Nate Silver: evaluation

Transcript context

…But it’s not just you causing possible wins. Even before you’ve played for the team, the fact that they want you says something good about you. KCP has been wanted by good teams. His stats are good but not awesome, but that is a good sign about his quality. I think so, although we start to get into circularities when people become aware of that kind of thing. I feel this way a little bit with prediction markets, too. I consult now for Polymarket, so I’m officially a champion of prediction markets. When people believe, “Oh, the traders must be doing something really smart. Therefore, it’s trustworthy,” it can become circular logic sometimes, where you can make yourself vulnerable to thinking you have blind spots and having a bystander problem, basically. Someone actually has to have alpha they’re providing, value-added they’re providing, and then other people can draft off that. But now and then, someone thinks that everyone else has vouched for somebody. It’s like the story of Sam Bankman-Fried in the book a little bit. Everyone assumed that because he has such prestigious coattails, that he’s hanging out with Anna Wintour and hanging out with Bill Clinton and Tony Blair, and he has his name up on a basketball arena in Miami, and he’s getting his praises sung by everybody in Sequoia Capital, and things like that. At the heart of it, it was a big fraud. That’s a term I’m choosing intentionally. What’s your model of his risk-taking behavior?…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.