"Woof. Nate. Not cool man."

August 26, 2024 5:29 PM

In a thread on BlueSky, political science professor Dave Karpf dissects Nate Silver's new doorstop of a book on gambling and risk, and finds several interesting - and disturbing - things within.

Probably the biggest (and where the thread title comes from) is the revelation that Silver was betting 7 figures on the NBA at the same time that 538 under his leadership was undergoing mass layoffs. Karpf also notes that the venture capital chapter focuses around Palantir founder (and his new boss) Peter Thiel, as well as Silver's lack of consideration of systemic risk.

posted by NoxAeternum (66 comments total)

> Nate is a serious poker player. He’s convinced that poker-thinking explains who has power today, and why.

> I’m 120 pages in and this is still entirely a book about poker.

oh goddddd, another book that attempts to explain all calculus of risk-taking in poker terms that are completely and utterly impenetrable to the non-poker-playing reader
posted by egypturnash at 5:39 PM on August 26 [34 favorites]

The Poker Broker
posted by stevil at 5:52 PM on August 26 [25 favorites]

Nate is like the canonical “thinks he’s smarter than he is” U of C douche-dweeb.

If he had just a modicum of humility he might learn something.
posted by leotrotsky at 5:58 PM on August 26 [28 favorites]

'Riverian'? i thought the point of making up bullshit terms to refer to groups of people in a fumbling attempt to Explain the World with this One Simple Idea was that the group you admire should get the cool name. apex predators or alpha wolves or what have you. riverians sounds like shitty speculative fiction, which i guess is pretty apt judging from the bsky review thread
posted by logicpunk at 6:00 PM on August 26 [4 favorites]

Gambling is illegal in decent places for good reasons. That shit rots the brain, it gives folks inhumane perspectives and priorities.
posted by GoblinHoney at 6:24 PM on August 26 [33 favorites]

I think the biggest problem with what Silver calls "The River" (basically risk-takers) is that they never care about systemic risk. So, for example, people writing all of the weird financial instruments up until the 2008 financial crisis didn't give a shit about any general risk, even as it grew into trillions of dollars. They got paid a percent, so only wanted to write more, and didn't care if it crashed and burned because they already got paid. They just assume society will continue, no matter what they do.

When "The River" loses as a whole, they just get bailed out, which is completely unfair to "The Village" and everyone else. "The River" strut about as if they won, because they basically did. If losses are generalized and wins are personal, they will always bet everything, including everyone else's future. I am still very sore about 2008.
posted by netowl at 6:29 PM on August 26 [116 favorites]

Alternate title: Wow, Are You Going to Be Even More Sorry You Ever Thought I Was Smart.
posted by DirtyOldTown at 6:30 PM on August 26 [70 favorites]

Tyler Cowen gets this exactly right in his interview with Silver, basically: isn’t gambling a bad sort of risk seeking? Like, life is risky and clearly some risks are net positive, but gambling isn’t one of them!

He hits the point over and over again until it’s pretty obvious that Silver just doesn’t see this clearly.
posted by anotherpanacea at 6:31 PM on August 26 [11 favorites]

I mean, he's an addict. It's sad, even if one's sympathy is somewhat mitigated by his conduct around it.
posted by praemunire at 6:40 PM on August 26 [15 favorites]

> he's an addict

Yeah, the only guaranteed payout from gambling is the dopamine hit.
posted by flug at 6:45 PM on August 26 [8 favorites]

I suppose I would need to read the whole book to have a proper opinion of it but I think it’s important to remember that poker players win or lose alone, and out here in the world most of the time most of us don’t.
posted by mhoye at 6:59 PM on August 26 [19 favorites]

I listened to this Ezra Klein interview with him a couple weeks ago, and I didn't realize how much I hated Nate Silver til then. Before then he was just a dweeby nerd who got lucky - and yeah. His attitude is "fuck the people who are at risk from long covid" while recognizing that the calculations are different he has the whole "because I'm not at risk and most people aren't it's better to say fuck those poor suckers who happened to be born with disabilities".

