Longreads Member Exclusive: A Catastrophic Failure of Prediction, by Nate Silver
This week we're proud to share a Longreads Member pick from Nate Silver's new book The Signal and the Noise, published by The Penguin Press. Chapter 1, "A Catastrophic Failure of Prediction," comes recommended by Janet Paskin, editor of Businessweek.com, who writes:
"Could there be a more appropriate hero for our time than Nate Silver? We can quantify and track and poll and log almost everything—and so we usually do, even if we're not sure how to make sense of it all. But Silver is—or at least, he can tell you exactly how likely it is that he's right.
"His nerd-god omniscience during the 2012 election cycle made him a blast to watch, read and retweet. He was consistent, and he was right, and it made a lot of people think a little differently about the relentlessness of our political pageantry and punditry.
"Here, in the first chapter of his new book, he revisits the housing crash, and the failure of the ratings agencies to spot it. It's not new criticism. Even so, the prediction game is Silver's strength, and he makes the whole thing feel outrageous again. He takes to task the errors in the rating agencies' models and in their psychology. There are charts, graphs, and 101 footnotes, and in the end, it's reassuring: If Silver thinks we can avoid making the same mistakes again—well, even a skeptic like me wouldn't bet against him. After all, he knows the odds better than I do."
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Raider. QB Crusher. Murderer?
[Not single-page] Anthony Wayne Smith, a former defensive end for the L.A./Oakland Raiders, has been linked to the murders of four men:
“Soon after retiring from football, Anthony invested in at least one shady business—an online medical-billing scam that was later investigated by the FTC—and started spending more and more time with gangbangers and thugs. ‘He was bringing the edge around, and I didn’t like it,’ Bryan says. When he asked Anthony why, Anthony told him, ‘These guys care about me. They’re genuine dudes.’
“‘I couldn’t understand it,’ Bryan says. ‘You’re married to a lawyer. You’re living in Playa del Rey. Why would you be involved with these kinds of people?’ He began to back away, unhappily, because he felt like now he was abandoning Anthony, too. Dwayne Simon didn’t like Anthony’s new friends, either. ‘That’s when I stopped hanging around,’ he says. ‘That’s when he started to change. He got that scowl, that ugly look.'”
The Old Man and the Tee
A 29-year-old combat veteran returns home, then decides to try to walk on as a kicker for Wyoming:
“Noble took a job for his uncle’s hay-brokerage company, throwing bales from trucks into the barn lofts of thoroughbred horse farms, sometimes 720 of them a day. He told the stories of walking dusty streets and climbing mountains in Afghanistan, of recognizing Coke bottles full of sand with wires sticking out as IEDs. Stories of the other men of 3rd Battalion, 3rd Marines, of air strikes and snipers, being on a squad searching for a month for a high-target member of al-Qaeda. Stories of friends getting wounded, and killed. He went to the bowling alley with his old buddies, and patrons stopped to talk to him, and he was feted with free meals and drinks, and when he went to a high school football game, he would be announced, then stand on the bleachers and turn around and wave and feel the applause turn to him instead of the field. The first few months were as though he were home on leave, as though he were still a hero, and then the novelty of his presence wore off, and everything went back to the way it had been before he left.
“He got bored, and he got angry. It felt as if there was nothing for him, as if he were still in high school, hanging out with his old friends, who hadn’t changed, and who, as time passed, treated him as though he hadn’t either. He went to bars and listened to arguments and complaints about problems that were petty compared with what he had seen. He did not want to be home anymore. ‘I’m not the type of guy who goes out to look at the stars and wonder about things,’ he says, but one night a few months after he came home, he did just that.”
‘I Will Ruin Him’
A writer is stalked by his former M.F.A. student:
“Soon after that first volley, Janice (my agent) called, sounding upset. For several days, she had been receiving strange e-mails about me from Nasreen, and she was concerned for her safety. The e-mails contained the same baseless accusations of plagiarism, accompanied by threats of ‘hell to pay’ if Janice and I connived to ‘steal’ any more of Nasreen’s work. Later that day, Nasreen began threatening Paula, the editor to whom Janice had introduced Nasreen.
“‘You all play a part in unleashing the fury,’ Nasreen wrote. Soon after, with this ‘fury’ now apparently reaching for terms strong enough to account for its own escalating intensity, Nasreen brought on one of those words that scorch everything they come near. The word was ‘rape,’ and even though she used it figuratively rather than literally, I felt immediately the potency of its touch, as if I’d been splashed with acid: ‘I say if I can’t write my book and get emotionally and verbally raped by James Lasdun, a Jew disguising himself as an English-American, well then, the Holocaust Industry Books should all be banned as should the films.'”
We Must Build An Enormous McWorld In Times Square, A Xanadu Representing A McDonald’s From Every Nation
What if there were a flagship McDonald’s store that served all the variations of country-specific fast food items found in chains from around the world?
