On the Edge: The Art of Risking Everything by Nate Silver

On the Edge: The Art of Risking Everything

by Nate Silver

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Society & CultureTech & Future

"Few places in American life attract a broader cross-section of society," Silver writes of casinos, and the book opens at one in Hollywood, Florida. From there he maps the River, a community of poker players, venture capitalists, traders, sports bettors and crypto founders, and sets it against the Village, the warier establishment in academia, media and government.

Core ideas
  • River habits: Its people share comfort with numbers and probability, self-reliance and skepticism of conventional wisdom, and those habits increasingly shape big decisions.
  • The cautionary case: Sam Bankman-Fried shows what the River's appetite for risk looks like gone wrong.
  • Past the tables: About 200 interviews carry the book from gambling into effective altruism and AI, where the question becomes how you estimate existential risk.
Published2024
Pages576
ISBN9781594204128
ReadMar 2025

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