Absofuckinlute sociopath. When Tyler Cowen calls you out, you know you're a real fuckup.
posted by symbioid at 7:20 PM on August 26 [33 favorites]

Part of Silver's early contribution to dialogue was illustrating relatively clearly how pundits substituted their own love of spinning a narrative for on actual data. I know some people disagree and think the early stuff wasn't valuable, but I think it held up (even in 2016) reasonably well. It wasn't flawless but it was a solid contribution to understanding the media landscape and incentives that pundits (and, to a lesser extent) reporters have beyond just being right.

I guess he's still demonstrating the limitations of punditry, only by being the pundit-mouthing-off side of things.
posted by mark k at 7:33 PM on August 26 [15 favorites]

Economists: we can create models of systemic behavior by assuming all nuance of human desires cancel one another out to be “rational actors”, though this runs the risk of creating perverse incentives by designing systems to maximize a particular value regardless of the human outcomes.

Nate Silver: Hold my beer
posted by Jon_Evil at 7:52 PM on August 26 [8 favorites]

What silver has done, I think inadvertently, is to peel back the curtain and lay out the mindset of the people running many businesses, banks, and Hedge funds, etc.

He somehow, improbably, has come to the conclusion that this mindset is good, but we can still learn from it nonetheless.
posted by Jon_Evil at 8:02 PM on August 26 [43 favorites]

I re-read Perlstein's Nixonland recently which relates the story that Nixon was a very successful, and ruthless, poker player, particularly during his WWII service in the Navy. But his revelation was that you don't play the actual game by its rules, you play the other players, and make the conditions work for you; in his case it was the stubbornness, and meanness, to sit out and wait until the right hand came along. Nixon's abilities had much less to do with thinking deeply about numbers or cards or odds, and everything to do with knowing one's own nature and the human skills of observing other people. Which I think is exactly the reverse of what's going on here.
posted by Fiasco da Gama at 8:35 PM on August 26 [30 favorites]

This is unsettling. I’ve never gone in on his work because it seemed chintzy, and he seemed like a bit of an asshole. Lots of people admire him and see him as an authority, though. This book sounds like Dark Enlightenment self-help. “The village”? “Riverians” who are identifiable by a specific “cognitive cluster” and “personality cluster”? Theil-reverence? I’ve got the heebie-jeebies, and I’m not even all the way through the thread.
posted by rrrrrrrrrt at 8:38 PM on August 26 [17 favorites]

“Silicon Valley needs probablists, reasonable people who calculate the odds. But it needs unreasonable people too—determinists, True Believers, people who write five-thousand-word manifestos.”

A voice roses up from the depths of my childhood : GAG ME WITH A SPOON

This shit is GROSS
posted by rrrrrrrrrt at 8:43 PM on August 26 [9 favorites]

I liked Silver's book on forecasting.
But if this is going to spend a lot of time on sports betting and poker... I can't do it.
posted by doctornemo at 9:09 PM on August 26 [2 favorites]

Maybe the book is the gamble. If he succeeds in implanting his "river and village" worldview in the minds of dipshits like Balaji Srinivasan and Marc Andreessen, he can ride that gravy train all the way to a golden retirement. The next move is setting up some kind of crypto scam backed by Andreessen Horowitz.
posted by qxntpqbbbqxl at 10:16 PM on August 26 [13 favorites]

Based on that NBA graph, he's an average gambler. He started off lucky and thought it was because he had some kind of talent, but the law of averages caught up with him. If he had started in the red he might have beat the habit before it took over his life.

Poker's different -- I played online for something like a week in 2010 or '11 and drove a $50 deposit to almost a thousand. And then when I was wondering if I should quit my job like those degenerates on 604poker.com (RIP) and play higher stakes, the U.S. gov't kicked off all the Americans, and when the site (Full Tilt RIP) started up again a year later I slowly lost everything to the Russians and Brazilians, neither of whom I could ever figure out. But for a week I reaped the fruits of a crappy nation-wide educational system.

