★★★☆☆ There are three kinds of people…

On the Edge: The Art of Risking Everything

Nate Silver

I have mixed feelings about Nate Silver’s On the Edge: The Art of Risking Everything, because it is a mixed kind of book. On the one hand, I find Silver’s way of thinking: quantitative, probabilistic, epistemically humble, congenial. On the other, his need to make enemies is less congenial.

The premise of On the Edge is that people who live by managing risks form a community, which Silver Calls “The River”. His definition of the River (“River: A geographical metaphor for the territory covered in this book, a sprawling ecosystem of like-minded, highly analytical, and competitive people that includes everything from poker to Wall Street to AI. The demonym is Riverian.”) is broad and vague, but that is not really a problem, because the book consists mostly of profiles of hundreds of Riverians — by the end, you have a clear idea of who (in Silver's mind) the members are. Silver considers himself a Riverian, and it is clear that the Riverians are the Good Guys. It is far from clear to me that the River is actually a community in any world other than Silver's mind.

The first half of the book is about capital-G Gamblers, primarily poker players and people who bet on sports. (By the way, the subtitle “The Art of Risking Everything” is misleading. Although Silver profiles a few people who actually did risk everything, most Riverians would say it is stupid to risk everything, unless the “everything” at risk is limited in some way, e.g. “all your money”, or “your career”…) Silver earned his living as a professional poker player for a few years and is still a member in good standing of that community.

This first half is followed by a middle chapter entitled Chapter 13, even though it is not the thirteenth chapter of the book. It consists mostly of a list of “Thirteen Habits of Highly Successful Risk-Takers”.

Chapter 13 is followed by a series of chapters about, essentially, Silicon Valley’s preoccupations: Venture Capital, Effective Altrusim, etc. You might have thought Wall Street and financial markets would play a prominent role in a book about the quantitative aspects of managing risk, but in fact Wall Street is essentially absent from On the Edge. I suspect Silver considers finance professionals too stodgy to extend Riverian citizenship to. This last section of the book was, to my tastes, much less satisfactory than the first. Too much is reasonable but poorly supported opinions about subjects we don’t know enough about to treat with the analytic tools used in the first half of the book. Instead, those tools are used more metaphorically in this final section. Not to put too fine a point on it, it felt to me like a load of bullshit. As bullshit goes, it was pretty good bullshit, but still bullshit.

Finally, I come to one of my main sources of dissatisfaction. I mentioned that the Riverians are the good guys. The designation of good guys almost necessitates the designation of bad guys, and Silver does that.

The Village: The rival community to the River, reflected most clearly in intellectual occupations with progressive politics, such as the media, academia, and government (especially when a Democrat is in the White House). To Riverians, the Village is parochial, excessively “political,” and suffers from various cognitive biases. However, the Village has any number of cogent objections to the River, as outlined in the introduction. My coinage is not entirely original and bears some similarity to terms like “professional-managerial class.” Both the Village and the River consist overwhelmingly of “elites”; the vast majority of the population doesn’t fall into either group.

This definition is the source of my title: “There are three kinds of people…” -- to wit, the Riverians, the Villagers, and the non-elites who belong to neither community.

Silver’s definition manages the trick of being both long and imprecise. Who are the Villagers? You would think from his definition that East-Coast journalists would be included, but Silver himself is a journalist (however much he would like to disown his occupation) who lives in New York City. You would also think academics would be Villagers, but in fact professors are quoted extensively, and usually with approval. Moreover, many of them are explicitly identified as Riverians. This even includes some Princeton profs. Princeton is definitely an East-Coast university. Unlike the River, which is well-defined by hundreds of individual profiles, the Village appears in the text mainly in the form of a long series of drive-by straw-men. This me-against-the-world schtick becomes tedious.

I think, in fact, the Village would be most accurately described as “people Nate Silver argues with on X/Twitter”.

Someone is wrong on the Internet

So, in summary, there's good and there's bad. I liked it and am not sorry I read it. But it did not change the way I see the world.

On the Edge on Amazon

Goodreads review

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