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Nate Silver
@NateSilver538
Founder, EIC
@FiveThirtyEight
. Author, The Signal and the Noise (amzn.to/QdyFYV). Sports/politics/food geek. Not a virologist.
New Yorkfivethirtyeight.comJoined August 2008
1,550 Following
3.4M Followers

Nate Silver’s Tweets

Nate Silver
@NateSilver538
Somewhat randomly came across this video, which seems like it's from a completely foreign place and an almost-unrecognizable era, but is actually from another large Western liberal democracy just 16 months ago.
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Charlotte,The Baroness of Burnley 💫
@CharlotteEmmaUK
What have I just watched? 😳 Whether it be psy-op/propaganda or not, this is the kind of thing being shown on Australian news channels 😱
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Nate Silver
@NateSilver538
Not that it's the most important thing but the statement on the left is much much better than the one on the right.
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Jason Kint
@jason_kint
CNN and Washington Post statements on their tech reporters being permanently suspended from Twitter.
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Nate Silver
@NateSilver538
News organizations like the NYT already had mixed feelings about their reporters using Twitter and if you can now be suspended from Twitter for doing fairly straightforward reporting, you have to wonder if that's the tipping point.
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Nate Silver
@NateSilver538
The prediction market I'd want to see is something like "will Trump hold at least 7 rallies in early-voting states in 4Q 2023". That's a pretty low threshold for a non-half-assed campaign. I'd buy it at 60% and sell at 80%.
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Nate Silver
@NateSilver538
He also has plausible reasons to *officially* have declared even if he hasn't yet decided whether to run an effortful campaign: 1) may deter prosecution; 2) gets him more media coverage; 3) keeping his foot in the door may deter GOP from coalescing on an alternative.
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Nate Silver
@NateSilver538
Is Trump actually running for president? I mean I know he's officially "running for president" but he's not actually doing almost any of the things that you'd expect a candidate to do when they're running for president.
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Nate Silver
@NateSilver538
We spent 7 years where the hypothesis "nothing could break Trump's hold on GOP voters" was pretty much always true, now something clearly has broken it* and it feels like that deserves more analysis. * Which is not to say he can't win though I think he's an underdog to RDS.
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Nate Silver
@NateSilver538
In advance of the 2016 GOP nomination campaign a lot of folks (including me) dismissed polls showing Trump doing well among GOP primary voters. Well, now there's more and more evidence from polls that GOP voters are tiring of Trump and turning to DeSantis.
usatoday.com
Trump in trouble: Republican support for his 2024 bid falls amid political, legal setbacks
Most Republican voters want Trump-ism but are no longer so enthusiastic about ex-President Donald Trump himself, a warning sign for his 2024 campaign.
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Nate Silver
@NateSilver538
A lot of people who would purport to understand the replication crisis are still way too willing to cite one-off studies to prove their point. Most studies are crap, it's trivially easy to cherry-pick studies or experts to suit your narrative, finding the truth is hard.
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Nate Silver
@NateSilver538
Agree with pretty much the whole thread. The "old" Twitter was a nasty place for all types of people based in large part on deliberate choices that Twitter management made. And everyone knew about it and complained about it. Talk that implies these were the good old days is nuts.
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Noah Smith 🐇🇺🇦
@Noahpinion
7/Twitter's old management fought against this. They did whatever they could -- including design choices *and* moderation choices -- to keep people who hated and feared each other's ideas in constant close contact, constantly fighting each other, in order to boost engagement.
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Nate Silver
@NateSilver538
Close call but—going out on a limb here—perhaps *slightly* more important to the future of humanity than how Elon Musk is running Twitter.
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Tom Wilson
@thomas_m_wilson
SCOOP: Net energy gain in a fusion reaction has been a holy grail in science for decades. Now I’m told US scientists have done it. A massive breakthrough with revolutionary potential for clean power. US Energy Secretary to hold a press conference Tuesday on.ft.com/3PgDdya
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Nate Silver
@NateSilver538
Simple theory: Donald Trump and the acute phase of the COVID pandemic brought out the worst in pretty much everyone, and likely had a lot of second-order effects. So, yeah, lots of seemingly-unrelated things have been getting better since roughly Feb. 2021.
