[MUSIC: Russell L. Howard III, “Get Busy”]
Stephen DUBNER: Hey, Nate?
Nate SILVER: Hey.
DUBNER: Hey, it’s Stephen Dubner, how’s it going?
SILVER: Good. Good to talk to you.
DUBNER: First off, just tell us in 60 seconds or less, what you actually do now in a given day.
SILVER: So I am the editor-in-chief of the website FiveThirtyEight.com, and I don’t know that I have a lot of consistency from day to day. Sometimes I’m writing, sometimes I’m running models, sometimes I’m editing, sometimes I’m managing, sometimes doing media. So it’s a job that is always really fun and challenging in a sense that you’re not doing too much of the same thing, but I have to think carefully about how to budget my time.
DUBNER: Nate Silver is America’s favorite statistical guru of the past – well, maybe ever. He has been devilishly accurate in predicting electoral outcomes. Before that, he joined the small but influential fraternity of statheads who work with data in sports, particularly baseball. He’s written an excellent book called The Signal and the Noise, which is essentially about the folly of prediction. And today he is our guest on the latest installment of FREAK-quently Asked Questions, in which we compel a noteworthy person to tell us some important truths, such as … their favorite sport:
SILVER: I dunno, bowling, I suppose.
DUBNER: Just how devoted they are to their work:
SILVER: I don’t even always watch the State of the Union, for example.
DUBNER: And what you learn about life as you get a bit older:
SILVER One of the most profound lessons to me about adulthood is that everyone’s kind of weird.
[THEME]
ANNOUNCER: From WNYC: This is FREAKONOMICS RADIO, the podcast that explores the hidden side of everything. Here’s your host, Stephen Dubner.
[MUSIC: Pailboy, “Shut Up”]
DUBNER: What do we do on this show? Pretty simple: we ask questions — hopefully the sort of questions you might like to ask – and we ask them to the sort of people you might like to hear from. Nate Silver, for instance. He is chiefly known as the proprietor of FiveThirtyEight.com:
SILVER: Yeah, so the kind of elevator pitch is that FiveThirtyEight is data journalism. The problem is once you get past the first five words, then it becomes a little bit more complicated to define, right? You know, but really we think it’s empirical analysis, “the scientific method,” as applied to journalism, but it’s entirely compatible, which traditional reporting approaches too. But the idea is just it’s kind of, we believe there are skill sets that are underused in journalism including computer programming, coding, statistical analysis, of course, in particular, and we think that journalists could benefit from having more of that.
DUBNER: These days, FiveThirtyEight covers a lot of territory – sports, the economy, pop culture – but it is politics, especially political elections, that make up its foundation. That’s where the site got its name – from the number of votes in the Electoral College, which determines who wins the Presidency of the United States.
SILVER: I started kind of just as a Blogger.com blog back in 2008 during the campaign then. It kind of blew up during 2008, I licensed it to the New York Times from 2010-2013 and then it was acquired by ESPN after that. I’m kind of a big poker player and I played in the World Series of Poker a couple of times, never done extraordinarily well, but you know, to win the World Series of Poker when there are like 7,000 entrants you have to get really, really lucky a couple of times, right? And it kind of feels like in 2008 and again in 2012, I won a couple of really big pots in key circumstances when things could have broken against me.
DUBNER: During those elections, Silver compiled polling and demographic data from many sources. He aggregated, weighted, and analyzed these data, forging predictions that turned out to be remarkably accurate.
SILVER: So, you know, sometimes I feel like I’m playing on house money a little bit. But you know, I’m also trying to turn that into something more sustainable and you know, build out a staff of really talented journalists and really great people and that’s kind of where I’m mostly focused on right now.
DUBNER: We spoke back in early March, when Nate Silver had two things to celebrate: the one-year anniversary of FiveThirtyEight on ESPN.com, and the paperback publication of his book The Signal and the Noise.
DUBNER: First and foremost, congratulations. Does it feel like a time to sit back and appreciate yourself, or not really?
