On the Edge: The Art of Risking Everything

This book is great. Informative, deeply-researched, and fun to read. It’s the kind of book that has something interesting on every page. This is, by far, the best book I've read this year.The book is about a group of people Silver calls Riverians, after a river analogy he uses to structure the book. These Riverians come from across the political spectrum and are prominent in a wide variety of career fields—on Wall Street, in Silicon Valley, playing professional poker, advising casinos in Vegas, running Effective Altruism charities, and building crypto businesses.What they have in common is a mindset about risk—they embrace it—and an analytical framework for thinking probabilistically about, well, everything. They live in the world of expected value, marginal utility, game theory, and abstract models. And, in Silver’s view, they are becoming increasingly powerful in society. As tech leaders. As thought leaders. And as political influencers.In contrast to the Riverians are those with a risk mindset Silver calls The Village. Composed of a wide variety of people but with concentrations in government, academia, and the media, the Villagers are skeptical of markets, more likely to adopt partisan identities (especially center-left politics), more likely to focus on equality as a value and seek to constrain capitalism and meritocracy, and more like to view risk as something to mitigate.Villagers see The River mindset as too much unbridled capitalism and too little moral concern for the public good. Riverians see The Village as conformist and paternalistic political ideologues whose risk-aversion and culture war obsession are stifling progress on everything from technology to anti-poverty efforts.On the Edge is structured as a tour through the various worlds of the Riverians. The first half of the book is about gambling—the quintessential downriver activity. There are chapters on poker, sports betting, and the casino industry itself—and the people who are increasingly dominating these worlds through ever-more-sophisticated analytical tools.Those familiar with Silver’s short-form work will find his usual analytical skills on display here. But Perhaps the most surprising aspect of On The Edge is just how deeply personal it feels. If you read Silver’s wonderful first book, The Signal and The Noise, the writing style and the argument have an air of journalistic detachment. Not so with On the Edge, which often reads like a memoir. As it turns out, Silver is more cardplayer than election analyst, much more at home with the gamblers than the political pundits. He also breaks the 4th wall often; early on it’s somewhat jarring. There’s a Hunter S. Thompson gonzo quality to the story, Silver an omniscient narrator but also a participant-observer in an increasingly fantastical wonderland of poker games, casinos, and sportsbooks.The second half of the book goes both upriver—to the more respectable world of Silicon Valley venture capitalist, prediction markets, and the philosophies of Effective Altruism and Rationalism—and further downriver, where unbridled risk and temptation await in the world of cryptocurrency and other gray-market endeavors.The most surprising takeaway from On the Edge is how concerned Silver is about the direction of much of the world of The River. Those familiar with his recent public writing might think that the main villain of the book would be a Village-mindset risk-averse pseudo-expert type, maybe a partisan journalist or academic. Instead, the recurring danger of the book is the one built directly into the River. What if a bunch of hyper-rational successful risk-takers don’t sum to a collective meta-rationality? And what happens when the game isn’t poker or startup funding, but a global existential threat?This is an absolutely sprawling book that covers an insane amount of ground in-depth. The kind of project you can’t really imagine an editor greenlighting. It clocks in at almost 500 pages, but the sheer amount of content across so many domains makes it feel like double that. There are explainers, analysis, profiles, and commentary galore. You are going to learn a ton.Luckily, Silver’s breezy writing and engaging style make it an easy and fun read, not unlike his short-form writing online. Every chapter is substantively enjoyable, and each works as a stand-alone examination of a distinct topic. At many points, I literally couldn’t put it down. Often, the through-line of risk and the larger themes of politics and society are only lightly present, with the focus kept on the inherently interesting characters and worlds they inhabit. The reporting and analysis are top-notch.On the Edge also unconsciously captures this cultural moment almost perfectly. The stated through-line of the book is risk and the Riverian mindset, but an unstated theme is just how much of society has been transformed into fertile grounds for the application of analytics, and how much analytics have taken over in so many domains.

If you’ve read Nate Silver before, this is more is the same. I’ll love reading his technical descriptions. I come away from this book quite pessimistic about the future but it’s not like I had rose-colored glasses to begin with. This is more like a fun time spent with someone I mostly agree with articulating his argument in an entertaining manner. I enjoyed it and I’m somewhat sad it’s over.