If I get my hands on that book I'll probably skip the parts on sports betting. At least in poker you have some control over the play and outcome.
posted by morspin at 10:54 PM on August 26 [3 favorites]

Funny how the term "poker"now almost exclusively means "Texas Hold-Em" when there are so many varieties of the game. Terms like "The River" are, afaik, exclusive to the game of Hold-Em and it's the only game I see being played competitively while in my father's poker-playing days Poker, in the strictest sense meant Five Card Stud with other permutations seen as kind of novelty offshoots of "real" Poker. I'd been playing (no money) poker with my dad since I was about six years old and never learned about Texas Hold-Em until well into my adulthood, in the mid nineties.
posted by alltomorrowsparties at 10:58 PM on August 26 [34 favorites]

The next move is setting up some kind of crypto scam backed by Andreessen Horowitz.

The "his new boss" link says he's hustling for generic-event gambling site PolyFuture.

The BlueSky of this FPP suggests the book misdirects from making poker (and extrapolated to all gambling) about finding less-informed marks and exploiting them for being 'chumps in the deal' (from the trading maxim 'if you can't spot the chump in any deal, it's you').

He's looking to land rich players to keep losing to the House on his new venture.

Earlier this summer I read Superforecasting, which is a selection of case studies of people and teams who have an expert-level performance on general-event prediction tasks. The author, Philip Tetlock, ran studies in the 1990s which caused the headlines like "experts no better than chance" but by the late 2000s, he had recovered his reputation to try again with one discussion boards, structured and time-limited real-world predictions and elimination for low performance. The most successful collaborated, forming teams to improve their knowledge base and their predictions, returned to their predictions periodically to review and update circumstances, and practised working at detail -- four or five figures for numerical probability -- so that their corrections could include that detail. Crucially, forecasters broke down predicted events into contingent "what would need to happen for this to occur" predictors, reading up in detail to fill gaps in their expertise.

All a stark contrast to the individuals and characters of The River.
posted by k3ninho at 12:17 AM on August 27 [12 favorites]

Karpf is fun, but the book seems so scattershot and meh that the critique itself seems scattershot and meh. The Nate Silver brand at this point seems entirely unfocused, bottom-shelf airport book material. Which is I guess fine if you’re winning at poker all the time, but meh for a public intellectual and meh for other Twitter-famous gadflies to comment on.
posted by Going To Maine at 1:04 AM on August 27

I mean, he's an addict.

A-ha! That's it! That's the source of that smell, that particular "vibe" of the guy: say whatever you need to to keep the fantasy alive. The Ezra Klein interview was this in spades - rationalizing on the lines of "beer is only 'barely' alcoholic so it doesn't count." Couldn't put my finger on what was so egregiously 'off' but it was this.

And he's aligned with that billionaire, as sure a sign of unfitness as you could ask for.
posted by From Bklyn at 2:13 AM on August 27 [11 favorites]

Wooty woot, I knew what The River meant and so understood one of Karpf's carps . . . because I just finished Maria Konnikova's The Biggest Bluff: How I Learned to Pay Attention, Master Myself, and Win. (2020). Konnikova set herself to win a Vegas poker tournament in one year from a "what's a full house?" start.

It is interesting because Konnikova is sufficiently self-aware to be a) good at poker b) skeptical about what she experiences on her journey. But it is not a text-book about how to Win Big at Vegas. Not least because a rather large variety of types have mastered the craft; and to win you have to play to your strengths, not Konnikova's. Your strengths . . . and a little bit more! Too many people rock up to Vegas to get rich quick rather than putting in the graft to get good. Top poker players can be burning 6,000 kCal a day just setting and thinking.

Ten years ago I took 10 months to plough through Nate Silver's The Signal and The Noise. It has a pretty good explanation of the application of Bayesian Stats in the real world.
posted by BobTheScientist at 2:13 AM on August 27 [5 favorites]

What does it cost to upgrade to Nate Gold?
posted by Galaxor Nebulon at 4:10 AM on August 27 [15 favorites]

What silver has done, I think inadvertently, is to peel back the curtain and lay out the mindset of the people running many businesses, banks, and Hedge funds, etc.