SILVER: That’s the problem is like you can’t really stay still. And we have, like, March Madness this month and the U.K. election coming up, and so, yeah, you can kind of be content or happy, but kind of not both at the same time, I’ve found. This is one of the consequences of having a lot to do and kind of being people’s boss.
DUBNER: Where do you find people that fit your worldview? Because your worldview, while it’s pretty popular in some circles, including I should say, the circle of people who listen to a show like this, it’s not overwhelmingly popular, it’s certainly not quite mainstream yet. And furthermore, it’s new-ish. So how do you find people that you think will fit?
SILVER: I mean, I think one, one sort of problem we have is that the skill set that we’re hiring for is a place where people would have a lot of options in addition to journalism. I tend to buy into the notion that there’s a shortage in the United States of STEM talent and we’re hiring from that pool a little bit. But still, you know, there are a lot of organizations, news organizations, that are trying to be more data-driven, you know, a lot of college programs are training people in coding and computer programming and statistics in addition to journalism as a part of their curriculum, so it’s getting better over time. But you know, we do sometimes feel like we have more ideas than we have the capacity to execute on right now. But that’s also kind of part of being a start up and having a lot of creative people on board.
DUBNER: And let’s say you find a perfect candidate, or ten perfect candidates who are all the perfect data nerds, who are really good with the math and the statistics and even have good taste, but don’t do journalism at all. Is that more coachable than the inverse?
SILVER: I’m not sure. I mean, I think there are a lot of parts of being a journalist that are hard to teach other than through experience. You know, one of them that we noticed our people have that maybe some people in academia lack is just a sense for how other people see the world. So no, I’m not sure it’s been our experience so far that one skill set is easier than the other to teach. Obviously a lot of work is collaborative too. We might have someone who’s more experienced at getting on the phone or travelling somewhere and talking to people than someone else who’s more versed in the “number crunching.”
DUBNER: You are the perfect person for me to ask this question of. In the last, I don’t know three, four, five years, the phrase “big data” has become so used, maybe abused, that it really has become a cliché that in a pretty short time, it’s used in corporate advertising slogans and so on. And to me, and I’m maybe totally wrong on this, but to me, it’s received in some quarters as a sort of magic bullet.
SILVER: No, I agree with almost all of that really. It’s kind of one of the themes of my book and there are a couple of things to unpack. You know, one is the term “big data” itself. And there are some people who would say, “Well, big data has to be really large, not the sort of stuff you could crunch on a regular computer.” You know, for example, we launched an interactive recently where it looks at- a different way of looking at which flights get you there the fastest, what’s the best airline for logistics, and that relies on data from about 6 million flights. That sounds impressive. But you can still run that program in about ten or twelve minutes on a laptop, right? People wouldn’t really say it’s big data when all those records are pretty carefully scrutinized. But that said, people I think when they say big data often mean analytics really, and statistical analysis, applied statistics. You know, it’s not all about the data necessarily. Oftentimes it’s not about the amount of data you have but how much you vetted that data. If a data set is virginal, as they call it, no one’s looked at it before really. You’re gonna have a lot of problems and one problem with a really large data set is that if you’re running some algorithms, some quick and dirty way to find the most influential data points, a lot of times those are bugs and outliers, right? And the reason why you have that anomaly is because someone coded it in wrong. Or you made some mistake in the analysis. You know, I also think there aren’t necessarily the skills and the training, so one thing I talk about in my book is how when the personal computer became commonplace in the workforce in the 1970s and then in the home in the early 1980s, it took awhile before there were any tangible signs of productivity gains in the economy, meaning like ten or fifteen or twenty years, even. So I think people love new technology but they overestimate how much of the kind of human factor gets in the way. I’m not trying to be cute about that, I just mean that people need to learn how to use these tools, what they can do, what they can’t do, you know, no amount of data is a substitute for scientific inference and hypothesis testing, and kind of structured analysis of a system. I think one of the false promises that was made early on is that, well if you have a billion data points or a trillion data points, you’re going to find lots and lots of correlations through brute force. And you will, but the problem is that a high percentage of those, maybe the vast majority, are false correlations, are false positives. Where there could be significance, but you have so many lottery tickets when you can run an analysis on a trillion data points, that you’re going to have some one in million coincidences just by chance alone. If you bet all your money on them, you might wind up looking very foolish in the end.
