How the Late Former Iowa Republican Congressman Jim Leach Still Lives Rent-Free in the Head of Nate Silver
Another one of the good things Jim Leach did was to push through the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act (UIGEA), which did not “ban online poker per se, but it established regulations that choked off payment processors…. [With] the increased friction of getting your money in and out, inexperienced new players avoided the games, making them much tougher to beat…” And that has Nate Silver really mad. To a degree I find surprising. And actually rather shocking. For reasons:
This is over in Notes <https://substack.com/profile/16879-brad-delong/note/c-304750387>.
But it really belongs here, in the main thread, instead of or as well:
Thus: one more remark on how I wish we had the early-days Nate Silver of <http://fivethirtyeight.com> back, and how the story of the evolution here is rather tragic.
Silver understood poll aggregation:
But now he writes about things he does not understand. Kaleberg had a nice comment on this:
Kaleberg: ‘I don’t think Silver understands [real] risk. He has a romanticized view limited to those who have a choice as to whether to accept certain risks or not. Failure for venture capitalists means not making the big score, not losing everything...
So let me chime in and add to this:
There is a very very very very very important distinction between people who are working with their counterparties, and people who are working against them. Or, indeed—going further into the psychopath realm—people who do not think that their counterparties are real people of any concern to them at all.
Case in point: Silver’s extraordinary and persistent rage against Congressman Jim Leach.
IMHO, Jim Leach did very few good things with his time in the U.S. Congress. But one of those good things was placing roadblocks to try protect people who did not understand the risks they were running from so easily becoming marks grifted by the likes of Nate Silver.
And Silver’s rage against Jim Leach still persists. It looks as though Jim Leach will live rent-free in Nate Silver’s brain until the day Silver dies, if not after:
Nate Silver: On the Edge <https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/529280/on-the-edge-by-nate-silver/>: ‘I’d been a professional poker player for three years between 2004 and 2007, during the so-called Poker Boom. The Poker Boom began because of the increasing availability of online poker and because of Chris Moneymaker, an accountant from Nashville who won an online qualifying tournament for a seat at the $10,000 Main Event at the 2003 World Series of Poker and then parlayed that into winning the Main Event for $2.5 million.
If you’d asked ChatGPT to design a person who would most increase the amount of interest in poker by winning the WSOP, it might have spat out Moneymaker. An affable, pudgy, late twenty-something dude with a boring corporate job, he was exactly the customer the online poker sites were targeting, an archetype for every office drone who wanted to break out of his cubicle and win the big jackpot.
The number of participants in the World Series of Poker Main Event exploded from 839 in Moneymaker’s 2003 to 8,773 just three years later in 2006, largely fueled by people who had won their seats online. I was one of those people who lived the dream. I soon found myself on a nocturnal schedule. Poker games are usually best late at night, when your opponents are some combination of drunk, sleep-deprived, or delirious from winning or losing a bunch of money. So I’d come home from my cubicle, take a nap, and then play poker online, sometimes straight through until the morning, when I’d straggle into work and struggle through the day.
Needless to say, this wasn’t sustainable, and—making considerably more money as a poker player than as a consultant—I quit my corporate job within about six months to play poker and work for the baseball statistics startup Baseball Prospectus. It was a good living for a couple of years—but like most edges in gambling, it wouldn’t last. Some of this was the natural evolution of the game: the Poker Boom sputtered into more of a poker plateau as losing players either went broke, quit, or got better, removing one sucker from the table at a time.
But it was also partly the doing of the U.S. Congress. In late 2006, the GOP-led Congress, hungry for a victory with “moral majority” voters ahead of the midterms as Republican congressman Mark Foley resigned from office for having sent sexually explicit messages to underage male pages, passed a bill called the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act (UIGEA).
The UIGEA didn’t ban online poker per se, but it established regulations that choked off payment processors: it’s hard to play poker if you can’t exchange cash for chips. Some sites closed to U.S. players while others remained open, but between the shadow of illegality and the increased friction of getting your money in and out, inexperienced new players avoided the games, making them much tougher to beat.
There was one silver lining: the UIGEA piqued my interest in politics. The bill had been tucked into an unrelated piece of homeland security legislation and passed during the last session before Congress recessed for the midterms. It was a shifty workaround, and having essentially lost my job, I wanted the people responsible for it to lose their jobs, too. And they did: Republicans lost both the House and the Senate, including the seat of Representative Jim Leach of Iowa, the chief sponsor of the UIGEA, whose thirty-year tenure in office ended partly because of poker players who had contributed money to his opponent.
Struggling to win money as the games were drying up, I quit poker about six months later. With my newfound interest in politics and the extra time on my hands, I wound up starting FiveThirtyEight in 2008...
And I really do not think Silver has any idea what kind of a look he is giving into himself here.
The full Kaleberg comment:
Kaleberg: ‘I don’t think Silver understands risk. He has a romanticized view limited to those who have a choice as to whether to accept certain risks or not. Failure for venture capitalists means not making the big score, not losing everything. There’s a reason venture capitalists tend to come from relatively wealthy families. Compulsive gamblers may risk losing everything, but professional gamblers are more like venture capitalists. It may be a negative sum business, but it’s still a business.
A woman having sex with a guy she met at a bar takes a much bigger risk than any of these. Ditto for a fireman or peace officer responding to a 911 call. Immigrants to the US took on a broad variety of risks, and despite overcoming many of them are now being clobbered by a long shot outcome. These risks are much harder to romanticize. They are definitely not flowing in Silver’s river...
There is a very famous line from Shakespeare’s Hamlet:
KING: How do you, pretty lady?
OPHELIA: Well, God yield you! They say the owl was a baker’s daughter. Lord, we know what we are, but know not what we may be[come]...
The underlying story that Ophelia is referring to is a very strange story indeed:
Steph Rae Moran: “The Owl Was a Baker’s Daughter”: Unpacking Ophelia’s Folkloric Remark <https://stephraemoran.com/the-owl-was-a-bakers-daughter-unpacking-ophelias-folkloric-remark/>: ‘Thiselton Dyer’s book: “Our Saviour went into a baker’s shop where they were baking, and asked for some bread to eat; the mistress of the shop immediately put a piece of dough into the oven to bake for him; but was reprimanded by her daughter, who, insisting that the piece of dough was too large, reduced it to a very small size; the dough, however, immediately began to swell, and presently became a most enormous size, whereupon the baker’s daughter cried out, ‘Heugh, heugh, heugh!’ which owl-like noise probably induced our Saviour to transform her into that bird for her wickedness…”
This is a profoundly unChristian story to a remarkable degree.
And it is not clear to me what work it is doing in Hamlet—it could be doing any or all of a number of things, depending on who is supposed to be the baker’s daughter here, and what it is supposed to mean to become an owl here.
But the underlying lesson is that of Kurt Vonnegut’s Mother Night: we become who we pretend to be, so we need to be very careful who we pretend to be.
The baker’s daughter is the perfect emblem of it: she had no idea, standing in a warm shop on an ordinary night, that a small, mean act would become the whole and permanent shape of what she was. She went from girl to owl without ever choosing to be an owl. The self she woke up as was not the self she went to sleep as. That is the terror and the wisdom folded into the line. Identity is not something we author and then possess; it is something done to us—by other people, by circumstance, by God or fate or luck. We know what we are right now. We have no access to what we will turn out to have been. And our identity is done to us in substantial part by our own small choices whose weight we cannot see in the moment.