I really enjoyed reading “On the Edge” and recommend it highly to others, irrespective of their interests, as it provides context for ongoing cultural wars and societal development.Silver does an outstanding job of providing a tour of the “River” (Silver’s word for a section of society that effectively views the world through expected value calculations) as he sets out to do at the outset of the book. But more importantly, I found him to be measured in his praise and criticisms of it, which allowed for a more thorough examination of its component parts.For some, this will be an articulation of beliefs and information that they inherently know. Yet, for others, this will represent an eye-opening account of how some of our society’s “different thinkers” view and engage with the world.Following this book, I’m interested in a deeper exploration of how the River interacts with the “Village” (what Silver calls the “ideological” or “identitarian” section of society, often seen as left-leaning academics and “coastal elites”), as well as a breakdown of the Village into its component parts. Namely, I’d want to know whether the global rise of populism in the last 10-15 years might be more “Village”-ish than one would think. My working thesis is that right-wing populism is a direct descendant of the Village with similar fondness for ideology and absolutism, but without the gloss of academic backing.

I read both "On the Edge" and "The Signal and the Noise" (2013) both good books and I highly recommend them for highlighting probabilistic thinking. Nate's books are well written for the risks and rewards in many areas, but he seems unaware of the methods I work with. Most of my career focused on training engineers, scientists and others to use specific statical methods for innovation and improvement of products and processes.The Glossary is very helpful in understanding terms, but one obvious error is the key term Variance. It is the square of standard deviation, not the square root and is used in models to quantify R-sq, the "% explained" by a model.Over 100 years ago, Sir Ronald Fisher, developed Design of Experiments (DOE) methods to improve crop yields over that are used at university experimental farms in every state. Nate downplays his accomplishments in The Signal and the Noise in favor of Bayesian methods. George Box incorporated the DOE methods in industry, profoundly separating signals from noises, but Nate only uses Box's quote "All models are wrong, but some are useful".Nate's graphics tend to be weak, and his writing could use some common methods (e.g. Fishbone diagrams for climate change) to condense his writing.

What a wonderful book on how much effort, risk and luck entwine to affect our world. From gambling to technology, this book will give you an in-depth view of things. If you ever wondered what it'd be like speaking with leaders like Thiel or Musk or MacAskill or Singer, this book is for you.I highly recommend getting it!

I'm not done reading, so can't speak of the content, but the quality of the paperback was crazy poor, with the cover just slightly thicker than the pages

The Indian philosopher Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj tell us to "stop attributing names and shapes to the essentially nameless and formless. Realise that every mode of perception is subjective."In this rambling and somewhat inchoate book, Silver seeks to nail jelly to a wall. He formulates a notion of (the) River, to, in his own words provide a "geographical metaphor for.....a sprawling ecosystem of like-minded, highly analytical and competitive people that includes everything from poker to Wall Street to AI." Nothing like attempting to cover all the bases.The book fails on a number of fronts. Nate Silver's concept of "Riverians" presents a paradox that undercuts the coherence of his argument. On one hand, Silver depicts Riverians as idiosyncratic outsiders, individuals who feel left out or estranged, which in turn fuels their competitiveness. This suggests a group defined by their unique perspectives and unconventional approaches—traits that would presumably resist rigid categorization.However, Silver simultaneously goes out of hois way to imposes a strict set of characteristics on these Riverians: they are, he tells us, highly analytical, probabilistic thinkers, skilled at decoupling problems from their context, and deeply engaged in quantifiable problem-solving. This list of traits seems to contradict the idea of Riverians as idiosyncratic outsiders, instead painting them as a homogenous group with a narrow, shared mindset.Further complicating this portrayal, Silver alludes to some Riverians displaying symptoms of autism or Asperger's syndrome, even quoting Simon Baron-Cohen to emphasize the variability within these diagnoses. Baron-Cohen's point—that two individuals with the same diagnosis may have nothing in common—clashes with Silver’s earlier attempt to define Riverians through a set of common traits. If Riverians are as diverse and variable as Baron-Cohen suggests, how can they be neatly categorized by a strict list of characteristics?This paradox in Silver's depiction of Riverians raises important questions about the validity and usefulness of his concept. Is it possible to reconcile the idea of Riverians as both idiosyncratic outsiders and members of a tightly defined group? Or does this contradiction reveal a deeper flaw in Silver's attempt to classify a diverse, complex set of individuals under a single label?To sum up, one feels that the following quote is most pertinent to our argument: “No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it is not the same river and he is not the same man.”

An amazing work of journalism wrapped in with a how-to guide on risk. A must read if you deal with risk (everyone)!

I am reading this book as part of a book club and am really struggling to get into it. It had great pre release reviews but most of our group have struggled to connect with it so far. Will keep persisting