Live from Aspen! Zohran Mamdani’s Win, and How To Communicate Probabilities

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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.

21 straight days of poker.

We can spare one day for the Aspen Ideas Festival.

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 meatier.

Yeah, I think the election of Zoran Mamdani 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 govern a city that's actually very pro-finance.

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

So we're going to talk about both the strategy behind ranked 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.

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.

One of the final two.

Happens to be the guy who can win this additional million dollar bonus on top of the million dollars he's 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 alleged 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.

And to 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 players 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 except the two opponents it's taped away 15 minutes right if if one player what's his name um 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 without 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 poker in particular to a high degree.

These are all plays that are done 0% of the time.

in optimal play, that are done almost 0% of the time by two very experienced players, right?

Things like folding a pair to a tiny bit, which in heads-up poker, it's hard to make a hand in poker.

You're never supposed to do that.

No, 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 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 sportsmanship.

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 dumping or whatever whatever it is that goes against the spirit of the game.

And that is something.

It also violates 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 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 the sweet, sweet, wonderful guy.

But you have to be careful, right?

If you like someone, it doesn't mean that what they did means.

This is kind of the theme that will tie this into kind of larger themes at this conference.

So I not just straddle back and forth between 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 altruist, 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 over and over again, people are very short-sighted about the weird by normal person standards norms in 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 an irregularity, the consumer are actually obligated to report that.

Or the fact that, okay, why are we having this World Series poker gets bigger every year despite the tariffs and despite various headwinds, right?

They're 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've one time finished second place in 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 just

has 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, politics?

Yeah, absolutely.

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 in Zaran Mamdani, 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 you know 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 and I think have some appreciation for in New York.

He's a proud member of the Democratic Socialists 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, $30 minimum wage, right?

So tangible, focused on that, not culture war stuff.

And he winds up beating former Governor Andu Komo, who ran 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 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 maybe 1.05 million, right?

Yeah, this was where our high stars, right?

But there were 8 million people in New York City of whom 3.3, 3.4 million are registered Democrats, right?

So you're still only getting 25 or 30 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 Central Park East, but you you go even a couple of blocks into the upper east side, one of the more conservative neighborhoods, you start to see some Mom Dani precincts right there.

So, you know, a very impressive performance, and of course, we will be accused as New Yorkers of 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.

They're outnumbered by liberals, but we have lots of conservatives, right?

We have every imaginable ethnic group and slice of racial demographic, right?

There's lots of working class people in New York.

He mostly did well well among the kind of upper middle class, you know, kind of white people basically, but they're those two, right?

And did well enough, this is important, did well enough among the other groups, right?

Because sometimes candidates say, okay, well, we're not going to win any, you know, Democrats, right?

We're like, we're not going to win any working class white men.

So just write them off, treat them as a zero when actually like getting 30% of working class non-college men as opposed to 20% makes a big deal, right?

Trump in this past election got something like 18 to 20 percent of the black vote, which is a significant minority, right?

Mitt Romney got 4% against Barack Obama in 2012, right?

So going from 4% to 20% with 12% of the population, you can do that math, right?

That's quite a big swing, actually.

Yeah, it is.

Nate, 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 campaign.

Do you guys know what ranked choice voting or in Sarah?

Okay, everyone, there's not a doubt.

You should be Ask an Ideas Festival.

And

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

So

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.

For 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 was necessarily rational for Brad Lander because like if you're in third place and the other guy's in second place or maybe first place, right?

You don't necessarily want to help him out, right?

But I think Brad Lander hates Andrew Cuomo's guts as a lot of people do in New York.

And so so and so there was that zombie also ran a very positive yes campaign and a substantive campaign um which is a change for 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 MAGA, right?

But like, there often's 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 did every podcast in the world.

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

I think Zoran probably beat that record.

I'm sure he did.

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's a good idea.

And so is Eric Adams, maybe.

And Eric Adams did come up here,

defected from the Democratic Party, friendly with Trump, right?

You also have the proper Republican nominee, Curtis Sleewa, who is a guy who founded the Guardian Angels and owns like 56 cats or something like that.

So yeah.

Yeah, so I'm also interested, you know, 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 Zoran Mamdani, right?

They think that he is, you know, too fringe, right?

That he is too radical, that some of his ideas are 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 hard to be like an exciting centrist is part of the problem.

I don't know if Mayor Pete is exciting.

I guess he's a well-spoken person, for example, but like sometimes more of 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 become more sympathetic 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.

There are always rivalries between Albany and City Hole, right?

That will not be any different.

