Founder of Silver Bulletin: natesilver.substack.com/, and cohost of Still Counting podcast!
New York
- Tweets 45,269
- Following 1,760
- Followers 3,042,367
- Likes 10,621
I wrote a whole book on this subject, and the thesis is about the normative and practical importance of human agency. It doesn't help that people like you have no idea WTF AI can do right now.
There's no word for the actual problem going on with AI discourse, which is not that we're anthropomorphizing AI systems but that writers simply airbrush out of the narrative the humans building and running these systems.
15
4
186
87,809
The whole problem is that the AP's language is inaccurate and politically charged. I don't particularly trust the labs. But most (certainly not all) people with real expertise in this field would consider their guidance to be presumptive at best.
You’re policing language right now. You’re policing the AP’s language. Attempting to find more accurate and less industry propaganda terms isn’t policing anything, they’re not imposing their guidelines on Nate Silver, you’re welcome to parrot EA cultists all you’d like
17
3
118
86,687
OK then give Astra or Fable a 10,000-line program, ask it to debug it, ask it to understand what's going on, ask it to make revisions. It's certainly not perfect. I'm bullish on human expertise fwiw. But it sure as hell is way more than a "stochastic parrot."
No, it's different in this case, because LLM are designed to create an illusion that they do think and talk like human beings.
107
23
842
148,025
IDK if you polled some unbiased sample of experts in the field (granted, "experts" and "unbiased" are doing a lot of work there), I imagine most of them would roughly agree with the idea that AI models "think," at least for more advanced tasks.
44
2
188
106,714
Interesting that Dems' generic ballot gains have come from undecideds rather than Republicans, whose numbers have held steady.
44
72
1,034
90,317
Anyway, the continued gains on the generic ballot (and continued decline in Trump approval) has been enough to offset the NYT poll in Maine in our forecast update today: natesilver.net/p/nate-silver…
2
7
67
30,245
The whole "don't anthropomorphize AI" thing is very Woke 1.0. People trying to police language that is perfectly natural in some cases and ending up in a web of contradictions.
I don't think this is analytically helpful. But either way, extremely surprised to see the line "such as animals" in this statement.
180
43
958
292,940
Nate Silver retweeted
This is interesting, via @NateSilver538:
In 2024, one takeaway was that the Red Wave was especially strong in blue cities. In 2026, the Blue Wave seems especially strong in red states.
19
66
431
68,140
Polls over the past week or two (mostly GREAT for Democrats, but Collins still ahead in Maine?!?) tell an internally consistent but slightly weird story: D gains are overwhelmingly concentrated in red states.
204
167
3,116
486,047
I went into that a bit here, as well as in this week's Still Counting. This probably makes for more of a boom-or-bust story than if the gains were concentrated more evenly.
natesilver.net/p/the-blue-wa…
6
9
149
60,949
ELWAY update out for the week. You can get a sense here for how the model really likes good QBs. Buffalo looks like the best team in football. As mentioned last night, the model also really likes Brock Purdy and the 49ers. Patrick Mahomes' rating is ticking back up.
31
7
197
86,327
Full model here. We're aiming to expedite things for more rapid/frequent updates going forward. Busy times on our other beat (politics) so please give us another week or two on that.
natesilver.net/p/2026-elway-…
1
24
28,271
Nate Silver retweeted
🎧New Still Counting!🎧 A dive into whether the really good polling for Democrats is actually believable ... and I pester @NateSilver538 @galendruke to give us a sense of what's actually happened to polling in the last 5 years.
piped.video/watch?v=Sl2L79F5…
podcasts.apple.com/us/podcas…
4
24
42,821
I think the critique of "bothsidesism" is often overused but this is a good example of it, NYT commenters are rationally reacting to her staffers being a bunch of snowflakes.
just a classic comment section story:
Anger, confusion, dismay
the self selecting people on this site don’t want anything negative about their preferred side!
31
35
1,397
337,495
I think most reasonably well-adjusted people would read this and feel pretty sympathetic toward Peltola rather than her annoying staffers.
SCOOP: Inside the tumult of Mary Peltola's Senate campaign in Alaska and her time on Capitol Hill.
Peltola is known publicly as kind and affable. But aides recall angry outbursts, slurs and a shove. (She also required staff to feed a pet chameleon.)
nytimes.com/2026/09/23/us/po…
228
271
6,126
759,865