I've long thought there was a particular Venn diagram that the worst, most successful people fall into, which is the overlap between high IQ and still being prone to Dunning-Krueger effect errors. If Nate Silver were to become the poster child for this, I wouldn't be upset at all.
posted by Smedly, Butlerian jihadi at 4:30 AM on August 27 [9 favorites]

To be clear, why our social systems are so prone to elevating and maintaining the elevation of this kind of person is another question entirely.
posted by Smedly, Butlerian jihadi at 4:36 AM on August 27 [12 favorites]

elevating and maintaining the elevation of this kind of person

Seriously. Isn't the go-to in America to hate experts and know-it-alls? I mean, it's pretty clear why Silver, and people like him, are able to get away with it: they're telling people what they want to hear, saying "yeah, the terrible fucked up things you do? They're just fine! Trust me, I'm an expert!" and all is okay. Of course, the same crowd would revile anyone who attempted, with evidence, to show them that the things they were doing were objectively bad. We (in the general American sense) don't hate experts, we hate people who try to make us think about our choices, or actually question ourselves, rather than just telling us to keep up the good work.
posted by Ghidorah at 4:54 AM on August 27 [11 favorites]

The whole book sounds like something written by a person who has never learned about Survivorship Bias. So perfect for the Business Success shelves in airport bookstores.
posted by srboisvert at 5:35 AM on August 27 [4 favorites]

I mean, he's an addict.

Yeah, the more excerpts from this book I read, the more I'm worried Nate Silver has a coke problem.
posted by Jon_Evil at 5:36 AM on August 27 [3 favorites]

I know nothing about poker, but the VCs operate in a world that's atypical. First, they already have a ton of money, so they're not personally at risk. Second, the payoff of going public gives returns that are 20-30x the "bet," so they can lose a dozen times and still come out ahead.

That doesn't work for the small business entrepreneur, who wants to open a coffee shop. You don't have the resources to fail a dozen times and the payoff of even an early "win" can't typically bankroll 30 additional attempts.
posted by CheeseDigestsAll at 5:51 AM on August 27 [12 favorites]

Gambling is a malignancy, with a specific growth strategy of feeding on the inability of somewhat-smart people to recognize their own limitations.

Valorizing gambling behaviors as some sort of social corrective is an elaborate coping strategy for those who have at least an aspiration towards social worth.
posted by argybarg at 6:20 AM on August 27 [1 favorite]

Nixon and poker… Back in the Nixon days, the story came out that his poker playing skills rested on just plain cheating. I can’t believe that online gambling isn’t rife with cheating, both human and algorithmic. Gambling as a paradigm for anything seems to be just a marked deck of cards used until caught.
posted by njohnson23 at 6:34 AM on August 27 [6 favorites]

really the idea of being a "public intellectual" is something made a whole lot more terrible by the social media era, where people are prone to this idea of an analyst's curse, where they have one set of tools that can be a useful way of looking at certain problems, and (due to the overmagnification of their approach via social media and the attention economy) they start to believe the idea that they are skilled at analyzing ANY problem on ANY topic with this one set of tools! I'm so smart to own a hammer! People keep asking me about it! The whole world is nails! The fourth crack commandment does not apply to me!
posted by entropone at 6:36 AM on August 27 [5 favorites]

I've read part of Tetlock's Superforecasting. It turned out that pundits are embarrassingly bad at forecasting, but experts aren't as awful.

I don't know what either Silver or Tetlock have made of people being so wrong about Russia's military capacity, or the possibility of a large Palestinian sneak attack.
posted by Nancy Lebovitz at 6:50 AM on August 27 [2 favorites]

Nate Silver understands Silicon Valley as well as Michael Lewis understands SBF: not at all.
posted by chavenet at 7:00 AM on August 27 [3 favorites]

For every Nate there's the decades-long sorry saga of an Art Schlichter.
posted by thecincinnatikid at 7:03 AM on August 27

Smedly, Butlerian Jihadi: I've long thought there was a particular Venn diagram that the worst, most successful people fall into, which is the overlap between high IQ and still being prone to Dunning-Krueger effect errors.

