Nate Silver's guide to "The River"
vanityfair.com
vanityfair.com
The part I see as accurate is the idea that "River" people just want to win. And for that to happen, they have to perpetuate a world with winners and losers, a system that just makes it easier for those on top to keep taking whatever they want.
I'm seeing a lot of commenters disliking this article overall and/or the author. Are there any alternative articles/books/resources you would recommend that discuss the reasoning styles aspect of author's argument?
https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/checking-our-work/
(Note, he no longer is affiliated with fivethirtyeight, but at the time this article was published he was, and he retains the rights to the politics models that are being tested, and potentially some of the sports models as well, although I'm less sure of that)
Right-of-center, "Wait But Why" by Tim Urban and "Rationality: A-Z" by Eliezer Yudkowsky (and LessWrong in general) are much better at talking about examining our own biases. LessWrong will be much better than the stuff Tim Urban wrote, which is still better than what Nate Silver is writing. LessWrong is arguably not even right-of-center.
Left-of-center, David Graeber's "The Utopia of Rules" does a good job of pointing out a lot of our society's quiet assumptions.
But I mean ultimately when you say that such-and-such a crowd has a problem with "decoupling," you're just talking about what it means to be human. I guarantee you anyone who claims they don't have a problem with "decoupling" is lying. It just takes a little bit of time and you'll find something which seems like a minor point of order to you which makes them fly off the rails.
My own biased and unhinged take is that the decline of religion in the West has given people total cognitive blindness to the idea that people might actually believe different things from you yet still be rational, i.e. that there are plenty of interesting and useful arguments that are valid but not sound.
Bruce Springsteen’s “The River” Spoke to My Working-Class Dublin
https://lithub.com/bruce-springsteens-the-river-spoke-to-my-...
> Normally, they will—like the robber barons of the turn of the last century—insist that they are acting in the name of efficiency, or “rationality.” But in fact this language always turns out to be intentionally vague, even nonsensical. The term “rationality” is an excellent case in point here. A “rational” person is someone who is able to make basic logical connections and assess reality in a non-delusional fashion. In other words, someone who isn’t crazy. Anyone who claims to base their politics on rationality—and this is true on the left as well as on the right—is claiming that anyone who disagrees with them might as well be insane, which is about as arrogant a position as one could possibly take.
When you zoom into almost any controversial political opinion, you will find that peoples' arguments are valid but not sound. That is to say that their arguments logically follow from their assumptions, but that you don't share their assumptions.
If someone has different assumptions from you, sometimes you're not stupid and they're not stupid. You just have different assumptions. But it certainly feels better to assume that they just messed up their argumentation and are being irrational.
While he is no longer with "fivethirtyeight", this is from when he was:
It's also worth noting that you making your comment on a thread about an article by Nate Silver on why people like him are great that makes almost no reference to statistical modelling and is instead heavy on some sociopolitical views are better than others, which is exactly the kind of writing that has caused many people to sour on him.
However, I think right now a lot of society broadly is turning against people who market themselves as misunderstood contrarian geniuses, mostly because this is a bullshit archetype in the first place, but partially because viewing oneself this way has become a tribal signifier of a certain crop of industrialists who use this image and a philosophy that glorifies it to justify business and policy decisions that, as people are faced with the consequences, seem less like 4D chess and more like ponzi schemes and mafia shakedowns. People don't like the corporate hellscape where their fundamental autonomy is increasingly restricted by technological and techno-legal fiat even as their economic opportunity seems always to be shrinking, and so as humans generally do, they start to also not like the tribal signifiers of the people they (mostly correctly, though with a bias toward publicly visible figures regardless of how ultimately influential they are) view as responsible for this state of affairs.
I actually view Silver as kind of a misfire from this perspective, in that he hasn't particularly caused the immiseration people are actually reacting to and so his bad PR year seems like people picking up on aforementioned tribal signifiers, though by publishing stuff like this it really seems like he wants to lean into those
> Democratic-aligned “Village” elites.
Such a worn out strawman. Wealthy Republicans and Libertarians are successful because they earned it, but wealthy Democrats are corrupt "elites". Give me a break.
> those of us who understand the algorithms hold the trump cards.
So he's separating the world into "idiot sheep" and "cunning wolves", and he's of course one of the wolves. He's talking about "trump cards" like the purpose of life is to win over weaker, stupider people. He sounds like a psychopath.
> their ties are deep, they speak one another’s language, through terms like expected value, Nash equilibriums and Bayesian priors.
Another "people in my tribe are smart because they know how to manipulate the behavior of people in the other camp". When most people learn what these things are, they go "oh cool, a sometimes-useful model for making better decisions", not "OMG this is the key to finally being able to ruthlessly manipulate others!". Nate is assuming that if someone is not playing The Psychopath Game, it's because they're too stupid, not because they don't want to.
It looks to me like Nate is doing the thing where he gets successful, which allows him to say more of what he's really thinking, and when he starts to get negative feedback from that, he doubles and triples and quarduples down. Prediction: he's going to get worse, with his public writings getting more and more overtly hateful and persecution-complexed, until he suddenly realizes he's scared of his own fanbase. We see lots of people on this curve: Jordan Peterson, J.K. Rowling, Elon Musk.
Though he was always a controversial figure in certain circles, so there may be lingering anger over his polling averages not saying what people thought they should say.