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Daniel W. Drezner
@dandrezner
I wrote optimistically today. danieldrezner.substack.com/p/is-the-count
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Nate Silver
@NateSilver538
The Twitter content moderation discourse is supremely uninteresting because nobody's mind is going to be changed about whether previous Twitter moderation was biased against conservatives, and almost all of the other questions flow downstream from that.
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Nate Silver
@NateSilver538
"It's all about turnout" is perhaps the biggest myth in electoral analysis. Persuasion generally matters more than turnout.
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Nate Cohn
@Nate_Cohn
Republicans enjoyed a superior turnout this fall, based on authoritative data on turnout by party from NC, AZ, GA, NV, NY and FL, but lost high-profile races because of defections from Republican-leaning voters nytimes.com/2022/12/08/ups
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Nate Silver
@NateSilver538
Sinema was not very popular with anyone, I'm not sure whether today's move increases or decreases her chances of winning another term (I actually suspect decreases) but they were low to begin with and they remain low.
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Nate Silver
@NateSilver538
This is…weird/creepy. If you ask ChatGPT who was better, Michael Jordan or Kurt Rambis, it won't answer and then will gaslight you into pretending it doesn't know how many points Jordan scored. But if you start out by asking it how many points Jordan scored, it DOES answer.
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Nate Silver
@NateSilver538
Don't want to many any premature "calls" but I thought you might enjoy the following word puzzle (unscramble the anagram). WANROCK WNIS
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Nate Silver
@NateSilver538
I don't think betting markets are particularly good at pre-election forecasting but on election nights, that's what I'd tend to go with. Their incentives are better than people have reasons to be extremely risk averse in not making an incorrect "call".
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Nate Silver
@NateSilver538
Feels like there should be a bigger gap in pricing of aisle/window vs. middle seats? Are there people who secretly love the middle seat? (Maybe they're super social or something.)
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Nate Silver
@NateSilver538
Basically the NYT's coverage of politics devours a lot of its other beats. Elon's management of Twitter is a very interesting politics story, a somewhat interesting business story, and a not-very-interesting tech story. ChatGPT is just the opposite.
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Flo Crivello
@Altimor
The NYT still has 0 mentions of ChatGPT, which is basically all tech has been talking about for the last few days. Instead, 3 out of the top 4 articles in its tech section are about Elon and Twitter - mostly negative, of course.
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Nate Silver
@NateSilver538
One of the more understated risks from AI is that it comes up with medicore answers that people mistake for being brilliant.
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Nate Silver
@NateSilver538
The tendency to puff up a ~moderately interesting story or argument~ into something //EPIC// is one that occurs in all forms of media but long Twitter threads are especially prone to it.
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Nate Silver
@NateSilver538
My general critique of AI language models is the same critique one should have of models in general, which is that giving an approximately correct solution in 98% of cases isn't particularly valuable if the 98% are trivial and the 2% are what you really care about.
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Nate Silver
@NateSilver538
A big deal. This has been a quite productive two years in Congress for Biden.
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Kyle Griffin
@kylegriffin1
BREAKING: The Senate has voted to pass the Respect for Marriage Act, legislation to codify federal protection for marriages of same-sex and interracial couples, 61 to 36.
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Nate Silver
@NateSilver538
And sometimes it's *worse* if you're making a *nuanced* argument because those are more on the boundary of what needs to be policed as acceptable discourse. It's a Broken Windows philosophy in which the appearance of order is maintained by intolerating minor transgressions.
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Nate Silver
@NateSilver538
I've experienced similar things on Twitter. There's a range from out-of-context quotations to outright falsehoods/fabrications with a lot of stopping points in the middle. But some people are remarkably untethered to being truthful if you're seen as a threat to their "team".
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zeynep tufekci
@zeynep
What's interesting, sociologically, is while the claims are *absolute* opposite of one another, the methods are similar. It's usually an out-of-context, misrepresented, or even doctored screenshot, with a claim about me/my views, that will only work on people who don't check.
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