I can't find the source, but I think it's a Feynman quote: "when I read an article in the newspaper and it's my specialism, I'm horrified by their inaccuracy, then turn over the page to resume my expectation that the news reporting is consistently excellent."
posted by k3ninho at 7:37 AM on August 27 [14 favorites]

I mean, he's an addict.

A-ha! That's it!

I'm reminded of Dostoevsky, who had a bad gambling addiction, and who wrote a great story about gambling in part to pay down gambling debts.
posted by doctornemo at 8:13 AM on August 27 [3 favorites]

“Silicon Valley needs probablists, reasonable people who calculate the odds. But it needs unreasonable people too—determinists, True Believers, people who write five-thousand-word manifestos.”

I know of a 35,000 word manifesto that SV could use. You can deduce the unreasonable person who wrote it and what manifesto it is (note: this is NOT an endorsement of that manifesto; the author is abhorrent, in some ways similar and in many dissimilar to Nate Silver). Both of course, are math geniuses, which is ironic.

I guess it's just "engineer's disease" and they both seem to think they have the solution and both are reactionary, only one exults and praises the technorati, and the other wanted to burn it all down.
posted by symbioid at 8:27 AM on August 27 [4 favorites]

I can't find the source, but I think it's a Feynman quote: "when I read an article in the newspaper and it's my specialism, I'm horrified by their inaccuracy, then turn over the page to resume my expectation that the news reporting is consistently excellent."

Gell-Mann Amnesia. It’s in the “why Picard sucked” video a little bit down the page.
posted by leotrotsky at 8:32 AM on August 27 [8 favorites]

I think the biggest problem with what Silver calls "The River" (basically risk-takers) is that they never care about systemic risk. So, for example, people writing all of the weird financial instruments up until the 2008 financial crisis didn't give a shit about any general risk, even as it grew into trillions of dollars. They got paid a percent, so only wanted to write more, and didn't care if it crashed and burned because they already got paid. They just assume society will continue, no matter what they do.

Interestingly (to me) Silver's electoral models have had fatter tails than anyone else's because they take into account the possibility of correlated errors among his data sources, which (if I'm understanding correctly?) is a kind of systemic risk. But it's possible he hasn't applied this sort of thinking across other contexts.
posted by a faded photo of their beloved at 8:55 AM on August 27 [3 favorites]

And Karpf gets a bit vicious:

Thinking about setting up a Polymarket account, just so I can start a "will Nate Silver seek help for his gambling addiction in the next decade" betting market.

posted by NoxAeternum at 9:15 AM on August 27 [5 favorites]

the revelation that Silver was betting 7 figures on the NBA at the same time that 538 under his leadership was undergoing mass layoffs.

Woman is walking into a casino in Vegas when a man stops her at the front door, and he says "Ma'am, I'm sorry to bother you, but I'm in a real bad spot. My wife is terribly sick and we can't afford her life saving medication. Can you open your heart and help us out any?"
Woman says "I'd like to help you, but how do I know you won't just go in and gamble away whatever I give you?"
And the man says "Oh, don't worry about that, I have gambling money."
posted by Pickman's Next Top Model at 9:53 AM on August 27 [18 favorites]

Mod note: One deleted, swearing at people is not OK.
posted by loup (staff) at 9:56 AM on August 27

I can’t find a link, but I heard Silver touting his book on NPR the other day. I haven't really paid much attention to him since 2016 or so. I knew he was still around but didn’t even realize he was no longer running 538. And I was really surprised to hear him pushing the lab leak theory of the origin of COVID-19. He seemed to really be grasping at statistical straws to support an opinion that he has gotten invested in an now can’t back down from. When I heard that I figured I would go back to ignoring him.
posted by TedW at 10:48 AM on August 27 [4 favorites]

