Nate Silver demonstrates how not to do book promotion

Election forecaster and statistics pundit Nate Silver has a new book out. It’s called On the Edge: The Art of Risking Everything and it’s billed as an investigation of “the River,” the “community of like-minded people whose mastery of risk allows them to shape–and dominate–so much of modern life.”

Like any author, Silver and his publicists are pursuing media opportunities. He’s got interviews and book reviews in all the usual places. In the New York Times alone he has a book review, an interview, and a podcast.

The interview is a mess. And it’s instructive for any author to see how a person so used to giving an expert opinion has failed to capitalize on an opportunity to promote his ideas.

Some principles for book promotion

The hard part of nonfiction book promotion is securing all the opportunities for visibility. That’s why you’re better off hiring a publicity firm to do that, if you can afford it.

But once you or your publicists have secured the placement, you have to keep in mind why you are doing this. That means following these principles:

1. Whenever you can, refer to the ideas in the book. The book is (presumably) about something new and interesting, and it is your job to make sure the reader knows about that.
2. Mention the book title. Once is enough, anything else is overkill.
3. Pick a lane. If you are an unbiased researcher, represent yourself in an unbiased way. If you are partisan for a particular person or point of view, be enthusiastic about that person or point of view. But you don’t get to be both.
4. Communicate clearly and briefly. These opportunities are awesome, because you can say pretty much anything you want. But they are not unlimited. You need to get really good at deliver your knowledge in short, pithy, easily understood sound bites, plus stories and stats that people will remember. Don’t ramble.

Nate Silver violated every one of these principles

Let’s take a look at some excerpts from Nate’s rambling, off-point, and incomprehensible interview with the Times‘ Ezra Klein (gift link). And I promise, I am not taking these out of context, they’re no more effective in the context of the whole interview. The bold text are Klein’s questions, the rest are Silver’s answers.

The last I looked, your model has Kamala Harris winning the election at around 52 percent — it might be a little different today. But this has been an unusual election. How much stock do you put in your model right now?

I think the model is balancing these different factors pretty well. There are some things you could argue are favorable to Harris, one of which is that, for the past few weeks, we’ve been in what the model thinks is supposed to be the convention bounce period for Republicans. Typically you poll pretty well after your convention; there’s the afterglow of the new nomination and things like that — the afterglow of the V.P. pick, too. And Kamala Harris kind of stomped on Donald Trump’s news cycle. So maybe it’s an overly favorable assumption for Harris. . . . At the same time, her momentum has been pretty good, which usually I dismiss, but we don’t really know what the base line is here. Hillary Clinton, who was, I think, kind of a terrible candidate, won the popular vote by two points. . . .

A terrible start. First, he’s talking about the geeky details of his election model, which has nothing to do with his book and isn’t of interest except to other modeling geeks. He could easily have pivoted that answer to talk about models and risk, which is the topic of his book. Second, he torpedoes his own expertise with “maybe it’s an overly favorable assumption for Harris.” And third, he undermines his objectivity by calling Hillary Clinton a terrible candidate. (Since I’m sure I’ll get lots of comments on this . . . the point is not whether Clinton was or was not a good candidate. The point is that Silver, who is supposed to be an unbiased analyst, shouldn’t be making broad criticisms of candidates as good or “terrible.”)

My read of you is that somewhat over the 2016 election, then specifically over the pandemic — and your experience with online liberalism in the pandemic — you became much more disillusioned with the people who once felt to you like your group, your coalition, your tribe. . .

. . . I thought a lot of the liberal and centrist news media kind of were in denial about their own role in the “but her email” stuff and then picked scapegoats for Trump’s victory that were not the real reasons that he won. . . And the discussion over the polls in 2016, where there was some revisionist history. The polls actually showed a pretty close race — we had Trump with a 30 percent chance. And it was the conventional wisdom that assumed he was dead in the water.

My sense was that you ended up in a lot of fights on Twitter with liberals who had a much lower risk tolerance than you did. You began to see habits of what you call “the village.”

Yeah, and that’s been a term that’s been used by others. But the village is basically media, politics, government, the progressive establishment, The New York Times, Harvard University ——

The establishment, “the regime.”

Yeah.

Klein offers the bait: a chance for Silver to defend himself against the media. And Silver, unwisely, takes it! Now he’s railing against the “liberal and centrist media.” Is that going to sell books by a supposedly unbiased pundit? No.

