Nate Silver: belief

Transcript context

…Other than skilled with data, what are the personal qualities of good predictors? You have to have a certain mistrust of conventional wisdom, and that’s a tricky thing. On the one hand we know that I’m not that smart, that this room is way way way way smarter than me, and a market is way way way way smarter than me. At the same time people are social beings, and they behave in herds sometimes. This is easier in politics than almost any other field, because the political press corps literally is kind of a herd. It’s the perfect example of it. You have a few hundred journalists who travel around together, who are all reading one another on Twitter, who are all talking to one another. It’s not 500 really smart people. It’s one or two really smart people, and 489 followers instead. I don’t know. We get ourselves in a little bit of trouble I think at FiveThirtyEight at times, because we are fairly combative. For a long time I thought, “Well this is kind of part of my personality, and the kind of more happy warrior data side is more part of it too.” They’re actually kind of sides of the same coin. When you read the New York Times or the Post, not basic factual statements where they say, “Today, Donald Trump was in Arizona,” but when there’s a piece of analysis that isn’t necessarily obvious, to say, “Boy, there might be a 40 percent chance that that’s basically wrong.” That leaves you in a weird place kind of. But to believe that is, I think, the source of a lot of the healthy skepticism that we have and also some of our failings sometimes. Now let me get to the question that maybe the crowd most wants to hear. Who will be the next president of the United Arab Emirates? [laughter] Now this is a trick question because it’s a hereditary monarchy, but here’s my background question. Intelligence agencies and scholars did very poorly forecasting the Arab Spring and did very poorly forecasting ISIS. So you’re put on the case, someone from Washington, McLean, wherever. They call you in. They say, “What variables should we be looking at to understand the Middle East that we’re underweighting right now?” I know it’s a tough question, but who will be the next president of the United Arab Emirates? Will there be a next president? How do you think about what’s happening there? Black swans or a regularized process?…

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