The impressive statistician presents some useful insights in his latest book, but it suffers from trying to do too much and lacking a unifying theme.
A review of ‘On the Edge: The Art of Risking Everything,’ a new book by Nate Silver.
On the Edge: The Art of Risking Everything, by Nate Silver (Penguin Press, 576 pages, $35)
N ate Silver’s new book, On the Edge: The Art of Risking Everything, contains some useful insights but is ultimately a disappointment.
It’s a tour of what Silver calls “the River.” The River is a collection of like-minded individuals from the worlds of professional poker, Silicon Valley, and effective altruism, among others. The common threads uniting Riverians as disparate as blackjack card-counters and Silicon Valley titans such as Peter Thiel are a quantitative mind-set, a penchant for probabilistic thinking, and a high tolerance for risk. It’s not just a collection of people: “It is a way of thinking and a mode of life.”
Silver sees himself as part of the River. Known today as the election-forecast guru behind the models at FiveThirtyEight and now The Silver Bulletin, he began his journey on the River in the early Aughts, as a professional online poker player. The reason he got into politics in the first place is that Congress in 2006 passed the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act, which essentially made it impossible to exchange online poker chips for dollars. That piqued his interest in politics. “Having essentially lost my job,” he writes, “I wanted the people responsible for it to lose their jobs, too.” Republicans went on to lose both chambers of Congress in 2008, and Silver founded FiveThirtyEight that same year.
The concept of the River is somewhat amorphous, but you know it when you see it. Politically, the River leans libertarian: It is anti-woke, generally in favor of free-market capitalism, nonreligious, and future-oriented. (Perhaps the representative Riverian is the economist and podcaster Tyler Cowen.) The Village, on the other hand, is generally academic and moralistic, and it “has distinctly left-of-center politics associated with the Democratic Party” — think your average college president, or maybe Jen Psaki. The River is fiercely defensive of free speech as both a constitutional and a social norm, leading Riverians to be provocative and politically eccentric. On the other hand, because of its moralistic worldview, the Village often interprets controversial opinions as taboo and therefore enforces conformity. At the risk of belaboring the point: Elon Musk lives along the River, while Kamala Harris occupies the Village. Here’s an illustration of how the Village thinks, taken from Silver’s main hustle of politics and elections: Politicians, he writes,
see their victories as being morally righteous — not reflecting contingencies like butterfly ballots or the Electoral College or what the inflation rate happens to be, but rather as embodying the “right side of history” or even God’s will. They see every election as uniquely, existentially important — not drawn from some probability distribution of possible outcomes, . . . but its own special snowflake. They also don’t want to permit a whole lot of room for nuance or complexity or pluralistic and probabilistic thinking — it’s hard enough to keep your coalition together, so you don’t want people on your “team” arguing with one another. And they view the whole idea of betting on politics as cringey and morally suspect.
This comparison of the River and the Village is the most interesting and cohesive part of On the Edge. The problem is that after the book’s introduction (from which all the preceding quotes are taken), the purpose and thesis of the 559-page (including index) tome become much fuzzier.
The concept of On the Edge is intriguing. In theory, the book is a compilation of the bits of wisdom Silver has picked up from anecdotes passed down by Riverians with whom he’s spoken. Indeed, the bulk of the source material in the book is drawn from interviews with nearly 200 people, most of whom are wildly interesting and many of whom are quite famous in their own circles. For instance, Silver talked with the controversial Princeton philosopher Peter Singer, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, PayPal co-founder and Republican megadonor Peter Thiel, and even disgraced FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried (SBF). In addition to these household names, Silver talked with poker players, sports bettors, casino developers, pseudonymous bloggers, superforecasters, crypto investors, psychologists, venture capitalists, and even a sex therapist. On the Edge is packed with interesting stories and insightful commentary on everything from when to bluff in poker to whether human beings will be turned into paper clips by an unaligned AI.
That very diversity of perspectives is Silver’s downfall. On the Edge is not one fully formed and coherent book but a series of two or three half-baked ideas cobbled together under deadline pressure. This is not mere speculation: In the acknowledgments, Silver explains that he approached his editor with three ideas for a book — gambling, game theory, and AI. He admits that the book “wound up incorporating all three of those topics” (and that the deadline was extended more than once). The result is a fragmented narrative that is held together by the dubious through line of risk — that is, all the characters in the book are risk-takers in one form or another. Under that formulation, Silver tries valiantly to unite the book as a whole but ultimately fails.
