Nate Silver: evaluation

Transcript context

…Well, not p=1, but there’s some chance, right? There’s some chance. Look, a lot of problems in, I guess it’s called infinite ethics. You now have this big debate over shrimp welfare, for example. I’m like, we have enough problems that are in the terrestrial tractable realm, right? Well, I’m just not going to worry about those things so much. As thought experiments, they can be helpful and fine, but I think if you ignore the 1 percent of edge cases . . . It’s probably good to have some people — Will MaCaskill or whatever — worrying about those things — the shrimp people having some influence on that, but I’m trying to move in the realm of the tractable. I’ve always been more poker. What matters is what hand you have. What matters is the read that you have. The theory matters, but information you have that’s local and specific, and actionable always predominates that. You dismiss Pascal’s wager in short?…

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