed entrepreneur Sam Bankman-Fried, whom he interviewed several times (“He’s a strange person,” whose approach to risk was “irrational and kind of insane”). Bankman-Fried, known as SBF, was eventually imprisoned for stealing billions of dollars from investors who used his cryptocurrency trading platform, FTX. Silver quotes testimony from a prosecution witness: SBF “would be happy to flip a coin if it came up tails and the world was destroyed, as long as if it came up heads the world would be, like, more than twice as good”.
As it turned out, this gung-ho attitude merely led to his own ruin. But the fallout could easily have been much wider. Silver points out that SBF invested heavily in artificial intelligence company Anthropic, and it’s conceivable he could have ended up as CEO of a major AI company at a time when concerns about the technology’s potential to transform or even destroy society are being seriously debated. As he writes towards the end of the book, “Silicon Valley selects for highly (over)confident founders – people who are willing to gamble big on contrarian ideas that have a low intrinsic probability of success.” That may be good for innovation – and for venture capitalists, when a bet they’ve made pays off. But it might not always be good for the rest of us. “[SBF’s] luck was almost inevitably going to run out at some point,” he concludes. “But we all got lucky that it ran out as soon as it did.”
It’s this level of risk that really brings out Silver’s inner Villager. While he’s pleased the dangers of AI aren’t as “neglected” as they once were, this is still an area where the consequences of Riverian hegemony may be too dire, the case for regulation unarguable. He makes the analogy with other dangerous technologies: “You can’t build a nuclear reactor in your back yard, right? … I think there needs to be a role for government.”
Pondering these existential questions may even have led Silver across the Village green and into the (metaphorical) Church. When I ask him if there’s anything people would be surprised to learn about him, he says: “I’m probably leaning more to agnostic than atheist.” He dissolves into giggles as though slightly embarrassed to be talking about it. But then stats man comes rushing back in, lest I think he’s getting a bit woo-woo. “I think, from a kind of Bayesian standpoint, we don’t have good answers to questions about the origins, the nature of the universe. You know, clearly, I think you put a low probability on Christian theology, or something like that, as such. But I think people should be more open‑minded”.
“This could be the third book,” he muses. Might Nate Silver end up giving us odds for the existence of God? Don’t bet against it.
• On the Edge: The Art of Risking Everything by Nate Silver is published by Allen Lane. To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
