Nate Silver: belief

Transcript context

…Can you think of cases of people who have truly integrated attitudes toward risk? That is, they have some level of risk-taking, and they apply it more or less evenly to all the things they do. Are those people just in jail? [laughs] Look, I think some of Silicon Valley has that attitude a little bit. It tends to be correlated with other things that might be less desirable. The calculated risk-taking part [laughs] is hard, I think. If you’re very successful . . . One thing you see when you do play poker is, people play very differently when they’re on a winning streak. People play very differently when they’re confident. They usually play better, quite a bit better, in fact. Probably true for human beings, too. But I’ve had moments in my career where I flew way too close to the sun, and you begin getting worse feedback from people. That’s very damaging, where people are sycophantic around you, potentially, where you shut off criticism. Elon seems to have this problem a little bit, although Elon didn’t concede to Trump on tariffs and skilled immigration, things like that, so he had some values at least. But that’s a very big problem, I think. You’re surrounding yourself with yes men. Why haven’t you been to Oklahoma yet?…

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