Pushkin, Hey, Risky Business listeners.

This weekend, Nate and I took a break from the World Series of Poker to go to the Aspen Ideas Festival.

Sunday night, we got to tape a live episode of the Risky Business podcast and we're so happy to share that with you today.

We hope you enjoy it.

Welcome back to Risky Business, a show about making better decisions.

I'm Maria Kondakova.

And I'm Nate Silver.

So today on the show, we're going to be starting with a little bit of poker.

So Nate and I are both here from lovely Las Vegas because it is currently the middle of the World Series of Poker, but we love Aspen and the Aspen Ideas Festival so much that we're taking time off to be here.

With only one straight days of poker, we can spare one day for the Aspen Night Festivals.

We're going to be talking about a recent controversy at the World Series of Poker and what happened there.

But after that we're going to be getting into something much metior.

Yeah, I think the election of around.

I'm Donnie in New York or not, excuse me, The nomination he's still has to win.

The general election is one of the most interesting and seismic events in American politics, at least since the election, you know, one of the most successful opportunities for like a explicitly socialist left wing candidate to Governess said, it's actually very pro financed.

New York is not left in the way that Portland is or Espen might be, or things like us.

We're going to talk about both the strategy behind rank choice voting and how that might have affected things, but also just you know, a big political moment, how this might affect the party's decisions going forward.

And after that we will play a little game called how likely is It where we will test our knowledge and your knowledge of probabilistic thinking.

So let's get into it, Nate.

Yeah, So, first of all, we have a controversy at the World Series of Poker last week was one of the biggest tournaments of the summer.

It's called the millionaire Maker because first place is always guaranteed to be at least a million dollars.

This was a record breaking millionaire Maker, so second place was also over a million dollars.

This was complicated by the fact that there was also a promotion being run by a rival brand, the World Poker Tour, which one of the two players who ended up getting heads up, which is one of the final two players, was eligible for which meant that if he won the tournament, and only if he won the bracelet, he would get an extra million dollars.

So think about for a second, right, in the context of decision making, in the context of incentives exactly, incentives matter.

What that does they get heads up?

So two people left, only one.

Time wines final feo.

Happens to be the guy who can win this additional million dollar bonus on top of the million dollars has already won.

Yes, Unfortunately, this guy has a chip deficit of nine to one.

So that means that the other player, right, the one who is not eligible for the million dollars, has him out chipped nine times.

So what that means is that usually nine times out of ten, that guy's going to win the tournament.

And what happens to the million dollar bonus, It disappears incentives matter.

So what ended up happening was a very strange heads up match that looked an awful lot.

This is just allegations, you know, nothing proven, an awful lot like collusion.

There was a lleged chip dumping where one of the players dumped chips to the other players and made what was supposed to be an incredibly competitive, televised by the way this was all televised match into something that looked very strange into people outside of poker.

They were like, what in the world was going on?

The player who had the million dollar incentive won the bracelet, won the tournament, and they are now currently both under investigation.

Yeah.

No, I mean there are a couple of themes here.

I mean one is kind of how so it's not just that the tournament is televised, it's that in televised poker, the audience gets to see the player's private cards.

Right, So to think that you could have.

This live streamed on TV and everybody can like see the hands face up, basically accept the two opponents that's taped to lay fifteen minutes.

Right, If one player what's his name, Jesse, Jesse, If Jesse had been way ahead.

Then maybe, like you know what, maybe we're gonna be a little loose.

But instead, every single decision he plays as though he has knowledge of what his opponent has.

Right.

Almost that exception to the point where the hosts are commenting on the real time.

If you go and look at computers, computers now have solved poker at least heads up pick a poke in particular to a high degree.

These are all plays that are done ero percent of the time in op and we'll play that are done almost your percent of the time by two very experienced players.

Right, things like folding a pair to a tiny bit, which heads up poker.

It's hard to make a hand in poker.

You're never supposed to do that.

And so now and people are torn.

Right.

There are people who say, well, they didn't hurt anyone because they were heads up, right, so it's not like they took chips from a third player.

Now, I'm writing a book right now about cheating in games, and so this is something that kind of I've thought about a lot.

And on the one hand, I am sympathetic a little bit to that argument because a lot of the worst cheaters and a lot of the big cheating things in games, it hurts other people, right, it hurts other players.

You're taking away equity from other players.

If we assume that they were playing completely above board up until this point, then no one else was hurt.

However, However, there is another consideration here.

Right.

So one of the things that I am a huge proponent on, and we've talked about this on the show, is sportsmen.

Right.

There are two concepts, gamesmanship and sportsmanship.

Gamesmanship is you know I'm going to win, and you know, I don't care how I get there, right, Like, I will take every single edge I can possibly take because I want to get there.

Sportsmanship is doing it in kind of a the spirit of the game, right, the spirit of the sport, in a to use an old school term, in a gentlemanly fashion, right, that you actually respect the game you're playing.

When you're looking at a televised competition that's representing the game and people are watching it and expecting something to instead of competition, instead of an actual match, to give people, you know, chip dumbing or whatever it is, that goes against the spirit of the game, and that is something.

Also it also.