DUBNER: How’s FiveThirtyEight doing, um, I guess, overall editorial, but also from a traffic and business perspective? You know, whenever there’s a web debut as high-profile as yours leaving the New York Times for ESPN, there’s a lot of noise, but then, the noise recedes. And I’m curious, are you making boatloads of money for ESPN? Are they having mega-buyer’s remorse because you’re so expensive? How’s that working?
SILVER: You know, in the first year, I mean, it’s a pretty young staff and a lot of people were doing what they were doing for the first time and the expectations were pretty high, so it kind of took some time to hit a groove, I think. You know, I try to make analogies sometimes to opening a new restaurant, where you might have a lot of ambition for it, but to reproduce something every day, it’s very much- I mean, the first day we published, March 17, 2014, we kind of all got beers after work and we were really pleased and we like literally- or at least I had, I won’t blame my employees-
DUBNER: We’re done!
SILVER: Yeah, I had forgotten that, crap, we have to publish this website every day, for the rest of our lives, right? And so achieving a kind of consistency takes a little more time. But, you know, if you are looking at kind of indicators, I mean traffic is up about two times year-over-year. It often happens when you launch a product, but it’s good that it happened to us, too. We’re growing our staff in a slow but sustainable way. We have, you know, 25 or 30 people now, depending on how you count. But we still are able to do more things at once. I mean, in this period here in the kind of early spring, we’re launching interactive on airlines, and the NCAA tournament, and the UK election, and a historical perspective on NBA basketball, so four or five things in addition to the work that we’re doing from day to day.
DUBNER: So that success thus far notwithstanding, at the New York Times, FiveThirtyEight, which was a much much much smaller operation than it is at ESPN, FiveThirtyEight was more essential certainly to the New York Times website than FiveThirtyEight is to ESPN, which is a sports behemoth. What’s the difference for you? Being- now you’re a prominent and I don’t know what-sized fish in a really big pond. At The Times you were a prominent and gigantic fish in a big pond, which came about, I know, organically and maybe even surprisingly to you, but it did happen where you were driving so much traffic, you personally with a couple colleagues to the New York Times website. What’s the difference now for you? Psychically and editorially?
SILVER: It’s funny, I mean in terms of- and we don’t obsess too much over traffic, right? But the Election Day peak was really high at The Times. That’s the people to your site and the median month that we now get, you know, five or six times more traffic, more visitors, than we did at The Times. So, you know, I think sometimes people grasp onto outliers, especially when they talk about us and FiveThirtyEight. So ESPN when it signs a deal with a sports league, like the NBA, that’s a 10-year deal. And they literally will be contemplating technologies that don’t even exist yet. The thing about traffic now is that you can measure so much in real time, you know, so you might be able to say, “If we wanted to publish a story that would maximize pageviews right now, we would say, ‘There’s been an alien invasion, right? President Obama has been kidnapped and beamed up to Mars.’” And everyone on the internet would look at that story for about five minutes, and then no one, hopefully, would ever read our site again. There’s no metric, yet, for kind of what’s the long-term value that you’re generating from a stupid article that you post today to get a lot of page views or the loyalty you develop with your customers. So, we saw some baseball a little bit, where for a while people were able to measure offense really well, and not defense really well. And so the sloppy conclusion there is that, “Well we can’t measure defense,” therefore it doesn’t matter.” Well it turned out that when people actually found better ways to measure defensive ability, it turned out to matter at least as much, maybe more than the conventional wisdom had held. So we’re aware of that and that some things you can judge with metrics, some things you can’t and that’s a tricky part of the media business now.
