Nate Silver, a pioneer in the field of data journalism, spoke in two Book Fest panels about his career. 

Shaking it up: AI, social media, legacy media, the ‘new’ news  

On Friday, Nate Silver was joined by best-selling author Ken Auletta, former The New York Times Executive Editor Dean Baquet and MSNBC political analyst Molly Jung-Fast for a discussion on how artificial intelligence and social media are transforming the way media is consumed.  

On the edge: The art of risking everything 

On Saturday, Silver discussed his work and career with moderator Rajiv Shah, president of The Rockefeller Foundation.  

After graduating from the University of Chicago in 2000, Silver found a job in consulting but soon turned to online poker. 

“[I] took a consulting job I didn’t really like [and] was pretty bored at that,” Silver said. “I started playing poker on the internet. One thing led to another, and I was making a lot more from poker than I was from my consulting job.”  

However, after U.S. Congress passed a law to restrict online poker, Silver became much more aware of politics. In 2008, Silver founded FiveThirtyEight, a website focused on data-driven forecasting of elections.  

During the 2016 election, FiveThirtyEight predicted a 71% chance of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton winning and a 21% chance of President Donald Trump winning. Many criticized his model’s prediction as wrong.  

“People think … if you’re a forecaster you’re supposed to give definitive predictions of things. That’s not how I do forecasting,” Silver said. “I know the world is intrinsically probabilistic. What I do think is that we have to have humility when we’re trying to understand the world how much it changes.”  

Shah summarized the public’s reactions to FiveThirtyEight’s prediction: “[some] said, ‘Oh, you were wrong,’ versus people who understood that the probabilistic model allows you to bet on your ratios and actually do extraordinarily well on the same exact moment [with the] same exact data.” 

Silver groups these two reactions into two categories: “the Village” and “the River.” In Silver’s book “On the Edge: The Art of Risking Everything” defines “the Village” as the professional expert class that tends to be competent and risk-averse.  

“‘The Village’ is the east coast establishment. Basically, it’s The New York Times. It’s Harvard University,” Silver said. “You see some sense [that] people are afraid to make choices in ‘the Village.’ They want to prioritize everything. As a result, there’s nothing.” 

In contrast, people in ‘the River’ embrace risk and are very analytical and competitive.  

“Silicon Valley is part of ‘the River.’ Wall Street is a part of ‘the River.’ Poker is a part of the ‘the River.’ Sports betting, crypto, all these things,” Silver said.  

By embracing risk, people in “the River” are able to navigate and dominate modern life.  

In an interview, Silver discussed his experience in data journalism.  

As a political data analyst, Silver spoke about the difficulties of dealing with evolving data sets. 

“The system is always changing and … in politics, things that might have been true about elections 40 years ago are less true now,” Silver said. “Any data describing human beings is going to evolve.” 

Silver also discussed changing public trust and reliance on data.  

“People are less trustworthy of every American institution except for the military, ironically, and that extends to distrust of science and distrust of data,” Silver said, “Polls have had mediocre, inconsistent accuracy in recent elections, which doesn’t help perception, certainly. One thing I try to do is emphasize that there is a margin of error in these polls. It’s bigger than people assume a lot of the time.” 

Artificial intelligence has also proven to be an asset to maximize productivity in the journalism industry. 

“I recently built some models for college basketball. It probably saved me 20% of my time. And that’s quite valuable to be 20% more productive,” Silver said. “I think the world’s going to change very rapidly, and that’s exciting for journalism. I mean, newsrooms should embrace it to become more productive, because it’s an industry where the margins are thin, and if you’re not doing it, your competitors will.” 

Sophia Finkbeiner contributed to the reporting of this story.