Lates the rules, Like the first rule of poker is that one player to a hand.

It's an individual game, not a team game.

Right, So that fundamental precept of poker is violated.

It does, and you know, I was thinking about it in kind of broader games.

Like imagine if you were watching a tennis match, right, that's also a heads up match, a player one against the other, and it became clear that someone was throwing the match, and that's happened, right.

Tennis is actually one of the sports where cheating is.

There's a lot of it going on, and if you watch that, you feel cheated as a spectator and as a lover of the game, you kind of feel like something was taken away from you.

So I can understand.

And by the way, I really like Jesse, like the player who ended up winning.

He's sweet and sweet, wonderful guy.

But you have to be careful, right, if you like someone, it doesn't mean that what they did know in the rest.

It's just kind of a theme that will tie this into kind of larger themes at this conference.

So I not just straddle back and forth being poker and like the real world, but like I am involved in like lots of small, tight knit communities, right, I'm not an effective out your wist, But I know a lot of people who describe themselves that way, right, I know, like the sports analytics nerds, I know people who work in politics and politics analytics nerds right, and like over and over again, people are very short sighted about the weird by normal person standards, norms and their small communities and don't think about what happens when this kind of translates to the outside world that hey, actually there's such a thing as like the state of Nevada has gaming regulations.

If there's no regularity, are actually obligated to report that?

Or the fact that, okay, why are we having this world series poker?

It's bigger every year, despite the tariffs and despite various headwinds, writing their setting record fields again this year.

Well where do the players come from?

Right?

They come from like watching poker on TV or on video and saying that would be extremely fun if one day I were to make a final table and I've done it, you know, I have one time finished second place an event like this, right, you know, it's a thrill of a lifetime.

But like to undermine that and to do it in this way that like, I don't know, I think it a narrowness of like perspective.

It does, it does, and I do think that.

You know, when you're even talking about game theory, there's short term and there's a long term, and you need to be, you know, no matter what, you need to have the long term in mind and the long term health of the game and of how it's perceived.

And on that note, Nate, do you want to switch gears and go a little bit into the game theory of a different arena of politics.

So we are both New Yorkers and we just had a Democratic primary that is national news.

That is rare for a primary, even in New York, but we had a very unexpected winner of the primary and ar on mom Donnie showing a lot of shifts in the Democratic Party, the Democratic Party base, and the potential the game theory for the Democratic Party going forward.

This is one kind of potential blueprint should they choose to accept it.

So one amazing thing is that younger voters actually turned out at a higher rate than older voters in a selection, which basically never happens in elections anywhere.

Right, So he spoke very much the vernacular of vertical video and kind of how young people think about in general.

He's a you know, charismatic guy that's kind of a New York archetype of this kind of multi ethnic hustler type, but friendly guy and obviously a smart ambitious guy.

Right, It's like a type we recognize, I think have some appreciation for in New York.

He's a problem member the Democratic Socialist of America.

During the campaign emphasized affordability, cost of living, had tangible proposals on like free buses, rent freezes for certain types of buildings, right, city owned grocery stores, thirty dollars minimum wage.

Right, So tangible focused on that, not culture worse stuff.

And he winds up beating former governor and Dupomo, who in a terrible campaign but was very complacent.

And I think this is a kind of a generational moment.

I think it is, and I think it's very interesting to see that Momdani was actually able to get the voters who turned to Trump during the presidential election, that demographic to actually come out and vote for the Democrats.

And there are you know, videos from him campaigning where he actually manages to talk to kind of that exact demographic that you know, voted for not just a different type of Democrat, but for Republicans in the presidential election.

Yeah, I mean it's a little bit because you know, so we had comparatively high turnout about a million, probably one point oh five million, right.

Yeah, this was our high start.

But there are eight.

Million people in New York City of whom three point three to three point four million are registered Democrats, right, so you're still only getting twenty five or thirty percent of the electorate.

With that said, very broad based.

Right, He won precincts even in Staten Island, which is kind of cuomo home turf.

Not all of them, but some of them.

Right.

You know, Cuomo wins the Central Parkies, but you go even a couple of blocks into the Upper east Side, one of the more conserve neighborhoods, he started some mom don Aid precincts right there.

So, you know, a very impressive performance.

And of course we will be accused as the New Yorkers are being provincial.

But New York is so big and so diverse, right that not in the same proportions, But we have like lots of Conservatives in New York are out number by liberals.

We have lots of conservatives, right, We have every imaginable ethnic group and slice of racial demographic right.

There are lots of working class people in New York.

He mostly did well among the kind of upper middle class, you know, kind of white people.

Basically, but there are those two, right, and did well enough?

This is important, did well enough among the other groups, right, because sometimes can they say, Okay, well, we're not going to win any you know Democrats, Right, We're not going to win any working class white men, so just write them off, treat them as a ero, when actually, like getting thirty percent of working class non college men as opposed to twenty percent makes a big deal.

Right, Trump in this past election got something like eighteen to twenty percent of the black vote, which is a significant minority.

Right.

Mitt Romney got four percent against Barack Obama in twenty twelve.

Right, So going from four percent to twenty percent the population, you can do that math, right, that's quite a big swing.