You’ve also called it the indigo blob in different ways. You began to see it as a set of aligned cognitive tendencies that you disagreed with. What were they?

So one of them is the failure to do what I call decoupling. It’s not my term. Decoupling is the act of separating an issue from the context. The example I gave in the book is that if you’re able to say, “I abhor the Chick-fil-A’s C.E.O.’s position on gay marriage” — I don’t know if it’s changed or not, but he was anti-gay marriage at least for some period of time — “but they make a really delicious chicken sandwich.” That’s decoupling. Or, you can say, you know, Michael Jackson, Woody Allen, separate the art from the artist kind of thing. That tendency goes against the tendency on the progressive left to care a lot about the identity of the speaker, in terms of racial or gender identity and in terms of their credentials.

In this other world that I call “the river,” the kind of gambling, risk-taking world, all that matters is that you’re right. It doesn’t matter who you are; it matters that you’re right and you’re able to prove it or bet on it in some way.

And that’s very against the kind of credentialism that you have within the progressive Democratic left, which I also call the “indigo blob” because it’s a fusion of purple and blue. There’s not a clear separation between the nonpartisan centrist media and the left-leaning progressive media rooting for Democrats. Different parts of The New York Times have both those functions.

And as someone who’s more on the nonpartisan side — even though, again, I would prefer to see Kamala Harris than Donald Trump — I think people are exploiting the trust that institutions have earned for political gain.

Finally, something about the book that sounds interesting. The idea of decoupling what you want to happen from what is likely to happen is one of the book’s central ideas, and he finally gets to talk about it. But he’s missed a chance to define what “the river” is and why he calls it that. Of course, then he ends up — in a single sentence — saying both that he’s nonpartisan and that he’d prefer Harris over Trump. You can’t really say “I’m nonpartisan and I’m partisan” and get anyone to trust you after that.

What you seem to be doing in the book is making an interesting cut in society between people with different forms of risk tolerance and thinking about risk. And you wrote something that caught my eye: “Covid made those risk preferences public, worn on our proverbial sleeves and our literal faces.” And you go on to say, “People are becoming more bifurcated in their risk tolerance and that this affects everything from who we hang out with to how we vote.” Tell me about both sides of that, the way that it made risk tolerance visible, and how risk tolerance is becoming a deeper cleavage in society.

On the one hand, there are lots of signs that risk tolerance is going down, among young people in particular. They’re smoking less, drinking less, doing fewer drugs, having less sex — a different type of risk tolerance. They are less willing to defend free speech norms if it potentially would cause injury to someone. Free speech is kind of a pro-risk take in some ways because speech can cause effects, of course.

On the other hand, you have various booms and busts in crypto. You have Las Vegas bringing in record revenue. You have record revenue in sports betting. You have the C.E.O. of OpenAI saying, yeah, this might destroy the universe, but it’s a good gamble to take. You have FTX and all this stuff.

And so it just seems to me we are in a world now where institutions are less trusted. And some people respond to that by saying, OK, I make my own rules now, and this is great and I have lots of agency. And some respond by withdrawing into an online world or clinging on to beliefs and experts that have lost their credibility or just by becoming more risk averse.

I’ve quoted this part in full because it is central to the book. And he explains it reasonably well. Of course, that’s after he’s rambled about other crap for half the interview. He should have pivoted to this in the first couple of questions, because a lot of people lose interest and don’t read the full interview.

There’s a bias in the world you’re describing — an aesthetic around talking in probabilities. I see this a lot in Silicon Valley. I would call it faux Bayesian reasoning, where they’re given some probability, but they have no reason to base the probability. And it makes you sound much more precise. It makes you sound like you know what you’re talking about. . . .

There’s two things here. One is there is a jargon, where there’re just a lot of shared cultural norms and unspoken discursive tendencies. It’s just the way we communicate, I think, in the river. But also, it’s really easy to build bad models. A model is supposed to describe something in the real world, and if you lose sight of the real world and it fails to describe the real world, then it’s the model’s fault and your fault for building the model, and not the real world’s fault. And that’s a lesson that people, I think, have a lot of trouble learning.

I’d love to hear more about this. Too bad he’s not able to explain it well — which as an expert, is part of his job.

If these guys [Silicon Valley VCs and entrepreneurs] seem to be so good at making bets, what are they missing in politics?

Both the river and the village are groups of elites. And, ironically, I think both groups’ critiques of one another are kind of true.

