The River, the Village, and the Fort: Nate Silver's New Book, "On the Edge"

https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2024/08/13/the-river-the-village-and-the-fort-nate-silvers-new-book-on-the-edge/

by edward • 2 years ago

21 9 2 years ago

statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu

FrankWilhoit2• 2 years ago

The difficulty is that the people who appear to "thrive on uncertainty" are actually thriving on collateral damage.

gjm11• 2 years ago

Some of them, for sure. All of them? I don't buy it. Show your evidence.

Also ... how confident are you that there isn't just as much benefit-from-collateral-damage among people who thrive on certainty and stability? E.g., you might have noticed that The Rent Is Too Damn High, and that governments don't tend to pursue policies that would change that, and that plausibly one important reason is that they need the votes of property-owners who see their property as a stable, reliable source of income. That's not, on the whole, a risk-seeking group, but there's a good argument that they're making money off immiserating all the non-property-owners, which is "thriving on collateral damage" if anything is.

(Which is not to say that all property-owners, or all landlords, are bad people or anything. Nor are all tech investors, or all professional poker players. That's rather my point.)

gradschoolfail2• 2 years ago

You might want to further check with your Natenberg, maybe GP could have left out the “damage” in “collateral damage”, and strengthened “uncertainty” to “volatility”… but that wouldn’t be so poetic ;)

FrankWilhoit2• 2 years ago

I did not mean to imply that any group had a monopoly on indifference to collateral damage, or it on them. But it has become essentially universal and (to my mind) that is an important sign of devolution.

robg• 2 years ago

Nate’s take on Silicon Valley is that “to make all of this work, you need a symbiosis between two often-clashing personality types . . . risk-tolerant VCs [investors] . . . and “risk-ignorant founders.”

actionfromafar• 2 years ago

Haha, that's not symbiosis between VCs and founders!

The risk-tolerant VC has done this rodeo before, the risk-ignorant founders are discorded in droves by the wayside until the unicorn is found.

gradschoolfail2• 2 years ago

As memorably dramatized in the Inside Out movies, each of us is a sort of committee, and Nate’s portrayal of different people’s attitudes toward risk can perhaps give us a better understanding of our own incoherent selves and how this incoherence can be a strength.

Linking his own professional practice to psychotherapy…

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/07/movies/inside-out-2-thera...

layer8• 2 years ago

Here is another good review of the book: https://mattglassman.substack.com/p/book-review-on-the-edge-...

munchler• 2 years ago

Nate Silver was on Ezra Klein’s podcast recently to shill this book and it was surprisingly disappointing. I had previously thought of Silver as a careful, data-driven analyst, but he came across as an unrelatable tech bro vaguely defending Silicon Valley weirdness and MAGA tendencies. Not what I was expecting.

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/13/opinion/ezra-klein-podcas...

The River, the Village, and the Fort: Nate Silver's New Book, "On the Edge"

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