Nate Silver on Life’s Mixed Strategies

纳特·西尔关于生活的混合策略

Conversations with Tyler

2025-08-13

1 小时 3 分钟
PDF

单集简介 ...

In his third appearance on Conversations with Tyler, Nate Silver looks back at past predictions, weighs how academic ideas such as expected utility theory fare in practice, and examines the world of sports through the lens of risk and prediction. Tyler and Nate dive into expected utility theory and random Nash equilibria in poker, whether Silver's tell-reading abilities transfer to real-world situations like NBA games, why academic writing has disappointed him, his move from atheism to agnosticism, the meta-rationality of risk-taking, electoral systems and their flaws, 2028 presidential candidates,  why he thinks superforecasters will continue to outperform AI for the next decade, why more athletes haven't come out as gay, redesigning the NBA, what mentors he needs now, the cultural and psychological peculiarities of Bay area intellectual communities, why Canada can't win a Stanley Cup, the politics of immigration in Europe and America, what he'll work on next, and more. Read a full transcript enhanced with helpful links, or watch the full video on the new dedicated Conversations with Tyler channel. Recorded July 23rd, 2025. Help keep the show ad free by donating today! Other ways to connect Follow us on X and Instagram Follow Tyler on X Follow Nate on X Sign up for our newsletter Join our Discord Email us: cowenconvos@mercatus.gmu.edu Learn more about Conversations with Tyler and other Mercatus Center podcasts here.
更多

单集文稿 ...

  • Conversations with Tyler is produced by the Mercatus Center at George Mason University,

  • bridging the gap between academic ideas and real-world problems.

  • Learn more at mercatus.org.

  • For a full transcript of every conversation,

  • enhanced with helpful links, visit conversationswithtyler.com.

  • Hello everyone and welcome to Conversations with Tyler.

  • Today I'm chatting with Nate Silver, live in New York.

  • We are here to commemorate the paperback edition of Nate's On the Edge,

  • The Art of Risking Everything,

  • a book that last year I described sincerely as absolute fun on every page.

  • We're also going to revisit some of our earlier predictions from a year ago and nine years ago and talk about everything I want to talk about.

  • Nate, welcome.

  • Tyler, always a pleasure.

  • At current margins, do you learn anything from studying expected utility theory?

  • Well, I mean, I probably spend 10th of my time playing poker.

  • And like certainly in that respect, you're quite explicit about calculating things like that, right?

  • But are you learning new ideas, new theories, new concepts,

  • or are you just applying what you learned, say 13 years ago, whenever?

  • No, I feel it still feels fresh to me.

  • I mean, I, you know, I think so when I've talked about the book to people,