Yeah, absolutely.

And I also wonder, you know, if Mom Dani does get elected, right?

This is a big if still, right?

We're, I mean,

75%.

75%.

But 75%, as we know, is not 100%,

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 Dani have been, you know, the underdog, right?

And it's been kind of 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 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 are 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.

I am.

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, culturally center-left, and economically centered something, right?

A lot of people 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 raw 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 like he's very, he's a lot of dexterity in talking about policy, right?

He went on like the 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 wonkery about policy and things like that, right?

And like I like politicians who

are elected officials and are responsive to some degree to public opinion.

I think it's how democracy should function, right?

And he can say, here are my priors.

I stand for the working class.

I don't like capitalism all that much, right?

But he's not proposing anything too radical.

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 2020 when they won the first couple of primaries and they were instead of bending the knee to the Democratic Party, remember going to a rally in Nevada, Bernie wound up winning basically three states in a row.

Iowa was disputed between him and Mayor Pete, so we won't get into that, right?

But two and a half out of three, right?

And he gave speeches that were like, yeah, well, screw you, Democratic 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 Klobuchar, Mayor Pete, everybody else, rally behind Joe Biden successfully for one term, you know, whether that was a good decision in the long run or not will be, I think, debated.

But yeah, you don't want to rub rub it in someone's face when they still have chips on the table, so to speak.

And so

it behooves Oran to

understand there's still a losable.

We're going to talk about what these probabilities mean.

25% is a real possibility of losing, right?

And so he would be mindful to keep up the strategy that he had

in the primary.

And mindful to,

if he gets elected, to try to

keep up the same strategy if he wants to.

to 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 Eric Adams right but it's a it's a that's a hard job it's it is a it's a 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 in Bill Clinton to endorse him he called in Michael Bloomberg he called in Jim Clyburn every black group, Jewish group, Italian group, 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'd win elections.

And like Cuomo, Cuomo kind of actually got the numbers that ordinarily would win in New York mayoral race, right?

Since 2001, he has the second highest total of votes, but like Momdani 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 turnout did matter quite a bit.

In a race where maybe a third of Democrats turnout, if you're lucky, maybe 25%, then

getting people excited,

being interesting.

So many politicians are either psychopaths or boring, right?

Like 94 of 100 U.S.

Senators are either psychopaths, boring, or both.

Yeah, yeah, no, and

a lot can be said for being nice and having energy

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?

I can do the water.

Not in a suit, though.

I'm a sweater, not in a suit.

I can do it in high heels.

No, I can't.

You're going to hear a quick break, and then we'll be back.

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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 1951, March of 1951, there was a CIA analyst whose name was Sherman Kent.

And he filed a report on the probability of an invasion of Yugoslavia in the year 1951.

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 means?

Just, you don't have to answer.

So he thought it meant 65%

or higher.

So, right, more than 65%.

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, 20%, or maybe like a range from 20 to 70, 80%, certainly not 65% or higher.

So there was a a huge miscommunication, which resulted in massive policy

missteps, right?

Just because how serious a serious possibility was was not

phobic, right?

You know, at former 538, now Silver Bulletin, right, we have an election model

where we give, you know, a probability is fundamentally defined as a number between 0%

and 100%, right?

And a lot of times people use like weasel.

They're like, well, Nick Clinton, you you had

Hillary Clinton with a 71% chance of winning the election, so you were wrong.

We have to do 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 20%, right?

If I said that there's still a serious possibility that Zoran could lose a general election, right?

Because you're not saying probability.

Sure.

You're saying like, take this seriously, 20, 25.

Yeah, well, when you put it in that context, right, a serious possibility that Zoran loses the election 25% 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 contexts, right?

How do you communicate probabilities when it comes to things like global warming, right?

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, which is, 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, life but i know how it feels to lose on day four of the main event of the world series as a 98.6 percent favorite in a multi-million shit pot it happens right it feels like it shouldn't because 98.6 percent feels like it should be 100

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,

I think the probability is between 10% and 15%.

And I am 75% sure in this estimate, right?

Or at the very least,

be explicit about the language that you're using.

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, 95% or higher right nate how many people reading the report then go to the appendix to see how many people read the ICC 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 you know look

Christmas at your house this year

But no look

Because the opposite is people use this as weasel words, right?

They're intentionally ambiguous to say later on oh, 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 pointing 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 you, do, do of your 70% probabilities, do seven out of ten come true in the long run, right?

But do 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'll 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?

95% plus.

Okay, so almost certainly 95% plus.