The lack of coherence in On the Edge is best exemplified by its structure. It starts with an introduction, where the most interesting and insightful material lives, and then has a few chapters on poker, casinos, and sports-betting. Then there’s “halftime,” which consists of one chapter, confusingly labeled “Chapter 13” (it’s actually the fifth chapter), about the “thirteen habits of highly successful risk-takers.” This material could have been safely left on the cutting-room floor. Following this strange interlude is the second half of the book. In the chapters there, the saga of Sam Bankman-Fried’s downfall slowly unfolds. They are interspersed with a mini history of Silicon Valley, a pretty thorough overview of the effective-altruism movement, a competent explanation of cryptocurrency, and a deep dive into the existential risk of AI. The book culminates, again confusingly, with two conclusion chapters, one of which is titled “∞”.
When a book is this disjointed and covers such a wide range of topics, you’d stand to make good money betting on its failure.
This perplexing structure could be forgiven if the reader were rewarded for navigating such a maze, but alas, this is not the case. To be sure, there are some interesting nuggets throughout the book. For instance, Silver relates the surprising fact that, even though Texas Hold’em has been around for more than two centuries, it’s likely that up to 99 percent of all poker hands have been played in the past two decades (in large part because of online poker, where hands are dealt much faster). Later, after relaying SBF’s justifications of his own illegal activity, Silver has this memorable analysis:
The way SBF framed things to me, these were forgivable, tactical errors — like a poker player playing a hand suboptimally in a challenging situation. “You put those together and it went from, like, significant but manageable to significant and not manageable,” he said. “I just sort of lost track of it,” he told me at another point. In reality, of course, any of these would have been mission-critical mistakes, let alone all three put together. It was like a pilot saying, “Oh, the plane wouldn’t have crashed if only I hadn’t drunk three bottles of whiskey, punched out my copilot, and then told air traffic control to f*** off when they said the runway was closed.”
It’s also clear that Sam’s story was almost entirely b*******.
But ultimately, these anecdotes don’t add up to a compelling whole.
Beyond gripes about the book’s lack of coherence, a more substantive critique is that Silver’s conceptions of the River and Village are incomplete. It’s quite clear who populates the River: many Silicon Valley CEOs, professional gamblers, venture capitalists, most of the early adopters of Substack, etc. But the Village is much hazier. Silver argues that it is generally progressive, but where does that leave Republicans? Besides Peter Thiel, the only obviously Republican figure in the book is former president Donald Trump, whom Silver briefly ponders and then casts aside.
He writes that “if Trump is despised by the Village, he’s also not a member of the River,” in large part because of Trump’s failures in the casino business. But what about Senator J. D. Vance, Senator Mitch McConnell, or Governor Ron DeSantis? If any of these three figures read Silver’s description of people in the Village, they would surely reject the label. But they’re also clearly not in the River. And surely the Republicans who passed the aforementioned online-gambling law are not Riverians, either. Other than leaving open the possibility that, like Trump, they might “not [be] a member of the River,” Silver fails to address such obvious objections. Of course, if the River-vs.-Village dichotomy is purposefully incomplete, then Silver could deflect criticism by arguing that he’s talking about a certain subset of people. But On the Edge reads like an all-encompassing narrative with gaping holes that needed to be patched up.
Despite its flaws as a metaphor, the River can impart wisdom to readers. Thinking probabilistically is likely a better way of making decisions than just winging it. Especially in a time of excessive caution and helicopter parenting, we would do well to recognize the benefits of taking risks in our everyday lives. Perhaps most importantly, we should commit to free speech as a social — not just constitutional — norm.
But those insights can mostly be picked up by listening to Silver discuss his book on a few podcasts (I recommend his appearances on Conversations with Tyler and the Ezra Klein Show) or reading posts on his and other Riverians’ Substacks. As Kenny Rogers might say, you’ve got to know when to walk away — in this case, from On the Edge.