Nate Silver

Even Taylor Swift or whatever, the minute she endorses a major-party candidate, it offsets her influence. Better to keep your distance and have the influencer’s support be implicit.

Also, “influencers” are only influential to the extent they maintain distance from the political parties, which are the least cool brands imaginable. If you try to coopt them, they either lose their influence or they rebel because it’s bad for their audience. Just a losing game.

A lot of the obsession with political "influencers" is FOMO, middle-aged guys like me thinking they're missing out on important trends, which they undoubtedly are. But talking about influencers doesn't solve that problem it just makes you seem like you're overcompensating.

Sad to see this happen to beloved local restaurant Red Lobster which has literally been part of a corporate conglomerate since 1970.

We're used to Trump-related polling movement being very glacial, but the war with Iran is *rapidly* getting more unpopular.

From our tracker here FYI: natesilver.net/p/iran-war-pol…

@krishnanrohit No that's good, most people are way too anchored to their previous projections when issuing a forecast or only tend to update in one direction.

I find it quite amusing that the AI 2027 authors publicly updated for longer timelines a few months ago and now back to shorter closer to original timelines. Shows the tumultuous times we're all in.

“Just pick a straight white Christian man” is really dumb — Ignores a majority of the available political talent — Ignores the central importance of what politicians actually say and do slowboring.com/p/the-quest-fo…

@TheZvi I think we want to prevent a dynamic where the first pick is deterministic based on who acquires the most auction units, which might encourage hoarding. We do have rules limiting how often teams can win a 100 player in X number of seasons.

@NateSilver538 If you must cap bids at 100 (why?) then let's break the ties based on who has gone the longest without winning a 100-bid player.

You're going to see a lot of NBA draft reform proposals. Here's ours: replace the NBA draft with an auction.

The whole proposal is here. We welcome your feedback and critiques! natesilver.net/p/radical-plan…

Obviously the devil in the details with something like this. And I've put more work than I care to admit into thinking through the various incentives in the system. There are several rules that seek to prevent tanking or teams from getting lucky several years in a row.

@tombos21 My guess: equity edges are larger post so you have more nutted hands to trap with, whereas ~only AA wants to trap pre in a pot that's already been 3-bet. So it's easier to formulate a range post that contains nuts + great draws + top-pair hands that hope to slow the action down.

Why is cold-calling a 3-bet preflop bad? Most coaches will say something like, "Well, it caps your range so you're exposed to re-reraises, you're getting bad pot odds to call, you'll under-realize your flatting equity, you should enter the pot with initiative", etc etc. But my question is, why doesn't that exact same logic apply postflop? Here HJ faces a bet and a raise in a 3-way pot on the flop, and happily finds calls.

Deeper dive on all of this in today's newsletter. natesilver.net/p/trump-approv…

Obviously, gas prices are a big factor. But Trump has profound problems. There *are* signs of erosion among his base. Only 22% of Americans have a *strongly* favorable view of Trump. 2028 aspirants are starting to pull away from him. One wonders about the effect of his age, too.

Trump's approval rating just fell below 40 percent in our tracking for the first time. And his net approval rating is now -17.4, also a new low and down about 5 points over the past several weeks.

Just a super weird politician tbh

While we understand these are challenging times for the literally dozens of Americans who were rooting for Duke, we believe we have an obligation to our subscribers to continue updating the Silver Bulletin NCAA tournament model.