I was actually going to go a little bit lower and say 90% plus, just knowing that in this world, basically nothing is certain.

And if we're at above 90% 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 90%

probability of succeeding, how many of you would take that investment?

I hope most of you.

But if and if I told you that you could take a gamble with a 90% probability of success,

yeah, people are gambling, right?

I mean, you'll learn in poker.

If you can get like a 54% edge in the

camera,

it, it's amazing.

But I'm not saying that that means almost certain, but to me, like above 90%, 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 100% correct and is accounting for everything.

So, given all of that, I would actually say like above 90% would be almost certainly.

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

You know, I've watched enough NBA playoff games where teams blew 17 point leads and things like that in the fourth quarter.

So like I'm feeling I want the security of 95%.

All right, you want the security of after playing poker for a few weeks, yeah, where nothing is certain.

Then I'm like, I want my almost certainly at 95, right?

That makes sense.

So what would you, would you actually, like, what would you say for like a 90 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 it would be below 90%.

See?

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, 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, anything from like 0.000%,

1%,

0.001% to like 49%,

right?

It's very ambiguous.

I would tend to think unlikely means 25 or 30%, somewhere in the middle of the below 50% range.

What about you?

Yeah, I was going to be at around 25%

or below, right?

Any of that is unlikely.

And

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 you say likely is above,

above what percentage is likely?

Is it above 50?

It feels like you're a little asymmetric.

Like likely, I think you have to be 60 or so, right?

Yeah.

It is asymmetric, right?

Possible or probable.

These ones are pretty bad, right?

You want to do one more?

Yeah,

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, 10% or below.

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

I think that's 10% or below.

The other word's like 95%.

I was about to say why the asymmetry.

So you said, you know, the

highly likely was 95%.

Just a large language model teasing out implicit context from the way these phrases are used in the real world.

I don't know what ChatGPT 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 5%.

Like it's just, you're telling me that it's almost 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?

What is your threshold, Nate, for bringing an umbrella?

Like, what's

the point?

I'm not an umbrella.

I find umbrellas

very cumbersome and unwieldy.

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 50% chance of rain, I'm probably not going to bring it.

You know, if it's like above 60, I'll probably, probably bring an umbrella.

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

And so

that's...

But you think about those days when it was 90% chance of rain and it didn't rain.

Okay, let's get the audience involved here.

Let's do it.

All right.

One last one.

We're going to do it with you guys, and 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, 0 to 25%, 25 to 50, 50, 75, 75, 100, right?

If I say something is possible, raise your hand if you interpret that as 0 to 25%.

Okay, we have...

About a quarter of that.

About 0 to 20% of the hands up in the audience, right?

Quite a few hands.

We'll say 25 to 50%.

A little bit more, kind of similar.

Kind of similar, but probably a little more.

Okay, how about 50 to 75?

And there are a handful of hands?

Yeah, possible.

That could be.

And how about 75% or more?

So the weighted average is like 36 or something percent.

We're doing science here.

Yeah, doing it on the fly.

Yeah.

But people think it means anything from 5%

to 80%, right?

If you ask people to write down individual guesses.

To have that framework.

No, no, it's really not.

Because what do you even mean?

Probable, likely.

It's such a hedge word.

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 at the poker table, right?

What are your exact thoughts?

When it comes to politics and things like that, political questions, people are also just often interpreting stuff in bad faith, right?

Like

I think that when you say there's a 30% chance of rain and doesn't rain, people don't get as mad as when there's a 30% chance of Donald Trump winning and he wins or things like that, for example.

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 our brains are programmed to think, right?

90% is basically 100, 70 is basically 100, 65 is basically 100, 30, basically 0, right?

We just

at least get 75 and 25, right?

Because there are either 50, 50, 0, 100.

Let's at least get those middle zones, right?

As a stepping stone to more precision.

Yeah, and 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 25%

is not serious.

I'm halfway 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.

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Do you want to open it up to questions?

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

So there are mic runners.

We can also point and shout, but you.

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.

So, part of what you're saying is we're inaccurate in 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, and this kind of gets into the conversation about Zoran earlier, right?

Where he's going on podcasts where the audience might not be favorably inclined to him.

And I've done this too, like marketing my book.

I talk to conservative 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.

And 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 that create like false certainty sometimes, 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 is settled on this question.

Well, on some questions, it's settled.

On some questions, it isn't, right?

And it's like often used as a cudgel where there is genuine uncertainty.

And so, so, so, yeah, I mean, it's look, we wrestle with this every day, journalists do, but like, I may err 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 anybody to be like, 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 on the side of precision.