Actually, yeah it is, mate.

Do you actually think that the election was at all affected by the fact that this was the second primary where ranked choice voting was actually in use, because that was something that people really were, you know, emphasizing during the.

Candidate You guys know what rank choice voting or run off?

Okay everyone.

Festival, and we covered it for our listeners on the pod last week.

So I mean, okay, so ranked choice voting means you have five choices, you rank your choices.

If your first choice candidate is not one of the top two candidates, then your choice gets moved to your next ranked candidate, and so on down the line.

Yeah, so Zoran seemed to understand this and Cuomo did not, yes one thing.

He formed alliances with other candidates, right, especially Brad Lander, the third place candidate.

Now, from a game theory standpoint, I don't think this is necessarily rational for Brad Lander, because like, if you're in third place and the other guy's in second place or maybe a first place, right, you don't necessarily want to help him out, right, But I think Brad Lander hates Andrew Cuomo's guts, has a lot of people do in New York and so and so there was that surround a very positive campaign and a substantive campaign, which is a change from how campaigns are often run.

And I do think, like not uniquely the left in the United States.

I mean, look at Trump also.

In NAGA, right, but like there often is a lot of negativity, a lot of anxiety, right, and that wasn't what he was doing, right.

He was a smart, substantive guy, you know, who literally walked the entire length of Manhattan, like the last day before the campaign wearing a suit, and so like did every podcast in the world.

I think I've done.

I've done like six podcasts in the day before.

I think Zorn probably beat that record, but he very much earned it, and Cuomo was pure negative.

We do have a general election still where Cuomo is running again, right, I don't know if that.

And so is Sarah Adams maybe and Eric.

Adams and come a mirror defective from your practic party friendly with Trump.

Right, you also have the proper Republican nominee, Curtis Sliwa, who is a guy who founded The Guardian Angels and owns like fifty six cats or something like that.

So yeah, yeah, So I'm also interested, you know, from from the point of view of like the game theory of the Democratic Party.

Right, we have this election which seems like an anomaly but might not be, and a lot of the Democratic establishment don't want to embrace Zora Mom Donnie right there.

They think that he is, you know, too fringe, right, that he is too radical, that some of his ideas are are too kind of too out there, and that they want to go safer, They want to go more middle of the road, which is what they were saying during the presidential election that they lost.

Yeah, it's kind of it's kind of hard to be like an exciting centrist is part of the problem.

You know, I don't know if Mayor Pete is exciting.

I guess he's a well spoken person, for example.

But like, sometimes more the energy comes from the left.

Again, like to me, and look, I'm a University of Chicago economics major.

I'm unapologetically kind of a neoliberal.

Right, it does seem to me like, look, the left has not had the economic left has not had a lot of power in the United States recently, right, And so I've become more sympathetics because I'm like, well, we haven't made those mistakes.

They will make mistakes, and it's very hard to govern a state like New York.

It's particularly hard to govern New York City because New York State controls the taxation policy, a lot of the budget and things like that.

They're always rivalries between Albany and and city Hall, right that without being different.

Yeah, absolutely, And I also wonder, you know, if mom Donnie does get elected.

Right, this is a big if.

Still right, we're we're i mean twenty five percent, but seventy five percent, as we know, is not one hundred percent, as we very well know.

So he but let's assume he gets elected.

It's going to also be a very interesting shift where kind of candidates like Mom Dannie have been, you know, the underdog right, and it's been kind of the the underdog story of someone who is kind of young and kind of more radical and has those ideas and wins despite the odds.

Now, what happens when you become the establishment right like that that underdog story shifts your incentives.

We were talking just now in poker about incentives.

Incentives matter in everything.

Your incentives shift, right, the things that you were able to promise suddenly you have to make coalitions with other you know, with lobbyists, with other ruling factions, with you know, you need to face the realities of power.

And so it's much easier to kind of be the idealist before you get elected.

And once you're once you the establishment, that changes and you change.

And so I'm going to be very very curious to see what happens and how that story kind of ends up shifting, and then what happens to the supporters kind of what all the downstream effects are going.

To be Yeah, you're registered in Nevada.

Now I am, Yeah, I'm in New York.

This is the rarer time when I have a general election vote in New York that could plausibly matter.

And you know, people like me who might be kind of on vaguely the center of the culturally center left and economically centered something right, A lot of people are are concerned about him, but like, to me, it's a bit like if you're picking a founder for a startup, right, you're kind of going more off like the rod intelligence and talent and work ethic, maybe more than like the particular program or platform, right, or at least it's kind of like what I'm telling myself potentially, And the fact that he's a lot of dexterity in talking about policy, right, He went on, like the Odds odd Lots podcast, which is Joe Wisenthal and Tracy Alloway, which is kind of in the same family as Risky Business, right, and like talking a lot of wankery about policy and things like that, Right, And like I like politicians who who are elected officials and are responsive to.

Some degree to fulblic opinion.

I think it's how democracy should should function, right, and he can say here are my priors.

I'll stay for the working class.

I don't like capitalism all that much.

Right, but he's not proposing anything too radical and like and it's not angry.

