Nate Silver faces backlash for pro-Trump model skewing

[erronis]

17. A fair amount of chatter about how Nate Silver has his own real gambling problem.

https://www.emptywheel.net/2024/09/04/stop-obsessing-about-kamala-harris-polling-bumps/

What’s the deal with Nate Silver? He seems like he’s fully embracing this contrarian persona where everything he says has some snark (usually against Democrats). He had a recent AMA on Reddit which was quite embarrassing, with some COVID and lockdown comments that were just bullshit.

I’ve been following his “election forecast” for a few days and his commentary is always along these lines:

Harris polls above Trump: “Harris has a feeble lead and might not hold for much longer – it definitely doesn’t look too good for the future”

Trump polls above Harris: “Trump is holding strong and it’s unlikely Harris can retake the lead unless something crazy happens”

1) He’s selling a book.
2) The book reveals something that looks suspiciously like a gambling problem.
3) After he lost his last job in a period when he was gambling $ thousands/mo, he was hired by a Peter Thiel venture to a role that has the ability to impact gambling outcomes.

Oh shit. If he’s been gambling on election outcomes — and helping others who may also do the same — everything he’s written about elections could be skewed by that lens.

As an example, Brexit may have been set up for short sales of the pound sterling. Nigel Farage certainly looked happy about the pound’s crash.

What are the chances Bannon encouraged Thiel to hire Silver? They could be attempting to set up short sales but using our lives.


Here’s a piece from Slate on Polymarkets activities

https://slate.com/technology/2024/08/polymarket-nate-silver-prediction-markets-gambling.html

I don’t think it should do anything to allay your general concerns as to the corrupting effect of gambling on politics and elections, but it does seem to be a different sort of operation to the Farage Brexit night manipulation of the value of the £ on financial markets which I know you are very familiar with having discussed it at some depth on a previous thread.


Polymarket is the obvious application but did Silver get hired in the first place because 1) he had a track record, and/or 2) Bannon, a former fund manager with ties to Farage, either knew about the connection or saw the opportunity Silver offered and promoted him to Thiel-Polymarket?

If it’s successful once they do it again. Brexit was successful and made somebody some bank. Why wouldn’t they do it again.

And now we should be asking ourselves if this has also shaped news media — are outlets not only influenced by oddsmakers in their coverage by quoting them without caveats or research, but are the managers or the news business invested in betting because their old business model is unsuccessful? This is what “Neutron Jack” Welch did at GE in buying NBC; Karl Rove encouraged him to buy NBC through GE to shape tax policy affecting GE. Are news media invested in any businesses which are based on predictive markets?