In Conversation with Statistician Nate Silver

Picture a village by a river. In the village are a lot of recognizable faces—traditional government members, journalists, academics. By contrast, the river is filled with slightly different figures, from Wall Street executives and Silicon Valley moguls to poker players and sports betters. They live side by side, but not in harmony; they approach everything differently, from politics and policy to the world itself.

That premise was at the center of a conversation between renowned statistician Nate Silver and Kelly Family Professor of English Al Filreis during the Stephen A. Levin Family Dean’s Forum on April 8, following an introduction by Jeffrey Kallberg, Interim Dean and William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor of Music History. The event, a Penn Arts & Sciences mainstay since 1984, annually draws large crowds, this year bringing several hundred people to the Penn Museum for a discussion that ranged from Disney princesses and baseball to Silver’s new book, On the Edge: The Arts of Risking Everything, where he plays out the river-village dichotomy.

Filreis, who also directs the Center for Programs in Contemporary Writing and serves as Faculty Director for Kelly Writers House, kicked off the discussion with queries about On the Edge, which categorizes people as either living in “the village” or “the river,” and by proxy, taking on various stereotypes and attributes. Villagers, for example, tend to be something of a stand-in for the “liberal establishment,” while riverians—a Silver-coined term—tend to be capitalism-fueled creatures of risk and chance.

“We in the village need to understand how riverians think, or at least how Nate Silver thinks 90 percent of the time,” said Filreis.

Silver, animated and speaking at rapid speed, acknowledged that while politics factor in heavily, the real crux of his argument comes down to psychology. The two camps show “a real divide in risk behavior,” he said, recalling a trip he took to Florida during the COVID-19 pandemic as an example.

The event, a Penn Arts & Sciences mainstay since 1984, annually draws large crowds, this year bringing several hundred people to the Penn Museum for a discussion that ranged from Disney princesses and baseball to Silver’s new book.

“I went to a poker tournament,” he said, adding that many players were unmasked much of the time. “And this is where schools [at the time] were still closed.”

Throughout the tournament he observed poker players actively engaging in risky behavior, smoking, eating, and drinking, all without masks and in close proximity to other people within an enclosed space. Outside, meanwhile, COVID precautions continued apace. “That told me something,” Silver said.

Curiosity about human behavior is nothing new for Silver. He first rose to national prominence in 2008 by accurately predicting both the results of the U.S. primaries and the presidential race in all but one state (Indiana). He had no such trouble four years later, when he called all 50 states correctly. His blog, FiveThirtyEight, which took its name from the number of electors in the U.S. electoral college, was initially a polling aggregation website that later found a home at The New York Times before being acquired by ESPN.

Silver departed the site in 2023 as widespread layoffs hit Disney, ESPN’s parent company. Since then, he’s kept busy running his newsletter, Silver Bulletin, which is hosted on Substack. It covers a lot of ground familiar to FiveThirtyEight readers: polling, elections, public opinion, policy, political trends.

Beyond that, the email dispatch monitors media and technology, including the emerging world of artificial intelligence, as well as two popular Silver pastimes, sports and gaming. Silver is a poker player, and the game underpins quite a bit of On the Edge, which sees the statistician applying lessons from gambling to politics, psychology, and more.

Moving beyond the book’s poker chapters, Filreis noted, “you’ll actually begin to think about risk-taking in leadership … or baseball.”

America’s national pastime is another favored focus for Silver, whose back-and-forth banter with Filreis surfaced figures like former professional players Greg Maddux and Yogi Berra. Filreis cited them as examples of individuals who have embraced “randomness” in their approach to simple decisions like whether to throw a fastball or a curveball. Silver linked randomness to riverians, positioning himself as someone open to taking chances and unpredictability.

As the conversation continued, Filreis queried Silver about what traits villagers could learn from riverians, leading the statistician to return to poker. “You either want to raise or fold, because your hand is too weak to call,” he said. Raising could see a bluff called by another player, but it could also open up winning scenarios, including one where the opponent folds or a hand improves.

“Especially in the village, we’re a little risk-averse, maybe a lot,” Filreis agreed. “Risk-takers are good at tolerating randomness.”

Silver’s openness to randomness was later put to the test, when Filreis pulled out Disney princess cards, each of which had quotes on the back from baseball legend Berra. These ranged from, “A nickel ain’t worth a dime anymore,” prompting several jokes from Silver about the economy, to “We make too many wrong mistakes,” which led him to chuckle, “I don’t know what the right mistakes are.” Filreis and Silver closed out the evening with more random questions and subjects, good for the riverians, perhaps tough for the villagers, engaging for all.