DUBNER: How long do you think you’ll do FiveThirtyEight for?
SILVER: Hopefully for the foreseeable future. I mean, obviously, we have a big election coming up in 2016, but you know, people when they’re taking jobs here assume it’s going to be an organization that builds and grows for the long-term.
DUBNER: Is it my imagination, or has ESPN loosened up on talking about sports gambling, which traditionally the NFL among others, has been really nervous about? But it feels like this past NFL season, there was a lot more discussion on ESPN about betting lines?
SILVER: Well, look, Grantland, which is our sister brand and Bill Simmons, they’ve always talked a lot about sports gambling, and I mean, look, you can kind of see from the examples you cite that I don’t think ESPN has too many hangups about it. The leagues increasingly, especially the NBA, have fewer hangups about it, too. But this is one of those weird things that Americans are pretty puritanical about, I mean, before I started FiveThirtyEight, I made my living playing poker for a couple of years. So, you know, they knew what they were getting into. And you know, gambling and betting is very important in markets too. And where that line is drawn, I’m not quite sure. But you know, and they’re not saying, “Go give me your Vegas picks,” but we get no pushback at all from our bosses or from readers when things are framed in that way.
DUBNER: What do you think will be the first of the four major sports leagues to have a franchise in Vegas?
SILVER: The NHL- it’s kind of not a trick question, but the NHL is actively pursuing placing a team in Las Vegas. You know, I’d say the NBA since it seems more gambling-friendly. They’ve had, I believe, an all-star game or two in Vegas, seems like the next most likely. I’m not sure that baseball where you need to turn out, you know, 30 or 40,000 people 81 times a year is as good an area where the population isn’t that high, necessarily, and I don’t think baseball has become an event in the same way that an NBA game has, for example. One of my questions, too, is when are you going to have the first major political convention in Las Vegas. Because you think, “Hey, it’s a swing state, you could not have more hotel space there, especially in the mid-summer,” but I think both parties are terrified of what might happen or the implications of the stories.
DUBNER: God, can you imagine the prop bets, day-of? That would be so much fun, right?
SILVER: Yeah. It would be a lot of fun. Maybe- I’m sure the Libertarians would do lots of fun things in Las Vegas, but not Democrats or Republicans yet.
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DUBNER: Coming up on Freakonomics Radio, we put our FREAK-quently Asked Questions to Nate Silver. Even if you’re a hardcore Nate Silver fan, you’ll learn a thing or two:
SILVER: So I was born on a Friday the 13th. I’ve been thinking about trying to formulate a kind of Friday the 13th birthday club or organization or something.
DUBNER: And, if you’re a hardcore Freakonomics fan: you should circle on your calendar Tuesday, May 5. That’s the day we release our latest book – it’s called When to Rob a Bank – and 131 More Warped Suggestions and Well-Intended Rants. It’s a compilation of our favorite posts from ten years of blogging at Freakonomics.com. Among the questions we try to answer: Why don’t flight attendants get tipped? If you were a terrorist, how would you attack? And why does KFC always run out of fried chicken? That’s When to Rob a Bank, published on May 5, and available now for pre-order at booksellers everywhere.
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ANNOUNCER: From WNYC: This is FREAKONOMICS RADIO. Here’s your host, Stephen Dubner.
[MUSIC: The Diplomats of Solid Sound, “Plenty Nasty” (from Plenty Nasty)]
DUBNER: Today we’re talking with Nate Silver. He’s the editor-in-chief of FiveThirtyEight.com, author of The Signal and the Noise and, as you’ll hear soon, a would-be curler. As in the sport of curling. Seriously. We are now about to subject Silver to what we call our FREAK-quently Asked Questions. In the past, we’ve tried this with Boris Johnson, the mayor of London:
Boris JOHNSON: You plan to make this a regular feature but this is the first time that you’ve tried it on some guinea pig.
