Once upon a time, I accused Nate Silver of being “a numerologist, or a horse race handicapper, and I suspected he was juggling the numbers to fit his expectations”. I was not very perceptive, and I missed the heart of Silver’s problem. He’s a gambling addict. I shouldn’t be surprised.
He has come out with a new book, essentially a confession, titled On the Edge, a 572-page doorstop that is actually a gambling manual. He has this mentality where the purpose of predictions is to win and win big, and he’s constantly angling for the risky bet that pays off on long odds.
This is the blurb for the book.
In the bestselling The Signal and the Noise, Nate Silver showed how forecasting would define the age of Big Data. Now, in this timely and riveting new book, Silver investigates “the River,” the community of like-minded people whose mastery of risk allows them to shape—and dominate—so much of modern life.
These professional risk-takers—poker players and hedge fund managers, crypto true believers and blue-chip art collectors—can teach us much about navigating the uncertainty of the twenty-first century. By immersing himself in the worlds of Doyle Brunson, Peter Thiel, Sam Bankman-Fried, Sam Altman, and many others, Silver offers insight into a range of issues that affect us all, from the frontiers of finance to the future of AI.
I fwowed up in my mouth a little bit. You, too, can be just like these con artists and charlatans — it’s the future of finance and AI!
Here’s the revelation that shocked me.
Whoa. He’s gambling $10,000 a day on basketball? If you had a friend who was throwing away that much on his gambling habit, wouldn’t you take them aside and suggest that they get help?
Notice also that he was churning $1.8 million into his daily betting routine between October and May, and at the end he comes out ahead…by about $5000. That’s some return on investment.
Also, I don’t believe him. I had an uncle who was addicted to betting on horse races, who claimed to have a system, who told me that on average he was coming out ahead, just like Nate Silver’s graph. Unfortunately, he was somehow living in poverty, getting by marginally, unable to afford the basics, and we’d just sometimes learn that he’d made a big score because he’d come home staggeringly drunk. The only people who profit in the long run from gambling are the race track owners and the bookies and the guys who run the liquor concessions.
I will say that hardcore gambling does have one useful outcome: it’s practitioners tend to be pretty glib about rationalizing their results. Somehow I’m not surprised that a gambling addict can write a 572 page book to justify his methods.
If you are betting 10k per day for 100 days, probably being within -20k,+20k is within margin of error, for your predictions being essentially random.
I wonder if Silver got a big advance for this book, or if he\s gambling on its success by only taking a small advance and hoping to make it big on the royalties.
F Ing L.
I had the impression thsi fool was credible once..
There was a guy in Britain who achieved a profit of 1-2 % of his bets on horses, but he was doing it full-time and kept up with the condition of the horses. He was that one in a million that made a profit but I suspect he would have made more on an ordinary job.
I don’t see that “immersing himself in the world of Sam Bankman-Fried” is a good idea.
Sam Bankman-Fried is that crypto guy who was arrested for massive fraud.
The lesson of Bankman-Fried is to not steal your customers money and then get caught by the FBI.
The normalisation of gambling in the UK is really worrying to me. In the Premier League – England’s biggest football league watched by millions every week eight out of 20 Premier League clubs featured a gambling company on the front of their shirts in the ’23/’24 season.
FYI. I had no idea who Doyle Brunson was.
I also have no idea if he actually came out ahead at poker but with a 60 year career, probably he did.
“PokerNews: #5 Doyle Brunson – $75 million Brunson grew up in dust-bowl era America and played basketball at school.”
IIRC, poker is considered a game of chance and…skill. It isn’t pure gambling.
Bit confused, is this book supposed to teach me to be a better gambler or a better con men?
This seems like the VC approach to gambling (which I’m guessing is also lionized in this book) — bet on ten companies assuming nine will fold and one will be successful enough to cover losses and make some profit.
Both.
And also to be a small “m” monster.
Peter Thiel is a flat out American monster.
and
Peter Thiel is a far right authoritarian who is actively trying to destroy the US democracy.