“Everyone talks about how globalization ‘McDonalds-izes’ the world, but the funny thing about a place like New York is that you can get basically every kind of food *except* whatever they serve at the foreign outposts of our proud American chains. I would say I know more people who have had a lamb face salad from the Xi’an Famous Foods in the Golden Mall in Flushing than have had the poutine from the Montreal McDonalds, never mind something you really have to travel for, like a Chicken Maharaja Mac. Frequently, when I travel outside of the USA, my trips to the local McDonald’s are the most genuinely foreign-feeling and disorienting part of the trip. I went to Paris last year. There are probably ten restaurants within walking distance of my old Williamsburg apartment that are varyingly obsessive imitations of Parisian bistros, Parisian bars, Parisian brasseries. If they were hung in museums, the wall texts next to them would say ‘School of Keith McNally.’ But there is not a single place in New York that serves a Croque McDo.”
The Price of a Stolen Childhood
Victims of child pornography seek restitution, sometimes from hundreds of separate cases:
“Marsh researched legal remedies for Amy. Combing through his casebooks, he found a provision in the Violence Against Women Act that he had never heard of before: it gave the victims of sex crimes, including child pornography, the right to restitution or compensation for the “full amount” of their losses. Enumerating what those losses could be, Congress listed psychiatric care, lost income and legal costs and concluded, ‘The issuance of a restitution order under this section is mandatory.’
“The provision for restitution, enacted in 1994, had yet to be invoked in a case of child-pornography possession. The basis for such a claim wasn’t necessarily self-evident: how could Amy prove that her ongoing trauma was the fault of any one man who looked at her pictures, instead of her uncle, who abused her and made the pornography?”
A Priest’s Confession, A Man’s Relief
A court orders the release of church files revealing a history of sex abuse by clergy members. The documents back up the allegations of victims, who are finally finding justice:
“In recent years, a key part of clergy abuse cases has involved getting confidential files released. The Catholic Church is a meticulous record-keeper. When a letter accuses a priest of molestation, it’s supposed to go into his file. So are reports from therapists — no matter how graphic.
“The documents have repeatedly backed up the allegations of victims whom the church initially tarred as liars. The Roman Catholic Diocese of Orange made public 10,000 pages. The L.A. archdiocese is expected to release its own trove in the coming weeks.”
The Inside Story Of Siri’s Origins
How Apple’s voice-recognition software got its start—and how it lost some of its power along the way:
“This Siri — the Siri of the past — offers a glimpse at what the Siri of the future may provide, and a blueprint for how a growing wave of artificially intelligent assistants will slot into our lives. The goal is a human-enhancing and potentially indispensable assistant that could supplement the limitations of our minds and free us from mundane and tedious tasks.
“Siri’s backers know Apple’s version of the assistant has not yet lived up to its potential. ‘The Siri team saw the future, defined the future and built the first working version of the future,’ says Gary Morgenthaler, a partner at Morgenthaler Ventures, one of the two first venture capital firms to invest in Siri. ‘So it’s disappointing to those of us that were part of the original team to see how slowly that’s progressed out of the acquired company into the marketplace.'”
Following Slowly
[Fiction] Recommended by Joshua Ferris. A man returns to his family farm, starting over:
“The moon shone yellow through the trees. It was well past midnight, and Sonny was tired. For some time, he’d had trouble sleeping. He fell asleep quickly, exhausted by a day of cows and cold, only to come awake a few hours later in some unexpected place—sitting in the hallway, or standing over the kitchen sink. Sometimes it was hard to know where he was, and he stood awed and dismayed by some common object—a door handle, a sink fixture, the floral pattern of the bathroom wallpaper. One night, his mother had found him on the utility porch, urinating into a stack of neatly folded laundry. My God, she’d said, what is wrong with you? He hadn’t come home for two days, his shame was so great. He’d parked his truck in a field and slept there, curled on the seat, waking now and again to start the engine for heat.
“Even now, alone in the truck, the memory made him flush. He reached above the visor for a can of chew. He put a thick pinch behind his upper right cheek and leaned to get a soda can from the floor for a spitter. Then he sat with his hands in his lap, looking out through the windshield at the moon. Sometimes he forgot how good it was to be here, outside, and what it meant to sit alone in such quiet. Sometimes he had to remind himself.”
Memory to Myth: Tracing Aaron Swartz Through the 21st Century
Remembering Aaron Swartz, the programmer and Internet activist who took his own life earlier this year, and what he was fighting for:
“Aaron didn’t play that game. After he sold Reddit, he couldn’t be bought. In fact, he was spending his own money, and his valuable time, on campaigns for the public good, and helping others to do the same. He was a realist about the government, media companies, and Silicon Valley. His experience with all of them made him grow up too soon. But he also never stopped being that not-even-teenager who believed in the utopian possibilities latent in the World Wide Web. He never stopped believing in the power of small groups of people who were willing to devote their attention to small problems and nagging details in order to create the greatest good for the greatest number. Aaron played in that space without resolving its tensions.
“It’s that collapsing telescope between the many and the few, the rational and the altruistic, the minute and the world-historical, the irreducibility of life as it is lived and the universality of the ideals that life should serve.”
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