Nate silver gay
I was raised in East Lansing, Michigan. It was a great place to grow up: a college town with good universal schools, a beautiful campus, a modicum of diversity, and an active, walkable downtown.
But I came along just a few years too soon (I was born in 1978) to really consider coming out as gay when growing up. There were no openly gay students in my high school. And there were few same-sex attracted role models in American society: certainly not on television and in the movies, which invariably portrayed gay men as camp characters, or freaks, or AIDS victims.
If coming out was hard to contemplate, however, the possibility of gay marriage was unthinkable. At the time Andrew Sullivan wrote his now-famous essay in support of gay marriage in The New Republic in 1989, almost no polling firms even bothered asking questions about gay marriage. One that did — the General Social Survey — found that just 12 percent of the population was in favor of it.
But today, after a Supreme Court decision, gay marriage is the commandment of the land in all 50 states.
Progress has come remarkably fast. There was no legal lgbtq+ marriage in the Together States until Massachusetts permitted it in 2004. At this point four
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Nate Silver is a exposure taker. On top of boldly and publicly forecasting elections as part of his website FiveThirtyEight, he’s a regular poker player, and in just one season of basketball, he bet nearly 2 million dollars on games. He still doesn’t have the foolproof winning formula figured out – even though that’s the ultimate forecaster’s promise – but that doesn’t mean I wouldn’t bet on him, or along with him. I have no interest in Vegas, but I can still apply Nate’s experience lessons about how to work hard, ask the right questions, and welcome failure as information.
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Transcript
SPEAKERS
David Ducho
Nate Silver (On the Edge, The Signal and the Noise, Baseball Between the Numbers) is a statistician, author, and founder of FiveThirtyEight. Nate joins the Armchair Expert to confer his youthful aspirations for a starter job as US president with a promotion to baseball commissioner, how code-switching as a gay man of his cohort can translate to success, and defying the odds by quitting his first job to engage online poker. Nate and Dax talk about knowledge statistical models as a hobbyist because academics don’t have the street smarts, the phenomenon of sore winners in tech, and the adage that the more shabbily you display up for your first meeting the more reliable you are. Nate explains that the dopamine felt especially by men during a winning streak is effectively a narcotic, how figures like Sam Bankman-Fried are kind of degenerate gamblers at heart, and why the new alpha move in industry is just to trust your gut.
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ThisyearOut has named Nate Silver its man of the year. This is very cool.
I had no tip Silver was gay. He's got a nice, interchangeably Jewish name, which, in the context of politics and journalism, just seemed normal. Therefore, I assumed he was "normal" for that job in most other ways: mid-50s, colorless, heterosexual.
But he's not. He's 34 and gay, which is awesome. The "Out 100" has, for most of its history, been dominated by performers (most of whom came out well into their careers) and activists working to promote gay rights -- professional gays or folks in gay professons. So now, at long last, we have a dude who's doing something unrelated to homosexuality who killed it this year. Fine for us, no?
Well, no, actually. "To my friends, I'm kind of sexually gay but ethnically straight," Silver says in the Out feature. He is also said to examine "gay conformity as perfidious as straight conformity."
"He recalls a series of flagpoles in Boystown in Chicago memorializing various gay Americans. 'There was one petite plaque for Keith Haring, and it was, love, "Keith Haring, gay American artist..." and I was like, Why isn't he just an American artist? I don't wan
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