Nate Silver and the Addiction to Prediction

In the lead-up to the 2008 election, Nate Silver revolutionized the way we talk about politics, bringing cold, hard, numerical facts to a world that had been dominated by the gut feelings of reporters and opinion columnists. Sixteen years later, he remains a go-to authority on the use of quantitative information in the prediction of political outcomes. But despite his popularity, Silver feels misunderstood. In a 2023 interview with New Yorker columnist Jay Caspian Kang, Silver lamented, “It’s very weird to become very well known for the wrong reasons. People say, ‘Oh you have numbers and therefore a lot of certainty’ and they can’t quite process the fact that you can use numbers to quantify uncertainty as well.” Silver’s readers thought his numbers were telling them what would happen and informing what politicians, particularly Democrats, should do. According to Silver, that’s not at all what he intended, and, he told Kang, he was writing a book to clear up the confusion. At stake was something much larger: not just a question of facts and probabilities, but an entire way of seeing the world, and acting upon it. And the key was not in election forecasting, but another field that was Silver’s true passion: gambling.