Josh Marshall's Ire Is Activated by Nate Silver: ANNOYANCE OF THE DAY
Silver ought to know better. To say “apart from Iran, most of the Trump-related stories this summer have been boring and dumb… or kinda funny, maybe we’re movin on from him…” is to fly your “I’M ONLY HERE FOR THE LULZ!!!!” flag. It is the very opposite of, you know, being a grown-ups. Grown-ups have positive VAR in the sphere of public reason as the real ASI which is the Anthology Super-Intelligence of the human race cogitates on how to guide itself to a more prosperous, more productive, and brighter future. Assisting in that task seems no longer to be on Nate Silver’s radar screen.
I find this a pity, a shame, and an annoyance. And Josh Marshall concurs.
Over at TPM, that highly and deservedly respected node in the real ASI is annoyed:
Josh Marshall; <https://r.mail.talkingpointsmemo.com/>: ‘Nate Silver yesterday published a banger of a tweet, the kind only made possible by an indefatigable confidence that you know literally everything.
Setting aside his sweeping away a war, I’m over here reading the headlines on TPM. They seem fairly serious and involve the president:
I suppose a generous reading of Silver is that he is referring to things Trump is literally, actively doing and saying — his bids to control the news. That’s not the same as the news. Dismissing the WAR HE STARTED IN IRAN does a lot of work. But even setting that aside, there is more tariff nonsense, he’s been trying to steal the midterms for about a year, and his administration continues to break countless laws…
I greatly share Josh’s annoyance. Nate Silver is undergoing a transformation from being one of the best data journalists in the business and an international treasure into a different role: a zero or sub-zero VAR bloviator-pundit of the internet shouting class. I find this very annoying. And disappointing. And—I find myself thinking—really a tragic waste. I date the fall to his writing the second half of his 2024 On the Edge: The Art of Risking Everything, which is atrocious. (). And he has never recovered. Confer:
Perhaps the deep problem is that Nate Silver does not understand the difference between negative sum and positive sum games, and so cannot think coherently about either. As I wrote:
I was taken further aback by Silver’s claim that: “Blackjack and slots and horse racing and lotteries and poker and sports betting… are fundamentally not that different from trading stock options or crypto tokens, or investing in new tech startups…” Investing in new tech startups is—or is supposed to be—a positive-sum activity in which people coöperate to make something useful and, hopefully, great. The rest are, when we take account of risk, negative-sum activities: someone loses, and someone wins, and with declining marginal utility of wealth the loser loses more than the winner wins, They are thus, fundamentally, parasitic: the way to win is to find people who do not understand the risks they are running, and fleece them.
There is a common dopamine thrill in doing this well.
But wouldn’t it be wise to focus not on the dopamine thrill but on the usefulness of the underpinning activity—how those getting the dopamine thrills are fitting into the network web that is the coördination of what we want to be a positive sum productive practice of humanity considered as an anthology intelligence?…
And perhaps the deepest problem can be diagnosed by noting Nate Silver’s total cluelessness with respect to Kenny Rogers’s song “The Gambler”. Again, as I wrote:
“And somewhere in the darkness, the Gambler he broke even…” That Nate Silver fundamentally misunderstands Kenny Rogers’s “The Gambler” as a metaphor for human life—that is, in view of its other problems, relatively small potatoes with respect to his new On the Edge. But it does rankle. No, the song would not be improved by changing the line “Know when to run” to “Know when to raise!”…
I said it was a minor concern, and it is. But it is a sign of something deep and highly problematic.
Josh has a lesson for us:
I would avoid getting news or anything from those who interpret the vibes. Instead, I’d take the novel approach of reading people who actually report on the news and read the news and occasionally find themselves in a newsroom. TPM is not the only place that has people like this (at least not yet), but we are one of the increasingly few doing real reporting and surfacing important stories we think the public needs to be aware of. At TPM, even the “business side” is made up of journalists who put journalism first. When you join TPM, as we hope you will today for nearly 50% off, that is the kind of work you’ll be supporting…
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