SBSQ #18: Will wokeness bounce back?

Plus, college basketball models and Trump approval ratings are coming soon. And should you play like the computers say in poker?

Welcome to edition #18 of Silver Bulletin Subscriber Questions! You can leave questions for next time in the comments below. If I’m guessing right, this month’s SBSQ might beget as many comments as questions. But trust me, I sort through the monthly threads for actual questions, even when the comments get a little out of line. And if you’re thinking of getting way out of line …. please don’t: we’ve gotten some great questions lately, so let’s keep this civil.

NCAA basketball models and Trump approval ratings coming soon!

Before that, let me do a little roleplay as a traffic cop. We’re finally progressing on several long-term projects, with three things set to launch in the upcoming weeks:

1. The NCAA tournament model for the men’s and women’s brackets.

2. Related to this, Silver Bulletin College Basketball (SBCB) ratings for men’s hoops and possibly for women.

3. Our Trump approval rating dashboard.

The top-top-top priority is to publish NCAA tournament forecasts once the brackets are out. Selection Sunday is March 16. There’s actually a lot of data to process that won’t come out until the 16th, so I can’t get you an instant turnaround, but hopefully, around midnight on the 16th/17th for the men and then a day or two later for the women (their tournament starts later).

We’ve also always rolled up our own college basketball ratings as part of the composite of systems that we use for our tournament forecasts. But for some reason, I’ve never published them. There’s no good reason for this since they’re kind of cool. Hence, the forthcoming SBCB ratings. They’re mostly a souped-up version of Elo, but I’ve spent the past week working on improvements. Some long-term trends in college basketball are important to account for: programs are generally less dominant from season to season now than they once were, for instance. Each team now has a custom home-court rating, too. (Most teams that are reputed to have tougher home courts do, in fact, have a larger advantage, as do teams that play at high altitudes.) As a teaser, here’s a fully working beta version of the men’s SBCB ratings based on games played through Sunday night:

There’s also a Bayesian version in the works that accounts for teams' standing in human polls. We may or may not begin publishing SBCB ratings this month for women too — I thought there wouldn’t be enough time, but it turns out that AI greatly speeds up various annoying data processing tasks that are important for this sort of work. At the very least, we should be able to publish and regularly update both men’s and women’s SBCB ratings from early in the 2025-26 college season.

Meanwhile, the Trump approval ratings code is ready, but we’re working on backfilling the data for previous presidents and tinkering with the data visualizations.

Oh, and I’m moving apartments.¹ And we’re hiring for a new position, Assistant Sports Analyst, although you have until March 25 to apply for that.

So basically, a lot is happening in March, but I don’t know exactly what order it will happen in. Among other things, that means regular essay-type newsletters might be a little light for the next few weeks. I’d like to write something about the 5th anniversary of COVID hitting American shores — and I have a bottleneck of AI-related ideas — but those may need to be triaged.

Still… it might be an opportune moment to subscribe? Full disclosure: last year we got a ton of one-month-and-dones for the tourney, so we’ll probably temporarily increase the price of new monthly subscriptions once the NCAA model is out on the 16th or 17th. We have no plans to touch the annual pricing, and preexisting monthly subs always keep the same price. However, the current price will still be in effect this week:

In the meantime, I’ve got answers to three subscriber questions for you this month:

• What do you think of Trump's lawsuit against Ann Selzer?

• Will wokeness make a comeback?

• Should you play GTO or expolitatively in poker?

What do you think of Trump's lawsuit against Ann Selzer?

Dan Lear asks:

Has Nate commented on Trump’s lawsuit against Ann Selzer? If not, would love Nate to give his thoughts on the suit. https://www.thefire.org/news/fires-defense-pollster-j-ann-selzer-against-donald-trumps-lawsuit-first-amendment-101

I hadn’t commented at the time Dan filed his question, but here’s what Eli and I said in updating our pollster ratings a couple of weeks ago:

Selzer, as you may know, is being sued by Trump, an action we think is deplorable on free speech grounds, as well as in its failure to understand the difficulties of polling.

I’m not sure there’s too much more to say for now — we were hoping to do a deeper, reported dive on this, but people are understandably reluctant to talk given the lawsuit, and now we’re knee-deep in other work.

At the time Selzer’s poll came out showing Kamala Harris leading in Iowa, I said that it would “probably be wrong” — although I don’t think I expected it to be entirely as wrong as it was. But that she was brave to stick to her guns for that exact reason, avoiding the herding that so many other pollsters partake in. Selzer filed a motion to dismiss the case last week, and here’s hoping the courts will defend the rights of journalists and pollsters to seek out the ground truth.

One thing I’d add is that dishonest people just seem to be constitutionally incapable of accepting that others can do honest work — or even make honest mistakes. Selzer made a mistake — she was counting on letting the data speak for itself, an approach that worked spectacularly well for her in the past — rather than adjusting for the fact that Democrats are now often more likely to respond to surveys than Republicans. For instance, the poll would have been more accurate if she’d weighted by how people had voted in the past. But that approach has also caused problems and was considered an undesirable shortcut until recently. The goal-standard, “hands off” approach to polling is probably now dead, but we didn’t know that in advance.

This is a woman who can think for herself, though, and sadly that’s becoming rarer and rarer in anything even vaguely adjacent to politics.

Will wokeness make a comeback?

Michael Cameron asks:

Q18: Trump has Pushed hard against DEI. Leaving out ethical considerations, Is there any republican risk? Those most supportive of DEI are not his core base. Is this the 2025 version of Kevin Phillips's politics summary, "The whole secret of politics is about knowing who hates who."

I keep a “rainy day list” of ideas for the newsletter meant to provide some inspiration for slow news days. (Of course, there haven’t been many slow days lately). It’s rare that I actually draw from this list (it’s always easier to write something that feels fresher). But one idea that lingered on the list last year was a hot take that a Trump win would actually be a victory for “wokeness” because of the backlash that would inevitably ensue. And I’m glad I didn’t write up the story because I’d no longer bet on that.