They [the river] can be epistemic trespassers, but they are not very data driven when it comes to politics. . . . But no, I mean, these guys often are pretty dumb about politics. 

Hmm. You’ve got “the river” and “the village” which don’t make sense without a lot of missing context. Then “epistemic” — do you know what that means without looking it up? And finally, “these guys are often pretty dumb about politics” which is hardly pointed and cogent analysis. Taken together, a beautifully teed up softball question, followed by a muffed opportunity to talk about the ideas in the book about risk.

Look, in some ways, these V.C.s are obviously incredibly deeply flawed people. So why do they succeed despite that? I think because the idea of having a longer time horizon, No. 1, and being willing to make these positive expected value, high-risk, but very high upside bets and gathering a portfolio of them repeatedly and making enough of these bets that you effectively do hedge your risk, right? Those two ideas are so good that it makes up for the fact that these guys often have terrible judgment and are kind of vainglorious assholes, half of them, right? They’re interesting people, too, and I’m happy the book is able to present a complete journalistic portrait of some of them.

This answer was in response to a completely different question that has nothing to do with V.C.’s. But Silver finally gets to an interesting idea from the book and mentions the book (although not by name). Yes, we have a bit of gratuitous insulting language, which undermines his objectivity, but at least it’s fun. Unfortunately this gem is buried near the end of the interview.

Harris ended up choosing Tim Walz, the governor of Minnesota, as her V.P. pick. You made a case that it should have been Josh Shapiro. Why?

Pennsylvania, No. 1. There’s about a 4 percent chance in our model that Harris will lose the election because of Pennsylvania.

If you’re a probabilist, a 4 percent chance — because campaigns often don’t make a difference. If we go into a recession in the third quarter, then Harris will probably lose through no fault of her own. But in the worlds where campaign strategy can make a difference, then the V.P. being from Pennsylvania is a reasonably big upgrade. And the fact that he has demonstrated his popularity with this very diverse state that’s kind of a microcosm of the U.S. as a whole, and he’s 15 points above water approval-wise, that’s pretty powerful information to work with.

Actual nonpartisan analysis. Imagine how much more effective this kind of answer would be if Silver had not undermined his credibility and objectivity earlier in the interview.

I want to end on a part of your book I found really interesting, which is about the physical experience of risk in gambling but in other things, too. You talk about pain tolerance, you talk about how the body feels when you’re behind on a hand and you’re losing your chips. You’ve talked about being on tilt. But I see it in politics, too. There is a physical question that comes into the decisions you make. Tell me a bit about how you think about this relationship between the body and the ability to act under pressure to make intuitive decisions in moments of very high stress.

Human beings have tens of thousands of years of evolutionary pressure, which is inclined to respond in a heightened way to moments that are high stakes, that are high stress moments. Your body will know when you’re playing a $100, $200 game where it really matters. You will just know. You’ll experience that stress. Even if you suppress it consciously, it will still affect the way that you’re literally ingesting your five senses. So if your heart rate goes up, that has discernible effects. But actually your body’s providing you with more information. You’re taking in more in these short bursts of time. People who can master that zone — and I use the term zone intentionally because it’s very related to being in the zone, like Michael Jordan used to talk about — learning to master that and relish that is a very powerful skill because you are experiencing physical stress whether you want to or not.

Whoah, another interesting idea. Buried at the end.

Learn from this

You can work with your publicist to get prepared for interviews. I learned a lot from Jon Symons at Forrester when I was doing press hits and interviews as an analyst. When I went on “60 Minutes” I didn’t want to blow it, and Jon and I rehearsed to make sure I was ready to do my job effectively, which I did. (I was sitting across from the attack dog Mike Wallace in a context where his people are in control of how things are edited. Silver was in an interview where he could say whatever he wanted and have it recorded and transcribed. Blowing that softball opportunity was a huge waste.)

Here are some other things you should do.

Prepare punchy “set piece” answers that refer to the book.

Don’t just be smart, be smart in ways that are relevant in the context of the book launch.

If you’re supposed to an nonpartisan expert, don’t be glib about your partisan preferences. You’re allowed to have them. But every moment that you indulge yourself by talking about them, you undermine your expertise.

Silver’s been in the public eye for more than a decade. He spent a lot of time on this book. He really should have taken this softball opportunity and exploited the hell out of it.

You can certainly do better than him. So don’t waste your opportunities.