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, there, 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 as 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 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 sent us with for a friend's date and they're super fucking annoying and we hate their guts, right?

You know, if I say something like, Maria, what time did you say your flight was tomorrow morning, right?

Yeah, that's ambiguous.

What it really means is that let's get out of here.

And Nate and I have known each other for long enough that I would say, you know, it's at 7 a.m.

We really

have to go.

Yeah, so there are strategic uses of it.

Yeah, there are more questions back there.

Hi, I'm a long-time listener, first-time caller.

Welcome back to the show.

Yeah, yes.

My question is: how much

do we think Zauran's win is the idiosyncrasies 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 such a good question because the Cuomo sucking part of it is actually huge.

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 win, all of a sudden people who would never vote together, who would never kind of

partners, partner up.

And this is from a psychological standpoint, you see that.

He both ran a bad campaign and kind of,

to use 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 quotes after people who were like big Cuomo donors like I didn't really care about him 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 Zaran and Brad Lander or something or Adrian Adams it might have been closer but he's a good candidate 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 then close counts right you know so you know look if he had lost by seven points 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 woke 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.

So, 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 a half had to come together.

You still have won, 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 about 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 42%

chance of winning and another candidate has a 46% chance, should I interpret that to say they both have low probability

or they have

or I mean

or is it so close really doesn't matter?

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

If it's Trump 46%

in, say, Texas, Harris 42%,

undecided third parties, the remaining whatever, 18%, right?

Like a four-point lead, how often often does that translate into a win?

That's an empirical question, right?

The answer might be something like 70% of the time.

Question.

In New York, what were the polls saying before in New York?

No, the polls underestimated.

I mean, they had shown the race tightening a lot.

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

Almost none, maybe with one exception, had him winning the first round outright.

And none of them had him winning by like that wide a margin, right?

So this is what happens 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 mayoral races Considering the unlikely voters or 20% of the electorate right Cuobo got his numbers among that 20%

but then Zoran turned out people that never vote in mayoral elections in New York.

By the way, a lot of New Yorkers are transplants from all around the country, all around the world, right?

So we don't have that like tie to local politics, right?

I'm a person who covers politics, lives in New York.

I don't know that much about like New York politics, right?

It's very typical in some ways, but he broke through and became its cliche, but became viral in a way that, you know, I guess pollsters were too conservative in their methods and

missing these voters.

I think we have time for one more question.

Hi, thanks.

I was just curious, I know this is probably annoying, like too long in the future kind of question, but does Zoran's win at all change the probabilities that you think about candidates in 2028 for a Democratic primary, or I guess the general election, too?

So, with actually my former colleague at 538, Galen Drook, we did a Democratic 2028 primary draft, right?

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 instead.

He took AOC, too.

So I was mad about that.

But like, we both thought, and this is before Zoran,

that

she was, let me put this carefully, since we're talking about probabilities, right?

To say the most likely candidate might mean a 15% chance, right?

There's nobody in the field who is a clear frontrunner, but we both thought that she was more likely than any other candidate to become the nominee in 2028 before

Mom Donney came along, right?

And again, it's probably because like, look.

Democrats have all these retreads, right?

The Clinton family, the Cuomo family, the Biden family.

I bet Jill will probably fantasize sometimes.

What if I become become president, right?

Like House of Cards or something, right?

I think people are tired of all these families, right?

I remember

seeing in 2016, I was in New Hampshire covering the race for 538 in ABC News, right?

And like Hillary Clinton

spoke to a group of like then at a college, right?

Franklin Pierce College or something like that, right?

You know, the average age is 20 or something.

She's talking about like the Cold War.

And like the students' eyes are glazing 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, Zoran was literally half of like Cuomo's age, right?

I think it's a good thing if the Democratic Party is about representatives.

How come everyone's so freaking old, right?

I think it's a good thing is to, you know, have candidates 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?

No, 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 Zoran 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 Zoran tanks for some reason, right, and becomes incredibly unpopular.

And like,

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 rests on his shoulders.

I guess it's all we have time for.

Yeah, thank you so much.

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

Woo!

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 riskybusiness at pushkin.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.

And if you're not subscribing yet, consider signing up.

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You get access to all that premium content and add-free listing across Pushkin's entire network of shows.

Risky Business is hosted by me, Maria Konakova.

And by me, Nate Silver.

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

This episode was produced by Isabel Carter.

Our associate producer is Sonia Gerwit.

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

Mixing by Sarah Bruguer.

Thanks so much for tuning in.

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