Just recently his boy friend was found dead, falling or jumping from a balcony.
I’m not saying Thiel was directly involved but if you look at Thiel, it isn’t surprising that people around him end up dead.
Generic right wing monster.
We’ve seen enough.
Nate Silver can’t wait to roll in the slime with the rest of the wannabe fascists.
His credibility is zero and heading into negative territory.
I worked for a chain of betting shops in London, they are an example of the people who actually make money from grambling. Another worker, who had been a betting shop manager, told me of a bettor who made 28K (sterling not $) one day. The shop didn’t have the money to pay him, so the manager went to the bank that evening, paid him the next morning. The bettor said “put that money aside and I will bet against it.” By the end of the day he had lost it all. He could have had a great vacation with the money, but no…
For guy who makes his living analysing probability, he doesn’t seem to have much grasp of it.
You can win fairly at gambling (i.e. without cheating), but only in a few settings, and the only way to win fairly in a casino is card-counting at blackjack…which will get you banned. The only way to win at sports gambling is if your model is better than everyone else’s by more than the house margin. In sports betting, the usual margin is 5% – 6.5%. That is, you need to be 5% – 6.5% better than the rest of the gambling pool just to break even. I don’t believe Silver’s statistical model is that good given his graph.
Silver also seems not to understand how bookies and totalisators make money. The inescapable problem for a gamber is that if there is a better predictive model, then other gamblers will start using it, which will create a new equilibrium where the best possible algorithm, even one that perfectly arrives at the true underlying probabilities, will lose in the long run!
@6. voidhawk : “The normalisation of gambling in the UK is really worrying to me.”
Australia says “Hold my beer!”
Then again, we’ve recently debating restricted gambling advertising in parliament :
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-08-19/labor-mike-freelander-speaks-on-gambling-ad-reforms/104240372
Sadly, it hasn’t passed (yet?) and is being undermined by what is a n exceedingly powerful malign lobby here.
@12. chrislawson : Basic logic : Pubs and casino’s don’t put gambling machines in to lose money..
A pont that seems to evade gamblers.
Notice also that he was churning $1.8 million into his daily betting routine between October and May, and at the end he comes out ahead…by about $5000. That’s some return on investment.
That sounds more like a consolation prize. As in: “Okay, today’s my lucky day, I’m winning big, let’s keep it up, OH NOES I’M LOSING EVERYTHING HOW’M I GONNA GET IT BACK?!! OMG I’m getting my initial money back, thank god, oh and I got a tiny bit more, so I’ll just call that ‘winning’ and run away.”
Had a friend who played the ponies full time. Carefully studied the forms, won regularly – and always lost it all in the end. Just couldn’t collect his winnings and go home. I offered to hold half of his daily winnings and give him a big lump at the end of the month. He couldn’t do it. You can be a good gambler but you will lose it all every time if you don’t know when to stop.
“If you don’t know when to stop”.
And that is why casinos in Vegas successfully lobbied to make it permitted to pay by card, if I recall correctly.
If you run out of cash, you are not expected to take a break and go out to the whatdoyoucallitinenglish for more, the pause might make people realise they are being self-destructive.
SteveoR: An alcoholic can be a great sommelier.
raven@7 Yeah, there’s skill involved in poker or you wouldn’t have someone like Phil “Poker Brat” Hellmuth, who has won 17 events at the World Series of Poker and done well enough to actually win money at 210 of them. He’s estimated to have won 29 million dollars playing in tournaments as of July 2023.
A lot of pro poker players have gotten into trouble around gambling. Phil Ivey, considered by some to be the best overall pro poker player in the world, has been sued successfully twice for cheating at baccarat.
Betting shops (bookies) were legalized in 1961 in the UK and by the time I was old enough to notice them (the mid-70s) they were already a fixture in almost every high street in the country. Gambling has been normalized in the UK for 50 years already.
Grandstand, the BBC’s flagship Saturday afternoon sports show for 30 years, used to show at least five horse races — often cutting away from their cricket coverage during their four hour show, which used to really annoy me immensely! — complete with the odds and trends for all the horses.