You know, Bernie Sanders understood that.

Right.

The one moment when the Sanders campaign got a little bit angry was toward toward twenty twenty when they won the first couple of primaries and they were instead of bending the knee to the Timparty Party.

Remember going to a rally in Nevada, Bernie wound up winning basically three states in a row.

Iowa was disputed between him and their pete, So we won't get into that, right, but two and a half out of three, right, and he gave species that were like, yeah, well screwed you Democrats establishment, right now, you have to kiss my ring.

And there they still had leverage, right, they still had leverage.

They had the leverage to have Jim Clyburn and Amy club Ashar Mayor Repete everybody else rally behind.

Joe Biden successfully for one term.

You know, whether that was a good decision of a long run or not, we'll be I think debated, but like, but yeah, you don't want to like rub it in someone's face when they still have chips on the table, so to speak, and so and so, you know, it would behooves around to understand there's still a losible.

We're gona talk about what these probabilities mean.

Twenty five percent is a real possibility of losing, right, and so he would be mindful to to keep up the strategy that he had in the in the in the.

Primary, and uh mindful to h if he gets selected to try to uh keep up the same strategy if you want.

It's a really it's a really hard it's hard.

It's a really hard job.

It is it's an incredibly hard job.

You can probably do better than narrow dams, right, But it's a it's a that's.

A it's it is.

It's it is an incredibly hard job.

And I think we do need to remember that.

Nate, Do you have any other kind of final thoughts on the election or should we talk probabilities more generally?

No, again, I kind of said at the top, I do think that like the fact that Cuomo called in all the cavalry right, he called him to Clinton to endorse him.

He called him like a Bloomberg called him Jim Clyburn.

Every black group, Jewish group, Italian group, got all the ethnic groups in New York, right, lots and lots and lots of unions, right, And that's how you used to win in machine cities, machine states, that's how you win elections.

And like and like Cuomo, Cuomo.

Kind of actually got the numbers that ordinarily would win a New York mayoral race, right since two thousand and one, he's the second highest total of votes.

But like Mom, Donnie, reached into new parts of the electorate, not totally new.

These are people who vote in presidential primaries and things like that.

But this is the case where it turnout did matter quite a bit in a race where maybe a third of Democrats turn out if you're lucky, maybe twenty five percent.

Then and getting people excited, being I mean, being interesting.

So many politicians are either psychopaths or boring, right, like ninety four of one hundred US Saturday either psychopaths, boring or both.

Yeah, yeah, no, And a lot a lot can be said for being nice and having energy and actually being excited about the job you're going to do, even though it's going to be a really really hard job, and I think that's tough, right to show up every day with that kind of energy.

I mean, how many of you can walk the entire length of Manhattan and tape however many podcasts and I get.

Not in a suit though I'm a sweater, not in a suit.

I can do it in high heels.

Now, I kid, you're.

Gonna hear a quick break and then we'll be back.

We want to play a little game with you about probabilities.

We'll play it with each other first, but then we're going to involve you.

It's a game called how likely is it?

So how likely are certain probabilities?

So let's give you just a little bit of context behind this.

So back in nineteen fifty one March of nineteen fifty one, there was a CIA analyst whose name was Sherman Kent, and he filed a report on the probability of an invasion by of Yugoslavia in the year nineteen fifty one.

We all know how that turned out.

So how probable is it that the USSR is going to invade?

And he concluded in his report that it was a quote serious possibility.

So what did he mean by serious possibility?

In retrospect.

When he explained this, he thought it meant well, first of all, just think in your heads what you think it means, Nate, what do you think it mean?

Just you don't have to answer, Okay, So he thought it meant sixty five percent or higher.

So, right, more than sixty five percent.

Unfortunately, the person to whom he conveyed his report and his findings, who was a chairman of the policy Planning initiative, they had understood him to mean that it was a lot lower than that.

So in their minds, serious possibility was like, oh, twenty percent or maybe like a range from twenty to seventy eighty percent, certainly not sixty five percent or higher.

So there was a huge miscommunication which resulted in massive policy missteps.

Right, just because how serious a serious possibility was was not Well.

People are there were number match totobic right, you know at former thirty eight, no silver bulletin.

Right, we have an election model where we give you know, a probability is fundamentally defined, is a number between ero percent and one hundred percent.

Right, And a lot of times.

People use weaseled They're like, well, Nicklint, you had Hillary Clinton with a seventy one.

Percent chance of winning the election.

So you were wrong.

We have the semantics of that, right, But like, but you know, but you put a number there and people think it's like, you know, understand that that represents it bakes in the uncertainty in the model, the uncertainty in the real world.

Right.

If I were to say, I think, by the way, serious possibility to me implies like twenty percent.

Right, if I said that there's still a serious possibility Zaron could lose a general election, right, because you're not saying probability, You're saying, like, take this seriously, twenty.

Twenty se Yeah, Well, when you put it in that context, right, a serious possibility that Zar loses the election twenty five percent?

Right, Now, that sentence makes sense, which is why So when I was a grad student and studying decision making, one of the things that we talked about was how do you communicate risk?

Right?

How do you communicate probabilities to people?

