If you were to watch “Moneyball” today, you might find it quaint. You may recall the premise: In a world before “data-driven decisions” was a cliché, a likable nerd played by Jonah Hill helps craft a baseball roster from a spreadsheet, beating out better-funded teams who still rely on traditional scouts. These old-school baseball types are stuck in the past – more concerned with a player’s jawline and how the ball “explodes off his bat” rather than on-base percentage and hard statistics.
Fifteen years later, algorithms have taken over everything from baseball to politics to research, and the shortcomings of “software eating the world” are becoming more obvious. Kamala Harris’ presidential campaign is built on vibes and being “brat,” instead of well-articulated policies. Despite our access to information and powerful modeling software, there is an ongoing replication crisis for scientific studies. Our social media feeds are targeted and addictive, but ultimately immiserating.
Enter Nate Silver, the statistician, political forecaster, and poker player. His new book, On the Edge: The Art of Risking Everything, is much more nuanced than “Moneyball,” eschewing the worship of data geeks and their denigration of human cognition. Instead, he uses poker to illustrate how to live in a modern, complex world. Statistical models have raised the game, but the best players combine these probabilities with their own human intuition to make the optimal play.
The River and The Village
To most people, Nate Silver builds election models. He came to prominence for predicting all 50 states
