On the Edge: The Art of Risking Everything

by Nate Silver

That’s what Coates’s book The Hour Between Dog and Wolf is about.

Take Karikó, for example. Despite her persistence in pursuing mRNA research, she had no illusions that it was certain to work out. How could she, when she’d spent most of her career in risk-averse academia—a place more concerned, she thought, with getting the next grant than with inventing technologies that actually helped people—and

Many of the distinctive traits of Silicon Valley—from the increasing openness of psychedelic drug use, to the tolerance for difficult founders, to the tendency of VCs to pontificate on political issues—reflect a lack of fear of looking stupid.

the Village, my term for the cluster of intellectual occupations in government, media, and academia that are concentrated in the eastern United States and typically associated with progressive politics.

I asked Swisher why tech leaders like Thiel and Musk are so obsessed with their media coverage. She didn’t need much time to consider her answer. “It’s because they’re narcissists. They’re all malignant narcissists,” she said.

Sebastian Mallaby, the author of an excellent book about Silicon Valley called The Power Law, thinks that in certain respects it is an exceptionally conformist place.

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The Village also has a perception problem with the broader American public—even before the congressional hearings, trust in higher education was plummeting.

Particularly not in the Village, where ostracization (or if you prefer, “cancellation”) is considered the ultimate punishment.

That included taking the train down to Princeton one day to meet with Singer, where we spoke over a vegan lunch at one of the university cafeterias.

The Manifest conference was also one of the last reporting trips that I made for this book. And it confirmed for me that the River is real—not just some literary device I invented. It’s more likely to (ahem) manifest itself in some places than others, such as Las Vegas or in the San Francisco Bay Area. But these same forecasting nerds I saw at Manifold had kept popping up in different contexts elsewhere in the River. I knew a lot of people there who had become sources or friends (or both). I knew the in-jokes and the lingo. The conference didn’t quite feel like my backyard—I still prefer Downriver with the poker players, who tend to be a little more competitive and a little more street-smart.

my dad is an academic, a professor of political science, and I had even lived in Stanford for a year as a preteen when my dad took a sabbatical there.

Kelly was more in the midcentury archetype of John von Neumann—a polymathic genius who also liked to have a good time. A heavy drinker and smoker who died of a stroke at age forty-one, Kelly also had a passion for predicting the outcome of football games.

torn. I think AI x-risk is a question on which we ought to have a lot of epistemic humility;

Ursula K. Le Guin wouldn’t have liked the River. “The rationalist utopia is a power trip,” she wrote—“an either/or situation as perceived by the binary computer mentality.”

So I’ll close this book with a peace offering from the River to the Village—an effort to meet in the middle.

The correlation coefficient is a statistical measure of correlation on a scale of -1 (perfectly uncorrelated) to +1 (perfectly correlated).

Martingale: A system in which you continually bet more until you win, e.g., doubling the size of your wager on every spin of the roulette wheel until the ball lands on red. Martingale bets are -EV; the problem is that while you’ll usually win a small amount and then quit, you’ll occasionally lose a huge amount when you go on a losing streak and bust your bankroll.

(The) River: A geographical metaphor for the territory covered in this book, a sprawling ecosystem of like-minded, highly analytical, and competitive people that includes everything from poker to Wall Street to AI. The demonym is Riverian.

(The) Village*: The rival community to the River, reflected most clearly in intellectual occupations with progressive politics, such as the media, academia, and government (especially when a Democrat is in the White House). To Riverians, the Village is parochial, excessively “political,” and suffers from various cognitive biases. However, the Village has any number of cogent objections to the River, as outlined in the introduction. My coinage is not entirely original and bears some similarity to terms like “professional-managerial class.” Both the Village and the River consist overwhelmingly of “elites”; the vast majority of the population doesn’t fall into either group.

Wordcel: A meme, popularized by roon, that plays on “incel” to refer to people who are “good with words” but bad at abstract mathematics. The term is often pejorative, used to describe people like journalists (and writers of nonfiction books), whose skills are becoming less valuable. The more left-brained counterpart to a wordcel is a shape rotator.