DUBNER: We did it with Kevin Kelly, the technology maverick:
Kevin KELLY: I tell you, there’s nothing more boring than hearing someone’s acid trip.
DUBNER: And now it’s Nate Silver’s turn:
DUBNER: Who would you say has been the biggest influence on your life and work and why? And I guess I mean here not so much personally but professionally, so maybe it’s the intellectual influence.
SILVER: I mean, you know, I admire Bill James a lot for what he did with baseball statistics. In part because he was way, way ahead of his time. I mean, he kind of preceded Moneyball literally by 20 years or thereabouts, but also because he’s a good communicator and kind of a humanist at heart, right? He’s not just interested in statistics for statistics’ sake, but how they’re used to kind of vest life and our understanding of sports and other things with a lot of meaning instead.
DUBNER: And also wasn’t operating at the white hot center of either statistics or baseball or media for that matter. Quite the opposite.
SILVER: No, he did not jump on the wagon, right? I mean, he jumped into the road when there was no bandwagon even approaching at all and maybe got run over a couple times and then led the bandwagon now.
DUBNER: What’s one thing you spend or have spent way too much on but don’t regret? And, I realize as I ask you that question now, it sounds like I’m talking about money, but I guess spending could also be time.
SILVER: I mean, I invest a lot of time and a lot of money in eating well. It’s one of those things that I think in a market like New York, where I live, really rewards effort, where if you spend the time to try different places and sometimes spend the money, although there’s great cheap eats in New York, too, you know I just find that it’s a product where it’s a fun way to experiment and something where you have to eat every day, so you might as well put some thought into it.
DUBNER: What’s your favorite food? I know you’re partial to burritos, but are they your favorite or are there many?
SILVER: I mean, I particularly like, you know, Mexican food, Japanese food and Italian food I kind of see as being pretty iconic. You know, in part because they are cuisines that emphasize not a lot of pretense really. It’s kind of fresh and simple ingredients a lot of the time, as opposed to the kind of French classical tradition where I think they’re sometimes trying to dazzle you with presentation and style. So it’s elegantly simple, those cuisines, I think.
DUBNER: What in your view is the perfect burrito?
SILVER: So I went to a place called La Taqueria in San Francisco, which won our first national burrito bracket last year, and that was the best burrito I ever had.
DUBNER: What kind of burrito did you have?
SILVER: It had chorizo but it was kind of cooked- it was called dorado-style, so it’s kind of golden brown on the outside. It’s kind of- you know, it’s California, so all the produce is really fresh and the ingredients are perfectly mixed. There’s not kind of lumping in a bunch of guacamole where it shouldn’t be and whatnot. So on kind of both artistic achievement and technical merit, it scored very highly.
DUBNER: What is one story that your family always tells about you?
SILVER: When I was in nursery school or pre-K, one day I decided to just count numbers just to see how high I could count. I was pretty insistent about it. I got to like 2000 or something before my mom picked me up that afternoon.
DUBNER: And they realized then what your future contained, yes?
SILVER: Yeah, I think that was an early sign.
DUBNER: What do you collect, if anything, and why?
SILVER: I used to collect baseball cards when, when I was a kid. I’m trying to think – I kind of collect books. I mean, I have a pretty significant bookshelf that kind of keeps growing over time. One of the things about writing a book, as you probably know, is that you get sent an awful lot of books too.
DUBNER: And do you keep most of those ones you’re sent? Or do you start to triage?
SILVER: Yeah, I still have an issue with throwing away books. I just think it’s bad… It’s bad karma. Giving away, maybe. But throwing away, no.
DUBNER: Favorite book or author?
SILVER: You know, I kind of often talk about Daniel Kahneman and Thinking Fast and Slow is kind of, just I think, a really great overall kind of modern guide to thinking, if that isn’t a little too pretentious, or too precious, rather. But that’s one of my favorite books.
DUBNER: Good choice. Music? Favorite music? Artist? Band? Singer? Songwriter?