And it's really really hard, and it's hard in all sorts of context.

Right, how do you communicate probabilities when it comes to things like global warming, right, or or elections or something like that, And people just do not understand probabilistic thinking.

As we've talked about on the show many many times, our brains just suck at probabilities and at what they mean.

Just by the way, why poker is so good because it actually forces you to learn what probability feels like viscerally, which is how the brain learns the best.

You know, I, for instance, you know no bad beat stories on the podcast or in real life, but I know how it feels to lose on day four of the main event of the World Series as a ninety eight point six percent favorite in a multi millionship pot.

It happens, right, It feels like it shouldn't because ninety eight point six percent feels like it should be one hundred percent.

But it's not.

Probabilities matter, and we're so so bad at them.

And yet something that you just said, Nate, which is absolutely crucial, is that we're number phobic.

When you tell people, you know what, the best way to communicate probability is, state the probability.

State the damn thing.

Put a number on it.

Actually say you know it's I think the probability is between ten percent and fifteen percent, and I am seventy five percent sure In this estimate.

Rights, be explicit about the language that you're using it.

I believe the IPCC the Global Climate reports.

Right, they will use language like very likely a lot.

But in the appendix you look it up and they say very likely means whatever it is ninety five percent or higher?

Right, nay?

How many people reading the report then go to the appendix.

To see see s report.

My whole family once gave each other the Iraq Study Group report for like Christmas or something.

It's that kind of that kind of family.

But no, but and then you know, look house this year, but no, look uh, because the apsode is people use this as weasel words.

Right, They're intentionally ambiguous to say later on, no, I was right, I was wrong, right, which is lame.

Right.

People don't get any better unless they feel the pain of, like of putting something which is in the public record and is accountable to some degree.

Obviously, you need like.

A large sample of predictions to be able to evaluate, you know, do do of your seventy percent probabilities?

Do seven out of ten come true in the long run?

Right, But you want to play a little bit of the game here, how likely is it?

Yeah, let's absolutely do it?

So the way that this game is going to work at first is I am going to tell you a phrase, Nate, and then you will tell me what percent probability you think that that phrase represents, and then I'll think of my answer as well, and if you guys want to play along, feel free to think of yours.

All right, So if I tell you almost certainly, what are you thinking?

Ninety five percent plus?

Okay, so almost certainly ninety five percent plus.

I was actually going to go a little bit lower and say ninety percent plus, just knowing that in this world basically nothing is certain.

And if we're at above ninety percent probability, like holy shit.

You know, as a gambler or as an investor, if I told you that you had an investment that had a ninety percent probability of succeeding, how many of you would take that investment?

And I hope, I hope most of you.

But and if I told you that you could take a gamble with a ninety percent probability of success.

Yeah, people are there gambling, right.

I mean, you'll learn in poke if you can get like a fifty four percent edge, yeah, it's pretty good.

It's amazing.

But I'm not saying that that means almost certain, but to me, like above ninety percent, given how much uncertainty and ambiguity there are in the world, so those are two different things, right.

Uncertainty is we're not quite sure what the probabilities are.

Ambiguity is we're not even quite sure kind of what the factors are.

We're not sure if our model is one hundred percent correct and is accounting for everything.

So given all of that, I would actually say, like above ninety percent would be almost certainly.

Do you I don't know if that makes you rethink your answer or not.

You know, I watched en f NBA playoff games where teams blue seventeen point leads and things like that in the fourth quarter, So like, I'm feeling I want the security of ninety five percent.

All right, you want the security of.

After playing poker for a few weeks.

Yeah, We're nothing is certain that I'm like, I want my almost certainly s at ninety five Right.

That makes that makes sense?

So what would you would you actually like what would you say for like a ninety plus or an eight?

Is there something that you is there a phrase that you would think more accurately.

Represents that very likely highly likely.

Huh interesting because I would think that very likely would be below ninety percent.

See, this is this is how, this is why this is ambiguous.

All right?

So I am going to give you another phrase.

If I said that something was unlikely to happen.

Yeah, I'd say unlikely or for that matter of the counterpart.

Likely is one of the worst and most ambiguous terms to use in that context, right, because literally it can mean depending on the context.

Anythink from like ero point zero ero ero percent one percent ero ero ero one to like forty nine percent.

Right, it's very ambiguous.

I would tend to think unlikely means twenty five or thirty percent, somewhere in the middle of the below fifty percent range.

What about you, Yeah, I was.

Going to be at around twenty five percent or below.

Right, Any of that is unlikely, and you know, we can start we can start kind of playing around with it a little bit with adjectives.

But I totally agree with you that likely.

What about likely?

By the way, would would you say likely is above above what percentage is likely?

Is it above fifty?

If feel like you're a little asymmetric like likely, I think you have to be sixty or so.

Right, Yeah, it is.

Asymmetric, possible or probable.

These ones are pretty bad, right, You want to do one more?

Yeah, let me let's do it all right?

So, how about if I actually add an adjective to unlikely and say highly unlikely.

Now, what are we talking now?

Ten percent or below?

I think it's kind of the counterpart to I don't know why.

I think it's in percent of blowing.

There was like ninety five percent.