I find the whole Village vs. River distinction really strange. Both are inhabited by people from the same social and educational stratum, and use the same basic tools (say, statistics). The primary distinction seems to be one of attitude rather than anything else. The Village values accumulated knowledge, reputation, and consensus, whereas the River values risk-taking and irreverence. If that's accurate (and I can't be sure, since the whole thing appears to be rather thinly sketched), then making this distinction seems silly, since anyone can inhabit either point of view at any time. The whole thing seems designed primarily to give Nate Silver's battle with scientists/journalists/etc. a sense of greater significance than it really has.
posted by epimorph at 11:24 AM on August 27 [6 favorites]

Should have been the River and the Ocean: you can make a distinction but they're really both part of the same system.
posted by joannemerriam at 11:28 AM on August 27 [1 favorite]

Oh Christ no. I work in Silicon Valley, and am now on countdown until I hear some fuckwit talk about "the river" in a meeting. C'mon folks, I just want to make computers work. Stop with the corporate religions. You should have learned after "Mindfulness."
posted by Abehammerb Lincoln at 11:35 AM on August 27 [18 favorites]

This explained something to me, that I’ve puzzled over. I used to pay attention to Nate Silver until sometime in the beginning of 2021. I decided that I paid much too much attention to American politics and unsubscribed from all the many American political podcasts I’d listened to, and mostly stopped going to the various sites I frequented.

In the run-up to the 2022 election I started listening to some of those podcasts, including FiveThirtyEight’s, and I was struck by how different Nate Silver had become. He’d been contrarian by inclination, sure. but he listened to other people and paid attention to data, altering his opinions based on that. But in 2022 he was really knee-jerk, and also a jerk to his interlocutors, and it was really bizarre.

I attributed this mostly to him going off the rails during lockdowns (he sure wasn’t the only one) but it never seemed sufficient as an explanation. It adds to the picture to find out that during that time he developed a bad gambling addiction.
posted by Kattullus at 12:12 PM on August 27 [8 favorites]

Man, you give a guy one book on reinforcement learning and he uses it to categorize the world. Though he eschews the domain terminology of "greedy" and calls it "Riverian". I wonder why.
posted by DeepSeaHaggis at 12:22 PM on August 27 [1 favorite]

> epimorph: "I find the whole Village vs. River distinction really strange."

Yeah, when I heard that, I wondered if Silver was trying to do his own version of ESR's the Cathedral and the Bazaar, a catchy little dichotomy onto which he can project his pet theories of the world.

Meanwhile, regarding VCs: it seems wildly disingenuous to think of them as masters of "abstract, analytical reasoning" who apply their skills to better evaluate long tail probabilities than their Wall Street counterparts when their whole deal seems to be about rigging the game in their own favor. And as an inveterate gambler, I have enormous difficulty believing that Silver doesn't perceive this. I don't know if I've ever met a serious gambler (especially a poker player & sports bettor) who didn't spend a non-trivial amount of their time thinking about cheating (or, more generously, how to best exploit advantages unseen to others): how to cheat for themselves, how they might get cheated by others, practical vs. hypothetical methods for cheating, etc... Playing the odds is for suckers who don't know how to hijack the game.
posted by mhum at 12:45 PM on August 27 [6 favorites]

Whenever you're tempted to think VCs are any more intelligent or insightful or informed than anyone else, remember that they feel in love with SBF because he had a call with them where he discussed Bayesian priors while playing Starcraft.

These are not smart guys, and things got out of hand.
posted by fatbird at 1:19 PM on August 27 [15 favorites]

I do not gamble because I understand math and it concerns me when other people do not. (Also there are way more fun things to do with money than hopefully lose it.)
posted by dame at 1:46 PM on August 27 [5 favorites]

I played in a social Texas Hold 'Em game for about a year in college, right when it was trendiest. It never became a huge part of my life, but there were people there who did go to Vegas tournaments and do well. I was in the middle of getting my bachelor's in cultural anthropology and my main observations were: poker is massively performative, well above and beyond whatever's in your hand, and a lot of serious poker players are as superstitious as witches.

