Nate Silver: belief

Transcript context

…How long will it be before we have AIs who are better predictors than you are? Let’s say it’s a Centaur model. The AI sits down and says, “Nate, please talk to me for half an hour. Tell me your thoughts. Tell me what you know.” You give it your best half-an-hour worth of consulting on, say, the next presidential election, and then we just get rid of you. We send you off to pasture, and the AI does the work. You’re paid a small fee, and it does the actual prediction. How far away is that? I think election forecasting is an oddly hard problem, where the mathematical structure of it is fairly complex. The data is quite sparse, and you often have to make judgment calls based on incomplete information. That might be one of the relatively more robust areas. It gets half an hour of your time. It could pay for more if need be.…

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