I was about to say, why they asymmetry, so you said, you know, the just highly likely was ninety five I have still.

A large language model teasing out implicit contexts from the way these phrases are used in the real world.

I don't know what checchiput would say.

So highly unlikely, I would say it is interesting because I might actually be lower than you.

I might say, like below if it's highly unlikely, like below five percent, Like it's just you're telling me that it's almost certainly not going to happen to me.

Right, that like highly unlikely and almost certainly kind of go hand in hand.

But let's if you actually kind of go out in context a little bit with that.

Think about weather reports, which is something where we experience kind of that's one of these things where we do get probabilities, where we do get percentages, and we experience those on a daily basis.

Right, you, what what is your threshold, Nate for bringing an umbrella?

Like?

What's your an umbrella?

I find umbrella?

Okay, that was about this is true?

Why is umbrella technology not improved more?

Nate and I have walked together in New York City rainstorms where I'm like, do you want to share my umbrella?

He's like, I got my baseball cap.

I'm good.

But but you know, for people who are not like you and who actually care about rain, like, what's your threshold for bringing an umbrella?

Like for me, if it's like fifty percent chance of rain, I'm probably not going to bring it.

You know, if it's like above sixty, I'll probably probably bring an umbrella.

You know, it just it really just depends on what I'm doing.

And so you know that's but you think about those days when it was ninety percent chance of rain and it didn't rain.

Okay's great, let's get the audience.

Let's do it all right, one last one.

We're going to do it with you guys, and I'm gonna So I'm going to ask you to raise your hands.

So if I say something is possible, that's a secret password, right, yeah, possible, and you have to take one of the following ranges zero twenty five percent, twenty about to fifty fifteen, seventy five pcent five one hundred.

Right, if I have something is possible, raise your hand.

If you interpret that as zero to twenty five percent, okay, we have about a quarter about you're just twenty percent the hands up in the audience, right, yeah, quite a few hands.

I will say twenty five to fifty percent a little bit more, kind of solid.

It's kind of similar, but probably a little more.

Okay, how about fifty to seventy five and.

There are a handful of hands hands possible, that could be And how about seventy five percent or more one day?

So the way to average is like thirty six or something percent.

We're like doing we're doing science here, yeah, doing it on the fly.

Yeah, but people think it means anything from five percent to eighty percent, right if you ask people to write down individual guesses so like, so not very useful to have that, to have.

That for you.

No, No, it's really not because what you know, what do you even mean probbable likely?

Like it is?

You know, it's such a hedgeword.

And what we're trying to do is actually force you to be more precise in your probabilistic judgments, because precision matters, right, whether it's the precision of the USSR invading Yugoslavia or a gamble that you're taking out the poker table right out.

When it comes to like politics and things like that, political questions, like, people are also just often interpreting stuff in bad faith, right, Like I think that I think that when you say there's a third chance of rain and doesn't rain, people don't get as mad as when there's a third chance of Donald Trump winning and he wins, or things like that for example.

But like, but you know, politics makes people's brains misfire in various ways absolutely well.

As soon as there's personal motivation there, right, as soon as your identity is tied up in something like politics, all of a sudden, your ability to parse these things.

You start thinking in absolutes, which is how are our brains are programmed to think?

Right?

Ninety percent basically one hundred seventy is basically one hundred sixty five basically one hundred thirty basically ero.

Right.

We just let's at least.

Get sixty five, right, is certainly either fifty fifty ero, one hundred.

Let's at least get those middle ones right as a stepping stone to some more PI.

Yeah, and I think I think that the bottom line is that it's very difficult to communicate probabilities in plain language, and you do need to get people accustomed to having numbers associated with them, and one of the best ways of doing that is to try to figure out, Okay, what experience can I tie that to in their life that makes them understand what this actually means?

Right?

That percent is not ero?

I'm not way serious.

Yeah, no, teacher, kids, poker.

I've actually talked about this many times, and I actually think that that is one of the best ways that you can combat this.

And we'll be right back after this break.

Do you want to open it up to questions?

Yeah, I say it's extraordinarily likely that we're going to open it up to Q and A at this point.

So there are mic runners.

We can also point and shop, but yeah.

Okay, yeah, there are mic runners in the audience.

So raise your hand if you have a question.

Yep, there's one coming to you.

Thanks.

I studied statistics in graduate school and ended up in communications, and I think one of the things that confounds this problem is if somebody says to me, for example, climate change isn't caused by us, I would say, not believing myself that that's possible.

That's my opinion.

I know other people disagree, but in order to have a conversation, I validate their opinion and move on.

And that's standard operating procedure when you're trying to actually change minds of what you're saying is we're inaccurate and communicating.

The real probabilities.

But part of what's going on is that most of the conversation is about trying to find some middle ground.

So how do you separate those two uses?

Yeah, it just and this kind of gets into the conversation about Zoran earlier, right where he's going on podcasts where the audience might not be favably inclined to him.

And I've done this too, Like marketing my book, I talked to conserative audiences, liberal audiences, everything in between.

Right, And you're basically a politician, right, You're like you're trying to code switch back and forth.

