Nate Silver on statistics: Playing it safe versus embracing risk
At the Stephen A. Levin Family Dean’s Forum, statistician Nate Silver spoke with Al Filreis, Kelly Family Professor of English, about his new book and risk-taking, with tangents into hobbies, poker, and baseball.
2 min. read
Picture a village by a river. In the village are a lot of recognizable faces—traditional government members, journalists, academics. By contrast, the river is filled with slightly different figures, from Wall Street executives and Silicon Valley moguls to poker players and sports betters. They live side by side, but not in harmony; they approach everything differently, from politics and policy to the world itself.
Nate Silver (right) and School of Arts & Sciences Kelly Family Professor of English Al Filreis in conversation at the Stephen A. Levin Family Dean’s Forum.
(Image: Lisa J. Godfrey)
That premise was at the center of a conversation between renowned statistician Nate Silver and School of Arts & Sciences Kelly Family Professor of English Al Filreis during the Stephen A. Levin Family Dean’s Forum on April 8, following an introduction by Jeffrey Kallberg, interim dean and William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of Music History. The event brought several hundred people to the Penn Museum for a discussion that ranged from Disney princesses and baseball to Silver’s new book, “On the Edge: The Arts of Risking Everything,” where he plays out the river-village dichotomy.
Filreis, who also directs the Center for Programs in Contemporary Writing and serves as faculty director for Kelly Writers House, kicked off the discussion with queries about “On the Edge,” which categorizes people as either living in “the village” or “the river,” and by proxy, taking on various stereotypes and attributes. Villagers, for example, tend to be something of a stand-in for the “liberal establishment,” while riverians—a Silver-coined term—tend to be capitalism-fueled creatures of risk and chance.
Silver rose to national prominence in 2008 by accurately predicting both the results of the U.S. primaries and the presidential race in all but one state (Indiana). He had no such trouble four years later, when he called all 50 states correctly. His blog, FiveThirtyEight, which took its name from the number of electors in the U.S. electoral college, was initially a polling aggregation website that later found a home at The New York Times before being acquired by ESPN.
Beyond that, the email dispatch monitors media and technology, including the emerging world of artificial intelligence, as well as two popular Silver pastimes, sports and gaming. Silver is a poker player, and the game underpins quite a bit of “On the Edge,” which sees the statistician applying lessons from gambling to politics, psychology, and more.
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