The criticisms of Silver really clicked when it was revealed he's mainly an online player, because, honey, that is not real poker. I mean, it'll take your money like real poker, but everything interesting or genuinely revealing about human nature is missing, and also it is much easier. Those Vegas players kicked my ass every week, but when I played a cocky online player in person, I took all his money in three hands with startling ease and he wouldn't play me any more.

Texas Hold 'Em is also the easiest kind to get a good hand in--the fact that the cards are shared means it's way more statistically likely someone at the table is going to get one of the showy hands. A math guy should know this. The odds of a royal flush in Hold 'Em are a mere 30,939:1, vs a whopping 649,739:1 in Five Card Stud, kind of like my odds of starting a company are a lot different without millions of dollars from my parents.

All this is to say, I am a mere hobby player and I call bullllllllshit. The national helpline is 1-800-GAMBLER if you or a loved one has a problem.
posted by Nibbly Fang at 1:56 PM on August 27 [11 favorites]

every time i hear or read a reference to 'Riverian' i think, "doesn't he mean 'riparian'?"
posted by jindc at 9:40 AM on August 28 [8 favorites]

> The Ezra Klein interview was this in spades

Huh. This comment made me realize I've thought they were the same person all along.
posted by The corpse in the library at 12:59 PM on August 28 [3 favorites]

Man, you give a guy one book on reinforcement learning and he uses it to categorize the world. Though he eschews the domain terminology of "greedy" and calls it "Riverian". I wonder why.

I don't think 'riverian' quite translates to 'greedy', though I've not read the book nor do I have much interest in Silver's stats on elections or anything else. The River is the 3rd public card played, so it basically corresponds to those who are counting on 'luck' or 'fate' or 'patience' or 'grit' (whichever you want to use) completing their hand.

IMO, the value of statistics in poker is pretty low, considering that odds increase of someone getting a better hand the longer they play in a discrete game. All the skill is in getting rid of players way before the river comes along, and that is the part that relies on 'playing other players' instead of the cards, but that's luck as much as anything else too, against even moderately skilled opponents. People who can play to 'the river' often, absent better cards, have already gotten lucky and thus can surpass those trying to get them to exit prior to seeing that card.
posted by The_Vegetables at 8:18 AM on August 29

Worth noting that Silver does not call the people he likes "the River" in reference to the river in poker. Yes, it's the natural assumption, but that's not what he's doing. He means an actual river.
posted by Merus at 5:02 PM on August 29

Yeah, that was something that Karpf badly misread because he had his poker brain turned on - the comparison to the "cathedral"/"bazzar" analogy better hits the mark. It's the difference between "book smarts" and "street smarts" - the "village" represents institutional thought, while the "river" are people "on the edge", so to speak, and thus eschew institutional rules. What Silver avoids is because the "river" eschews said rules, it winds up often devolving to being red in tooth.
posted by NoxAeternum at 5:21 PM on August 29

It's the difference between "book smarts" and "street smarts"

nerd strives to be cool... in the nerdiest way possible... *nods head* checks out.
posted by From Bklyn at 12:07 AM on August 30

And apparently Nate thanked ChatGPT for helping him write this improvised bludgeoning tool.
posted by NoxAeternum at 1:17 PM on August 30 [2 favorites]

He thanks it for his analogies and metaphors, so maybe it came up with the River nonsense.
posted by hydropsyche at 2:26 PM on August 30 [2 favorites]

Just chiming in to vouch for the book that Karpf recommends instead of Silver's book, Dan Davies's The Unaccountability Machine. Forgot to bring that up in my original post. Davies is a great writer, good at explaining complex topics, and charmingly mixes humility, confidence and (for those who deserve it) contempt.

I honestly don't really get why he's comparing it to Silver's book based on the thread, although both cover decision making on some level. But it's a great book on how organizations work and how they fail. I've been in the corporate world for 35 years, and a at a decently high level for some of that, and some things really clicked. "Why does the C-suite always piss us off to bring in consultants who just repeat what we've been saying for the last five years?" Now I understand that. It'll still piss me off and frustrate me, but there is actually organizational logic behind it that I now understand.
posted by mark k at 6:40 PM on August 30