You're trying to be empathetic to your audience, You're trying to find points of agreement in that disagreement.

Maybe more politicians should take that lesson.

I mean, look, I generally think that when scientific communicators try to like dumb things down too much, it's like quite the right term.

There's empathy, and there's there's empathy, there's dumbing down, and there's like kind of like skipping over the rough patches of the argument in a way.

They create like false certainty times, right, Like I generally believe that like treat the audience as being reasonably smart and sophisticated, right, I mean as poker players too, you know, I think we are naturally suspicious, right, And I think people can like people can tell I think when a politician is being inauthentic or when they're not being kind of communicated with fully forthrightly.

Right, Like I thought this was an issue at the beginning of the COVID pandemic.

We're changing advice about like masks and things like that, Right.

I think whenever people kind of like say, oh, the science has settled on this question, well, on some questions, it's settled on some questions that isn't right, and it's like often used as a cudgel where there is genuine uncertainty and so so yeah, I mean it's it's look, we wrestle with this every day journalists too.

But like, I'm air more on the side of like, you know, you can be empathetic in how you present something, and obviously, if you're in a kind of question like not everything you say in response, you're not going to correct any way.

Oh literally, you're wrong, you're wrong, but let me tell you something else.

Right, So I'm yeah, empathetic, but when it official sign of a communication, I think should aim more in the side of precision.

I think that I think that we are also not tolerant of ambiguity.

Right that it's much easier to win elections.

It's much easier to win over a crowd if you speak in absolutes, if you speak in certainties, and the person who says, you know, I'm really not sure about this, you know, they're here are the pros, here are the cons And who gives the more nuanced response is not the person who ends up getting ahead.

And so there's a fundamental mismatch between the need to communicate ambiguity and uncertainty and the fact that you know some things we just don't know, and that there are these kind of confidence intervals there, and the need to tell a story and tell a compelling story.

And this is something that you know, Nate, You and I have to struggle with us storytellers too.

I mean, we're communicators, we're journalists.

We make choices all the time when we write an article, when we write a book, how do we tell the story?

What story do we tell?

And you can't constantly.

I mean a book will be absolutely unreadable if every single paragraph is a caveat where you know, well, you know, you can also interpret it this way and this way and I'm not quite sure about this, right, you can't.

You can't work that way, and so you make choices all the time.

Of course, sometimes ambiguity is strategic, right, Like let's say Marie and I are on a double date with our respective spouses and then a third couple that we don't know, that a friend kind of set us with for a friend's day, and they're super fucking annoying and we hate their guts.

Right, you know, if I say something like Marie, what time did you say your flight was tomorrow morning?

Right?

Yeah, that's ambiguous.

What it really means is that let's gett's great.

And Nate and I have known each other for long enough that I would say, you know, it's at seven am, we really really have to go.

Yeah, so there are strategic uses of it.

Yeah, there are more questions back there.

I am a longtime listener, first time caller.

Wellco to the show.

Yeah, yes.

My question is how much do we do we think Zauron's win is the inter syncracies in New York City and him being a great candidate and Cuomo sucking, and how much is the political climate has changed in some way since the last election?

That is, I mean, that is such a good question, because the Cuomo sucking part of it is actually huge.

That sounds like that sounds like a silly statement, but I actually think that that is an idiosyncrasy of this election from a psychological standpoint, because never underestimate the power of people to band together and coalitions to actually stick together when there's one enemy, right, when there's a clear someone who no one wants to see, When all of a sudden, people who would never vote together, who would never kind of partners partner up.

And this is from a psychological stamp.

What you see that he both ran a bad campaign and kind of, to us an informal term, kind of like cock blocked all the other candidates in the field, right where all the money from hedge funders and people like that went to Cuomo.

And you saw a quotes when people were like big Cemo donors like I didn't really care about that much, but it seemed like that's what everyone was backing.

I'm not going to back the socialist right and so therefore and so yeah, you know, if you'd had a fully fledged campaign between Zoran and Brad Lander or something, or Adrian Adams, it might have been closer.

But he's a good can.

I mean, look a lot of times political analysts like me are left saying, yeah, the wins and losses are what matter, but for analyzing trends and close counts, right you know.

So you know, look, if he had lost seven point instead of won by seven points, I'd still say that was pretty impressive.

Right.

It might be a sign of change here.

It's a cleaner story, I think, But usually surprising outcomes are overdetermined, right, you know, it has to do with the changing of the guard generationally.

It has to do with like he kind of figured out the right formula for more left wing ideas.

It's not wilk culture stuff, right, it's affordability, it's working class people, things like that.

Right.

He's a very well presenting guy, right, who's very New York.

I think in some ways his mom was a filmmaker, and his visuals are all quite stunning and beautiful and cuomo.

So it's like four things coming together.

But he also won by enough margin where maybe only three of those things or two, and to have it to come together, we still have one probably.

Yeah.

And when things are over determined, by the way, we can't answer your question right, When things are over determined, you can't quite know what the crucial factors were.

So I think that the real answer to your question remains to be seen.

But it's a really interesting thing to try to disambiguate and try to see kind of how did we end up here?

And I think that this is an election that people will be looking back and doing some commentary on for many years.