SILVER: I used to be really into My Bloody Valentine in college, a shoe-gazer post punk band, you know, so, but I think music is maybe one of those things where it gets frozen in time a little bit, where kind of the favorite bands I have now at 37 are the same ones I might have said at 20-21.
DUBNER: Favorite sport to play?
SILVER: Uh, you know, I like to watch sports. I dunno, bowling, I suppose. Or, my partner actually owns a bowling… ball, um, or you know -
DUBNER: Oh, I thought you were going to say an alley. A ball is not that much of a commitment.
SILVER: Oh an alley, that would be quite something. You know, I’ve never been curling. I really want to go curling. My partner and I had this idea one time to capitalize on like the curling frenzy-
DUBNER: Which was when? I missed that.
SILVER: Well every four years people kind of cultish affection for the sport of curling. Which having grown up in Michigan with Canadian television on all the time, I appreciate it. But the idea was to have some hideously expensive plan for building a curling rink in Central Park and just having such good design and PR around it that people wouldn’t realize it was kind of a very elaborate inside joke.
DUBNER: Now let me ask you this. Don’t you think you have the creativity and reputation to go to Donald Trump and say, look, Wollman Rink, once it’s up, it’s up all winter, and you can just carve out a nice little curling- I don’t know what you call it, a curling lane? What do you call it? The area where one curls.
SILVER: That’s a good- yeah, I don’t think it’s an alley, right? Or a rink or something?
DUBNER: I have no idea.
SILVER: You know, I think if Donald Trump kind of carefully read what we wrote about when he was quote unquote “running for President,” in 2011, he probably wouldn’t return my phone call.
DUBNER: Okay, so sport, your favorite, sport to play your official answer seemed to be bowling? Is that right?
SILVER: Sure, we’ll go with bowling.
DUBNER: What’s the highest you’ve ever bowled?
SILVER: I think I got like a 180 one time. Which is not good for a highest-ever score.
DUBNER: You know, I was with Levitt once, he bowled a 222, which is, you know, but for a few pins he was close to perfect actually. And this was bowling kind of cross-lane, like wrong way for a right-hander with like a 12-pound ball that didn’t curve at all and he just threw it very very very straight repeatedly, kind of like an automaton. And it was- we were convinced he was ready for the senior PBA after that.
SILVER: I’m trying to figure out what the relationship is between bowling and beer consumption. It’s kind of a Laffer curve, I think, or something. Right? After like 1.8 beers, I think you’re in peak bowling shape.
DUBNER: Well, although, you can probably identify the peak of that curve a little more easily with bowling than with a Laffer curve, no? Does anyone really know where the Laffer curve peaks?
SILVER: I think not. I mean, there is the curve it seems to me. But, I’m guessing with bowling there are some complications where you probably warm up to the lane, feel a little bit better, so you have to do a control – it can be another FiveThirtyEight thing.
DUBNER: Tell us something that most people, even if they think they know quite a bit about you, don’t know about you.
SILVER: So I was born on a Friday the 13th. I’ve been thinking about trying to formulate a kind of Friday the 13th birthday club or organization or something. John Walsh, who was the former president I think of ESPN, was also a January the 13th birthday, I think it was a Friday the 13th, too. But you know, kind of from the very beginning I guess, there was a kind of something slightly cosmic about numbers and me.
DUBNER: What is one thing that people seem to know about you that is in fact not true?
SILVER: Maybe not for listeners of this interview, but I think people think that I take myself way more seriously than, than I do. You know, I mean, for some reason when you’re associated with numbers and data, you know, and look there are other places out there where they can be a little bit pedantic sometimes, but you know, I’m kind of a little anti-establishment, and still anti-authoritarian. That goes back a long way. And we try in our newsroom at FiveThirtyEight to have a lot of fun and to poke fun at one another, you know, to see kind of the reader as a peer and not someone who you’re “educating.” And that doesn’t always come through, I think, in kind of how FiveThirtyEight or my career is portrayed.