You can bet on anything the bookmakers will give you odds for. One of the most popular non-sports bets every year is whether there will be a White Christmas in London. Several Tory Party members were recently investigated for placing bets on which date Rishi Sunak would pick for recent upcoming General Election. Many British poker players start playing from the age of 18. You don’t have to travel hundreds of miles to your nearest casino to place bets in person, you can simply walk into town.
Actually, this is one thing that is changing for the better. Under pressure from the government, the Premier League will be banning betting sponsors from their apparel from the summer of 2026 onwards. The ban does not apply to clubs in lower divisions, where the sponsorship money is badly needed and hard to give up, but the pressure to change is rising.
I’m probably one of the few people to spend three nights in a Las Vegas casino (for a convention) and not even put a dime into a slot machine (this was back in the 1980s). I hate to lose money.
But I do play in a poker home game with friends once or twice a month, $0.50/$1 Limit Hold’em with a $25 buy-in, so we’re not exactly high-rollers. I started off very cautiously, making sure my one $25 would last all night — again, I hate to lose money — but I’ve been on a winning streak the last few times we played, and the most recent poker night, the deck hit me hard every time I was in a pot. I even loosened up a lot so that I would give some money back to the other players, but I just won even more money.
The interesting thing was the feeling of exhilaration I felt while winning so much. It was quite a rush, feeling I could do not wrong. It was just a taste, but I can see how gamblers and poker players can get hooked to that feeling, and the need to feel it again.
Fortunately for me, the thought of losing money far outweighs the endorphin high of winning, so I think I’m safe. Been in the US for 30 years and still never bought a lottery ticket of any kind…
Me hateses Nate Silver:
https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/2024-election-forecast/
At this posting:
Damn him straight to Hell!
Hat tip Pakman from:
Speaking of RFK Jr, who had decapitated beached whale head leaking stinking whale juice into RFK Jr’s vehicle from the roof for 5 hrs on their Bingo card?
@22
Nate Silver doesn’t have anything to do with the 538 model any more. Though his current model result is fairly close.
@20 Tacitus
Yeah, only read about the shirt gambling ban after posting yesterday, but my understanding is that they will still be able to advertise on the shirt sleeves, backs, ad boards, Stoke will still play at Bet365 Stadium, etc.
Bookies have taken over High Streets, especially in deprived areas, like the Borg. Part of the issue is a quirk in the law that restricts betting shops to a small number of Fixed-Odds Betting Terminals (4, I believe) but doesn’t ban the number of shops you can have in an area, so instead of concentrating them in one place, they get spread out.
I am not in favour of banning gambling, that just pushes it underground (my Great-Grandad used to send my Nan out with money to place money on the horses at the house of a dodgy bloke who lived on their street) but we should absolutely strangle advertising and sponsorships.
I feel like a lot of the political and economic problems we face are a consequence of the most respected people in finance being dumb assholes who are completely oblivious to the fact that their jobs are essentially playing craps with loaded dice.
#21: I’ve been at multiple conventions in Las Vegas. Never dropped a single dime on betting.
#26: I always knew we were kindred spirits. :)
#24: Yeah, it’s hard to put the genie back in the bottle. Many of the clubs outside the Premier League can ill afford the losses that would be incurred should betting sponsorship be outlawed. Non-betting sponsorships are far less profitable, and it doesn’t help that the Premier League, right up there with the NFL as a global phenomenon, refuses to share its wealth to keep the state of English football solvent and competitive.
The title of one of Damon Runyan’s stories was “All Horse Players Die Broke”.
#27
I’ll be honest, I have nothing but contempt for most of professional football, from the gross human rights violations of the World Cup, to the enabling of betting companies. It all needs to be burnt to the ground and go back to its roots as a game for everyday people.
Hemidactylus@22,
Aside from what DrVanNostrand says@23, why do you hate whoever now runs fivethirtyeight? Is your objection to the procedures they use, or the outcome of those procedures? Would you still hate them if they showed Harris winning all 100 of the simulations?