How the Epstein files and the Dialog invitations tell us what’s missing from Nate Silver’s theory of politics

I’ll get to the Epstein files and the Dialog invitations at the end.

First, some background:

A couple years ago I reviewed the book, On the Edge, by politics and sports analyst Nate Silver. I’m a big fan of much of Nate’s work—we’ve even collaborated on a couple of projects—and I enjoyed his book, which explores the world of some people—notably, poker players and tech investors—who do not just accept uncertainty but thrive on it. Silver and these others thrive on uncertainty, directly because they can separate their wishes and fears from their assessments of risks and returns, and indirectly because everyone else’s irrationality leaves a lot of potential gains on the table. The messier and more complicated the game, the bigger advantage it is to have a cool head. And one thing I admire about Nate is his cool head regarding uncertainty. He’s made a few slip-ups, most notoriously his assessment of the political potential of corrupt former NYC mayor Eric Adams, but anyone who makes predictions will make some mistakes; that goes with the territories. Nate’s a thoughtful pundit and careful analyst and I get a lot out of reading what he writes, even when I don’t fully agree with him.

A central theme of Nate’s book is his take in Silicon Valley: “to make all of this work, you need a symbiosis between two often-clashing personality types . . . risk-tolerant VCs [investors] . . . and “risk-ignorant founders.” This is an interesting idea that goes well beyond business-book platitudes of risk-taking being good in itself—one of my pet peeves is when funders say they want to support “high risk, high return projects,” but then in the proposal they never want you to talk about the risky part, and I don’t think they really want high-risk, they just think it sounds good—instead distinguishing between different attitudes toward risk: there are normies who don’t want risk at all and will pay a high price to avoid it; there are savvy forecasters who try to accurately assess risks and then make optimal decisions; and there are the obsessives who try things nobody else would do. The savvies and the obsessives are similar in their willingness to jump into the unknown—and, according to Nate, they get along pretty well—but they thrive on risk in different ways.

I think all of us have all three of these attitudes in different aspects in our lives. So I think this symbiosis happens within people as well as in groups. That these three often-clashing personality types don’t just power Silicon Valley; in some mix or another they power all of us. As memorably dramatized in the Inside Out movies, each of us is a sort of committee, and Nate’s portrayal of different people’s attitudes toward risk can perhaps give us a better understanding of our own incoherent selves and how this incoherence can be a strength.

The River and the Village

The part of the book where I think Nate got it wrong is in his characterization of American politics. He contrasts the River (“an ecosystem of people and ideas” who “speak one language with terms such as expected value, Nash equilibrium, and Bayesian priors,” “have close ties to the tech sector,” “and have an “appetite for involving themselves in all sorts of problems and controversies”) with the Village: “people who work in government, in much of the media, and in parts of academia (although perhaps excluding some of the more quantitative academic fields such as economics). It has distinctly left-of-center politics associated with the Democratic Party”).

My impression from reading his book is that Nate feels a bit politically homeless. As a poker player and statistical analyst who specialized in quantifying uncertainty, he’s culturally closer to the River, while he finds the Village to be annoying and cringey. But on policy, he’s closer to the Village, supporting a social safety net, the rule of law, action on the environment, etc. The tension between Nate’s River vibes and his Village policy preferences gives his book, and his political writing, a valuable sense of urgency. Based on his recent writings, my impression is that Nate has pretty much given up trying to get the River to support his policies; instead he’s trying to move the Village to be more reasonable.

The River and the Village, and the Fort

But here’s my problem. If the River is risk-takers who are skeptical about politics, with views ranging from the far left to the right and everywhere in between, and if the Village is normies who are center-left and who have some connection to political power or at least would like to wield it, then . . . where’s everybody else?

There are two kinds of “everybody else” I’m thinking about here.

First, there are all the people in the country and around the world who aren’t well connected. They’re not professional gamblers or hedge fund investors or tech developers or election-forecasting statistical analysts (hi!), nor are they politicians, journalists, Ivy League professors of cultural studies, or even bloggers. They’re just regular working stiffs. I’m not saying Nate should write a book about these people; it just seems important to recognize that the River people and the Village people he describes are just two small tribes within a large society.

The other group of missing people are . . . approximately half the people who run the country. Where’s Ted Cruz, for example? He doesn’t seem like a gambler, and he spends much of his time trying to tell people what to do. He works in that small village of Washington, D.C. But he doesn’t have “distinctly left-of-center politics”! And then there are the six Republican judges on the supreme court: not river-dwelling gamblers in any sense of the phrase, these judges have the most risk-averse career paths imaginable—but they’re not in Nate’s Village, as he has defined it. Now, you might say that individual Villager can lean right even as the Village as a whole has distinctly left-of-center politics, but that doesn’t really work given that the Republicans control the judiciary, more than half of congress, and the executive branch of government as well. I think the only possible solutions here are: (a) redefine the Village as being divided between the two parties, or (b) define the Village as having left-of-center politics and then introduce a new entity—the Fort?—that has all the normie, risk-averse characteristics of the Village but on the political right. Ted Cruz and Samuel Alito are comfortably situated within the Fort.

I kind of like this River/Village/Fort thing. The Village is fighting against the Fort, and the River has to figure out what to do about it. Riverians are split: those on the left are in favor of growth in an environment of political equality, and they support higher taxes on the rich, government action on climate change, abortion rights, and other aspects of the Democratic platform; while those on the right are in favor of economic freedom and social stability, and they support lower taxes and spending, less business regulation, restrictions on abortion, and other Republican policies. People of all political persuasions can hate the River because they can find a group of people on the River who annoy them. If you’re on the right, you can hate smug successful Riverians who want to kill the capitalist golden goose that created the conditions for their success; if you’re on the left, you can hate greedy Riverians for whom all the world’s riches aren’t enough.

The Epstein files and the Dialog invitations

I thought about this all recently when learning that Ted Cruz was part of the notorious Dialog conferences, along with Lawrence Summers, Peter Thiel, Tulsi Gabbard, the former head of the Saudi secret service, and various other business and military figures. These people are the Fort. They’re not riverboat gamblers; they’re powerful people who want to retain their power. Peter Thiel’s most notorious act was to use the U.S. legal system to shut down an independent journalism outlet, and the last thing Lawrence Summers did before going to ground was to try to get some rich people to intimidate journalists at a student newspaper. Some of these guys might talk a good game about expected value, Nash equilibrium, and Bayesian priors, but ultimately their game is about using connections and staying on top, kind of like these meritocrats.

And then there are the Epstein files, which have some overlap with the Dialog membership and include other residents of the Fort such as Kenneth Starr and Donald Trump (along with Villagers such as Bills Clinton and Richardson).

The Dialog conferences and the Epstein files remind us of the centrality of the Fort to American politics and power, and thus the limitation of the River/Village framing which misses this group of people who run the government and much of private industry.

It was natural for Nate to focus on the River (because they’re lots of fun) and the Village (because he had to deal with them all the time and they’re annoying), but in retrospect—and even at the time, as indicated in my review—he had a major blind spot, missing the Fort.

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