On the Edge
The Art of Risking Everything
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On the Edge
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Gesprochen von:
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Nate Silver
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Von:
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Nate Silver
Über diesen Titel
NAMED A MOST-ANTICIPATED BOOK OF 2024 BY FT, The Guardian, and The Sunday Times
From the New York Times bestselling author of The Signal and the Noise, the definitive guide to our era of risk—and the players raising the stakes
In the bestselling The Signal and the Noise, Nate Silver showed how forecasting would define the age of Big Data. Now, in this timely and riveting new book, Silver investigates “the River,” the community of like-minded people whose mastery of risk allows them to shape—and dominate—so much of modern life.
These professional risk-takers—poker players and hedge fund managers, crypto true believers and blue-chip art collectors—can teach us much about navigating the uncertainty of the twenty-first century. By immersing himself in the worlds of Doyle Brunson, Peter Thiel, Sam Bankman-Fried, Sam Altman, and many others, Silver offers insight into a range of issues that affect us all, from the frontiers of finance to the future of AI.
Most of us don’t have traits commonly found in the River: high tolerance for risk, appreciation of uncertainty, affinity for numbers—paired with an instinctive distrust of conventional wisdom and a competitive drive so intense it can border on irrational. For those in the River, complexity is baked in, and the work is how to navigate it. People in the River have increasing amounts of wealth and power in our society, and understanding their mindset—and the flaws in their thinking—is key to understanding what drives technology and the global economy today.
Taking us behind the scenes from casinos to venture capital firms, and from the FTX inner sanctum to meetings of the effective altruism movement, On the Edge is a deeply reported, all-access journey into a hidden world of power brokers and risk-takers.
* This audiobook edition includes a downloadable PDF of charts and a glossary of terms from the book.
PLEASE NOTE: When you purchase this title, the accompanying PDF will be available in your Audible Library along with the audio.
©2024 Nate Silver (P)2024 Penguin Audio
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Kritikerstimmen
“A clever look into a unique realm. An enlightening study of the people who play the game of risk and win.”—Kirkus Reviews (starred)
Das sagen andere Hörer zu On the Edge
Nur Nutzer, die den Titel gehört haben, können Rezensionen abgeben.Rezensionen - mit Klick auf einen der beiden Reiter können Sie die Quelle der Rezensionen bestimmen.
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Gesamt3 out of 5 stars
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Sprecher2 out of 5 stars
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Geschichte4 out of 5 stars
- Anonymer Hörer
- 19.12.2024
Contentwise a mixed bag (but with high highs)
I'm a bit torn about this book. As a fan of Nate's work (first at 538, then on his Silver Bulletin Substack) I was quite excited about it and looked forward to it even more following Paul Bloom's recommendation and positive review (whose opinion I value a lot).
Unfortunately, the book is a little less cohesive than I would have thought, jumping from topic to topic and bringing up and spending substantial time on anecdotes (e.g., the one on whether or not a poker player cheated in a televised game) that were not particularly relevant for the overall point of the book: framing a picture of a group of risk-takers who amass a lot of power and/or money by their tolerance for risk and analytical prowess. For anyone reading this who does not have a professional or recreational interest in poker, I'd go as far as saying that you can easily skip large parts of the gambling book section (e.g., chapters 2 and 3) as a lot of the text seems redundant or only scarcely related to the overall message of the book.
Then however the book takes a sudden turn in its "chapter 13" (not actually the book's 13th chapter) where almost every sentence is relevant towards describing what people in "the river" are like. This chapter - as well as his subsequent one on the founding and core values of Silicon Valley - are for me the highlight of the book and hugely insightful; in a sense what I'd wish the entire book to be.
The rest of the book is fun but buys a bit too much into what was trendy in 2023-24 (I'm not sure how well this part of the book will age) with several sections on Sam Bankman-Fried and some on Large Language Models. In some of these discussions, he exemplifies what I see as the downside of mostly interviewing river types claiming (without scientific evidence) that the adaptation of LLMs is probably what drove much of the recent growth in companies (I'm sure that's what Silicon Valley types want you to believe, but research on whether it aids productivity and quality of work is mixed - to my current understanding even for programmers who can code much faster now, it's so far a mixed bag given the large number of coding mistakes LLM ls tend to make) or that we experienced "the worst of all worlds" in regards to Covid (because according to Nate we undercut liberties and the economy while still having a lot of deaths - though he doesn't explore any literature and/or simulation studies of how other approaches would have worked out). Here traditional experts' opinions might have been a valuable counterweight. I'm also disappointed by him shortly mentioning but not fully addressing whether some people that succeeded in the river were mostly successful mostly due to random variance - that given the number of risk-takers some had to succeed. Reminded me a bit of a section from Nassim Taleb's "Fooled by Randomness" that describes how many stock traders (ostensivly river types) we'd expect to be successful merely due to luck, even if they're actual skill level is below chance level. All in all, I would have appreciated if Nate spend a bit more time on "anti river" and "pro village" arguments than he did; his own opinions are clear, but he didn't give the opposition a fair chance to argue.
For completness, I'll mention that there are also large sections on the potential existential risk of AI technology (e.g., the "Richter scale of human inventions"). They are well-written and interesting but don't tread different waters than what you could read in more specialized writings on the topic (except for maybe framing it in terms of risk/reward with the "river type" frame, and for presenting Nate's personal opinions on the topic, if you care about them).
Overall: Good content but I wish he a) killed some more of his (poker) darlings and b) had more of a singular vision rather than make it a collection of (his views on) random topics that vaguely relate to risk-taking (people).
Voice performance: Over time it gets better (he seems to get into the groove more in the later chapters and as a listener you also get used to his speaking) and it doesn't distract you anymore, but his vocal performance is overall below average (for Nate, let alone for a professional voice actor): Several sentences seem like first takes (e.g., he emphasizes the wrong word in a sentence) or miss liveliness (i.e., the text will - in characteristic Nate fashion - be written with some comedic edge but his delivery will be neutral / seemingly disinterested). I really don't understand why he didn't either a) spend time on making his performance casual fun like he speaks in his podcasts or b) hire a professional if he cannot devote that amount of time on this side-project.
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Gesamt5 out of 5 stars
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Sprecher5 out of 5 stars
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Geschichte5 out of 5 stars
- P K
- 08.11.2024
Sometimes unstructured but very inspiring
This book gives a tour of the risk taking landscape with many good examples. The last chapter had good thoughts on modern democracy.
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