DUBNER: You are just a regular, burrito-loving, wannabe-curler who bowls once in a while, and drinks.
SILVER: Yeah, I mean, it’s pretty normal in some respects and completely strange in other respects. But you know, that’s one thing you learn. One of the most profound lessons to me about adulthood is that everyone’s kind of weird.
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DUBNER: What’s the biggest upside of being well-known?
SILVER: Gosh, I mean, sometimes you get, I think, slightly better service at restaurants. I mentioned food before, right? Where- one time I had a waiter who kinda tipped me off, I think it was her first day on the job, she was like, “Oh my manager handed me a card saying I’m supposed to treat you well.” I guess she was kinda very literal-minded and explicit about it. So I would imagine that if every time that happens, there’s a hundred times that it doesn’t happen potentially. But you know, in my perfect world I would be kind of, you know, influential without being famous, if that makes any sense. You know, I don’t mind if I get recognized out somewhere. By the way, it follows a lot when you’re on TV. If you’re on TV, you’ll have a half-life where people recognize you-
DUBNER: But that half-life is pretty fast, isn’t it?
SILVER: Really fast.
DUBNER: Because by seven days later, they’ve seen a thousand other faces and yours is starting to recede.
SILVER: At some point, you’re kind of on the- kind of on the hedonistic treadmill, I guess, where it becomes normalized pretty fast, right. And you’re like, okay, so now, you know, every 18th time I go out, someone will say hello to me and it’s almost always friendly. And it’s a nice thing. It would be jarring if it never happened to you before, but you know, then you also get in environments where- so a year ago I went to the Vanity Fair Oscar party, where you just realize that there are whole orders of magnitudes of fame that I, you know, I am just totally a kind of a quasi-nerd celebrity. You’re just dwarfed by, it’s not like people are twenty times more famous, they’re 20,000 times more famous, and you get in a room like that and you’re like kind of literally the least famous person there and it’s kind of fun to be a fly on the wall again.
DUBNER: What’s something that you believed for a long time to be true, and then decided that you’d been wrong?
SILVER: Oh gosh, this is a tricky, a tricky question. I mean, a little bit kind of gets in to the critique we were talking about, about big data earlier, where I kind of thought, “Well, just be quantitative and that’s better categorically than being qualitative and that’ll solve all your problems.” I still believe to a very rough approximation, people need to be more quantitative, but I think it needs to be a much more kind of structured investigation of the data. And kind of realizing this is one of the challenges, one of the reasons I’m betting our markets are interesting. Whenever you have a belief that kind of differs a lot from the consensus, then that’s a very complicated place to be.
DUBNER: We are more than two years out, but I’d be an idiot not to ask you, if you today had to bet $1,000 with, let’s say me, which if you were still at the New York Times, you wouldn’t be allowed to bet with me, I guess, but you could now presumably, who’s going to be president in 2016?
SILVER: Well you know, I don’t know that anyone has more than a 50% chance, you know, I think the plurality favorite is a pretty easy question, which is Hillary Clinton. If you figure or to a 50-50- well, to an approximation it’s 50-50 in the general election, which is probably about right in these circumstances. She is the dominant contender for the democratic nomination, where the GOP field is quite split. So she, you know, she would certainly be the front-runner in that sense.
DUBNER: Does political data analysis start to bore you after awhile?
SILVER: A little bit, but I think I’ll be reinvigorated by 2016. So midterm elections are big letdowns relative to how fun presidential years are. 2010 happened to be super-interesting because you had this very large Republican wave that had very tangible consequences as far as President Obama’s ability to continue to enact in effect, his agenda. So that had almost had a presidential-type storyline to it. The midterms last year were pretty dull, I’ve got to be honest. They were interesting from a forecasting standpoint that there was some uncertainty about what the polls said and which party would win the Senate, but I don’t expect any problems like that in 2016. I have to be honest. Nothing from a forecasting standpoint that there was some uncertainty about what the polls said and which party would win the senate, but I don’t expect any problems like that in 2016. We’re going to have a really compelling compelling primary. You know, we should have a close general election, with kind of a cottage industry covering Hillary Clinton, even if it’s sort of a field of one, so you know, that’s really fun. In some ways the presidential primaries are much more interesting, and in some ways a sort of better design process than the general elections, in that you have to perform well continuously over time, it requires more organization, you can’t get hot on one day. It’s like having to win a seven game series instead of just one game.