So I want to ask political polls, so I think you know something about it.

So now I've heard the lecture on words.

And so if I see that one candidate has a forty two percent chance of winning and another candidate has a forty six percent chance, should I interpret that to say they both have low probability?

Or they have or I mean I guess, or is it so close?

Really doesn't matter?

Well, for one thing, people who work in polling or who report on pulling need to be clear about a probability versus a percent of the vote.

Right, If it's Trump forty six percent in say Texas, Harris forty two percent undecided, third party is the remaining whatever eighteen percent?

Right, like a four point lead.

How often does that translate into a win?

That's an empirical question, right, The answer might be something like seventy percent of the time.

Russia, And in New York, what were the polls saying before?

In New York?

No, the polls underestimated, I mean, had they had shown the race tightening a lot.

Some of the polls showed Zoran pulling ahead after ranked choice voting.

Almost none Maybee, with one exception, had him winning the first round outright, and none of them had him winning by like that wide margin.

Right, So this is what happens with polls is like in a New York race, they assume turnouts fairly low.

They're surveying the people that like always turn out in New York MARYORL races, who consideringly unlikely voters are twenty percent of electorate.

Right.

Cuomo got his numbers among that twenty percent, but then Zoran turned out people that never vote in mayoral elections in e York.

By the way, a lot of New York's are transplants from around the country, all around.

The world, right, so we don't have that like tie to local politics.

Right.

I'm a person covers politics, listen to New York.

I don't know that much about like New York politics, right, and it's very typical in some ways.

But he he broke through and became its cliche, but became viral in a way that you know, I guess pollsters were too conservative in their in their methods and missing and missing these voters.

We have time for one more question, hi.

Things I was just curious.

I know this is probably annoying, like too long in the future kind of question, but does Zorin's win at all change the probabilities that you think about candidates in twenty twenty eight for Democratic primary or I guess.

The general election too.

So with actually my former colleague at five thirty eight, Galen Druke, we did a Democratic twenty twenty eight primary draft, right or do it so it's like a draft, like a fancy football draft or something.

Galen got the first pick and the first candidate on my list was AOC.

I thought he'd take Josh Shapiro or someone and said he took AOC too, So it was mad about that.

But like we both thought, and this is before Zoran, that she was let me put this carefully, from talking about probabilities, right to say the most likely candidate might mean a fifteen percent chance.

Right, there's nobody in the field who is a clear front runner.

But we both thought that she was more luckily than any other candidate to become the nominee in twenty twenty eight, before before Mom Donnay came along, right, And again it's probably because like look Democrats, of all these retreads, right, the Clinton family, the Cuomo family, the Biden family.

I bet Jill will probably fantasize sometimes what if I become president?

Right, like House of Cards or something.

Right, I'm I think people are tired of all these families.

Right.

I remember seeing in twenty sixteen, I was in New Hampshire covering the race for five thirty eight in ABC News, Right, and like Hillary Clinton spoke to a group of like then at college, right, Franklin Pierce College or something like that.

Right, you know, the average age is twenty or something.

She's talking about like the Cold War, and like the students size are gleazing over they don't remember the Cold War, right, And now that was you know, was eight nine years ago now, right, And so like, look, I think I think it's a good thing to see.

I mean, Zaraan was literally half of like Cuomo's age.

Right, I think it's a good thing.

Mcrat parties about present and was how can everyone's so freaking old?

Right, I think it's a good thing.

Is is to you know, have cannates that are good on social media, are substantive.

I think she's a pretty canny and smart politician and shows some restraint at times.

So yeah, it does change my views a little bit.

Maria, do you have a take now?

I mean, this is one of the things that I was talking about when I was talking about some of the long term consequences of this election, right, And I think a lot of it will depend on what ends up happening once Zorn takes power, right, if he's elected, how he actually handles himself in office, how popular he is.

I think that that will actually have a large bearing on your question in terms of, you know, what does the Democratic Party end up taking from this, because they could take two very different lessons one AOC Two if Zorn tanks for some reason right and becomes incredibly unpopular and like the you know, we don't know, we can't we don't have a crystal ball.

But if something like that were to happen, I think they'd be like, see, we told you so right, we need to go back to so I think you could see either thing working out, so you can a lot rest on his shoulders.

I guess.

Yeah.

That was our first Risky Business Live and we're so happy you were here.

That was our show from the Aspen Ideas Festival.

By the way, our segment on probabilities was inspired by Adam Kucharski's newsletter Understanding the Unseen.

We'll have a link to that post in the show notes.

Thanks for listening.

Let us know what you think of the show.

Reach out to us at Risky Business at pushkin dot fm.

And by the way, if you're a Pushkin Plus subscriber, we have some bonus content for you that's coming up right after the credits.

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Risky Business is hosted by me Maria Kanikova.

And by me Nate Silver.

The show is a co production of Pushkin Industries and iHeartMedia.

This episode was produced by Isabelle Carter.

Our associate producer is Sonia Gerwin.

Sally Helm is our editor, and our executive producer is Jacob Boldstein.

Mixing by Sarah Bruguier.

Thanks so much for tuning in.