On the Edge by Nate Silver
an election era ZIRP book
ON THE EDGE is a book by Nate Silver who is an American statistician, writer and poker player who is best known for his election predictions. Every four years, he becomes the leading expert on American politics, placing bets and making predictions about who will win the U.S. Presidential Elections based on his models. He first rose to stardom with the 2008 election, where his model correctly predicted the outcomes of 49 states. In 2012, he correctly predicted all 50 states. In 2016, Silver’s model gave Trump a 29% chance of winning, which was far higher than other pollsters. Thus, despite not predicting the outcome, he earned credibility for going against other pollsters and acknowledging that Trump had a potential path to victory. In 2020, he gave Biden an 89% chance of winning and proved correct again.
This book was published in August 2024 and I read it in the lead up to the elections in November, hoping to glean some insights from a former professional poker player about risk and predictions. I had previously read another book in this genre which was Superforecasting by Dan Gardner but that didn’t go well as I found it dull past the introduction. As I got into Silver’s book I realised that it wasn’t just about politics and making predictions based on polling data, turns out it was a book leading up to and after the ZIRP during the pandemic. It was more so a guide on Nate Silver’s life and his experiences dealing with risk and the people who are experts at it. The book is filled with stories from not just Vegas but also Silicon Valley, Wall Street, Effective Altruism (EA), Sam Bankman-Fried (SBF) and more. Silver frames these decisions — from the World Series of Poker tournament tables to SBF’s Bahamas penthouse — through the lens of expected value (EV).
This book reminded me a lot of Going Infinite by Michael Lewis which was published in 2023 which explored the turbulent rise and fall of SBF and FTX from an insider’s perspective1. It also covers the same time period and examines SBF as its main character. While in Lewis’ book he is the main character, Silver explores the character of SBF as a sort of final form living being that exhibits the values of risk takers he espouses throughout the book. SBF is the ultimate embodiment of whatever is wrong with the mindset and in my view Silver explains SBF a lot better than Lewis despite both of them having interviewed and talked to the guy before his whole scheme fell apart.
As I was reading this book, I couldn’t help but think that I had to finish this book by election day or else I was not going to finish this book. This book was very much focused on “The Current Thing” and the only reason I managed to finish this was because of how much attention Silver was getting in the lead up to the election. It also helped that during the last few months of the election, various polls, models and public prediction markets were in a tie between Kamala and the Donald helping lend more attention to every word that Silver wrote in his substack.
Eventually the day before election day, Nate Silver’s much awaited final forecast for the election gave Trump and Harris an almost equal chance of winning the Electoral College (50.015% for Harris, 49.985% for Trump) which was absolutely hilarious to witness on Twitter as everyone was losing their minds and meme’ing him for basically predicting a coinflip. Anyways, enough about the time period in which I read this book — what did I actually learn from this book?
The main idea that Silver introduces and constantly references throughout the book is the idea of The River vs The Village. He describes it like this:
The place where I fit in is what I call “the River”. It’s a place for people who are very analytical but also highly competitive. The archetypal activity in the River is poker. I’d been a professional poker player from 2004 to 2006, and the first trip I took by plane after the pandemic was to a casino in Florida — which was every bit as much of a shitshow as you’d expect — to play in a World Poker Tour event.
There are other communities in the River, though: Silicon Valley, Wall Street, sportsbetting, crypto, even effective altruism, all of which are covered extensively in the book. And I found I had a lot in common with these people too, even if I sometimes disagree with their politics. There are traits like decoupling, contrarianism and a high risk tolerance that I share with the River, for better or worse. And these seem to be correlated with extremely high-variance outcomes: tremendous success or tremendous failure (as in the case of Sam Bankman-Fried, who is sort of the antihero of the book).
The rival community to the River is what I call the Village. This term is more familiar: it’s basically the liberal establishment. Harvard and the New York Times; academia, media and government. The Village is politically progressive and, I would argue, increasingly partisan — though it can also be highly competent and it’s pretty good at winning elections.
Silver uses this River vs Village framework to structure what is essentially a blog-post-style narrative covering the past two decades of American River lore from poker in the early 2000s all the way up to OpenAI and AGI and beyond. While the book is fascinating, its biggest flaw is that it reads like an overly long blog post. The frustrations of reading a “very long blog post” become apparent in the way it meanders.
The adage that “this book could’ve been a blog; this blog could’ve been a tweet” rings painfully true. Though it’s a fun read, Silver could have made the book more timeless by avoiding shallow blurbs and the blogging tone that will make it feel dated very quickly. The concepts he explains are interesting, but the self-help-style writing undermines their depth. While it makes complete sense given his background as a blogger and journalist, it was nonetheless disappointing.
Overall, Silver’s examination of risk-taking culture in The River was a fascinating read and it’s an interesting perspective on what is going on at The Edge. It’s an obvious read for those who want to indulge in some nostalgia for the chaos of ZIRP or relive gambling vices from the last two decades but there’s also some value here for those who want to learn more about the intersection of forecasting, gambling and tech culture. Sure, there’s meandering prose but it’s worth it. It’s a great blog post.
Funnily enough, I read the book when it was first published and wrote a detailed review of it going through the main points but decided not to publish because I thought it was way too harsh on Lewis. I’ve tried to rewrite it a dozen times to publish but think it reflects badly on me and can’t figure out a way to get my point across without seeming bitter and emotional. So it’s just stuck in the drafts forever now.