DUBNER: Right, right, yeah, but it sounds like you, and maybe I’m wrong on this, but just from this conversation, and from what else I’ve read of yours, it just sounds as though sports is more fun, generally, than politics. Or you like sports more than you like politics, as shallow a characterization as that is.
SILVER: Yeah, I mean, look, I’m really into kinda election data, but I’m not like a fan of politics per se. Right, like I don’t-
DUBNER: You didn’t collect political cards when you were a kid, in other words.
SILVER: No, I didn’t kinda take joy in you know, I don’t even always watch the State of the Union, for example. Whereas I very much do enjoy watching and spending income on going to the sports games. You know, I think in some ways the fact that I’m not kind of, I mean I am a politics geek, but I don’t love politics. I think that’s helpful, potentially. I think in Washington, in particular, there’s a lot of reverence for the political system that leads to less criticality in coverage, that leads I think really to people sometimes lacking perspective on which stories resonate or not. So one interesting thing is at the time we’re recording this, there’s a big controversy over Hillary Clinton’s email records. There’s good reporting on that, excellent reporting form the New York Times. But you have some pundits who are saying, “Oh this is a huge blow to her candidacy.” If you go to betting markets, and they have this in the UK now, some of the US ones were shut down, but Hillary Clinton’s probability of winning the nomination or the general election haven’t budged one bit. I’m not promising you the markets are right, they can be slow to pick up on information, but interesting the scandal that is considered to be a huge deal by the political press, bettors are kind of saying, “This is literally nothing at all.” And so I think sometimes people don’t realize that things that are great reported stories, right, and deserve to be- you know, I believe in transparency in government and everything else. But they might lack perspective on what things people outside of the proverbial cocktail party are really talking about.
[MUSIC: Ruby Velle & The Soulphonics, “Feet on the Ground” (from Feet on the Ground)]
DUBNER: Nate, thanks, this was a blast. You were great, and this was a lot of fun — but most of all, just congratulations – I’m super-happy for all your successes, and I hope they just keep going.
SILVER: Absolutely, I really appreciate it.
DUBNER:And remember: on May 5, Steve Levitt and I publish our latest Freakonomics book, it’s called, When to Rob a Bank. If you want to learn more, keep up on our public appearances and so on, visit Freakonomics.com, where you’ll also find an archive of more than 200 episodes of Freakonomics Radio.
Also: would you like to appear in a future episode? We’re producing one right now about the economics of sleep. So we’d like to hear from you about your sleep routine. How many hours do you need? How many do you get? What do you do to try to ensure a good night’s rest? Be specific. What’s your optimal room temperature for sleeping? Do you do anything to block out light or noise? Or maybe you like background music. What are your pillow habits? Sleep position? What do you wear — if anything? Do you sleep best alone or with someone else — or maybe even many someone elses? What do you do about eating, or drinking, or taking drugs, before you sleep? How are you affected by stress, or travel, or the weather? What’s the very best night’s sleep you ever had? What’s the worst?
If you’re willing to share your sleep story, use your phone to make a short audio recording — just use whatever voice memo app is one your phone — and email us file, at radio@freakonomics.com. Tell us your name, where you live and also, what you do when you’re not sleeping.
And coming up next week on the podcast:
Steve LEVITT: Sometimes doing things differently and simply and with a kind of joy and triviality leads you to a really special place that as an adult you don’t get to go to very often.
DUBNER: How thinking like a child can make you a better problem solver. That’s next time, on Freakonomics Radio.
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