Like many others, I first discovered Nate Silver in the lead up to the 2016 election through his FiveThirtyEight website and podcast, which tracked the US election polls. And, as with the election cycle, I didn’t pay much attention to him in the intervening years. But in the leadup to the last election, I heard him interviewed on a couple of podcasts, talking both about the elections themselves, and his new book On the Edge: The Art of Risking Everything. He was more nuanced and interesting than I expected when talking about the US candidates, and I decided to take the plunge and see what the book was all about.
At some level, the title tells you everything – it’s a book about risk, and how to think about it. Silver divided the world into two types, the River and the Village. The Village is the (largely) liberal establishment, a space of conceptual consensus. It represents the status quo of power and ideas. The River is counter-cultural, or perhaps better described as counter-thinking. Members of the River don’t take the consensus for granted. They challenge given assumptions, and they are willing to take risks in defiance of those assumptions. Risk, to be clear, means thinking and acting probabilistically about potential outcomes, and rarely is it blind. The concept he explores the most is game theory as a mode for decision making in complex systems, and its impact on how to think about risk in relationship to other human decision makers.
In the book, Silver explores many stops along the River. The one he spends the most time on is poker, but also makes stops about AI, nuclear war, digital currency, venture capital, sports gambling and more. In each chapter, he digs into the personalities that can be found in the area being explored, how they evaluate and think about risk, and stories about the theme. He was a clear and engaging guide for ideas he explores, which I knew little about.
Not infrequently, Silver took long tangents that were interesting, but didn’t seem particularly relevant to the question of risk. He spent a long time on the personality of Sam Bankman Fried (well beyond how he thought about risk), and way too much time on a controversy that happened some years ago in the chess world. These were interesting curiosities, but seemed to say more about Silver’s interests than about the topic of the book.
By the end of the book it was clear that risk was the theme, but less clear that they cohered into the ‘river’ category, as a way of thinking about the world than Silver tries to suggest. That said, the book was engaging and interesting overall, and a helpful introduction to parts of our contemporary culture that, at least for me, are relatively unknown.
Just Because I Liked It:
- I love this conversation with Russia historian Stephen Kotkin. I think he may be more interesting than his reflections on Russian history!