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On The Edge of Glory Disconnected Thoughts on Nate Silver’s New Book
TLDR/Judgment: Nate Silver’s latest falls flat in a pale imitation of the kind of thing that is done on the Rat-Adjacent internet. He plods through soft-rock covers of Moldbug, SA, Big Yud on his way to no particular conclusions. Nate strikes me as a man without a country, who doesn’t know who his friends and who his enemies are, able only to observe and unable to understand changing.
I’ve been a Nate Silver fan since the PECOTA days, so I won’t pretend to total neutrality. Nate is, to be simple, my kind of dude. I bought his new book on a trip to the beach and just finished it. I enjoyed it more than my thoughts here will probably imply, but the pop-sociology and science here just doesn’t add up to a cohesive thesis. I’lll comment that I’ve gotten addicted to poker, again, as a result of reading it, evidence of its infectious joy. But the core thesis of the book is so thoroughly muddled, that I’m left agreeing with Hanania that a lot of books could be better as blog posts.
This Would Have Been Better as an Email
At core I agree with Hanania, a lot of nonfiction books I read today seem like blog posts that have been collected, or a special series of blog posts or podcast episodes that have been collated into a book. Much of it has to do with consumer spending habits. Spending on books is in decline, but many consumers (your humble commenter included) will rarely if ever spend money on a blog, but will spend money on a book quite happily. I’ve rarely subscribed to premium on a podcast or substack, and when I have I’ve nearly always unsubscribed within a month or two disappointed with the cost vs the premium content I got access to. Occasionally I’ll get talked into subscribing, but my net spend is pretty low, and to be honest I feel like kind of a dope when I do it, like I’m wasting money. I think it’s just hard for one or a few content producers to make enough standard content to attract subscribers, and then squeeze out enough premium content to make subscribing worth it. On the other hand, at this point in my life, I’m actively happy to spend money at my local small bookstore, I feel good about spending money on a book to support the store, and I’m happy to buy one from a writer I already like. Meanwhile, my subscription to Audible means I end up buying one audiobook a month, and I’m happy to buy something from a creator I like. Perfect example would be Karina Longworth’s Seduction, which was essentially identical to a slightly-longer season of her podcast You Must Remember This, covering similar topics in a similar way. I was happy to buy it, I love Longworth’s podcast and want to support her work, and enjoyed it; even though I’ll probably never pay on her Patreon for the main podcast. So the phenomenon of books that feel like blog posts, for me, ties back to customer willingness to pay for books vs blog posts. I’d be more likely to buy a physical Scott Alexander or Richard Hanania. This strategy makes sense even if you’re already making good money on your premium substack, as the existence of some subset of customers that will buy the book but not the podcast gives you a chance to hit more customers; I’d also imagine that for example Seduction sold well to people who read every book about Howard Hughes who might never have heard of her podcast.
Overall, this book might just not be meant for me, or other Mottizens, in that it is an intro course to so much that I already know about, Effective Altruism and the Trolley Problem and the idea of Expected Value. But as is, I just don’t think it did enough to justify its efforts.
Describing the Elephant
Which brings us back to Silver and On the Edge. This doesn’t feel like Silver’s online work, Silver has always been more small scale and topical in his blogging. But it feels like someone’s blog posts, maybe because of the core conceit of the book, and how it fits into other blogs I’ve read over the years from Moldbug to SA. It felt like a riff on an internet conversation that happens all over the DR and rat-adjacent internet.
Silver’s core thesis is that one can distinguish between two school of thought in American industry and intellectual life: the River and the Village. As near as I can tell, the River consists of Risk Takers; Silver labels everyone from Wall Street traders to professional poker players to sports gamblers to US Army generals and astronauts. The Village is largely coterminous with the Liberal Establishment, the Cathedral, the Blue Tribe elite, all the other terminology that has been mooted around to talk about the media/academia/Democratic Party policy complex. Silver identifies himself as a “Riverian” (a rather unfortunate neologism), while identifying most of those who criticized his election forecasts as Villagers.
The Village is portrayed as more risk-averse. And this is my first problem with Silver’s thesis: one of the archetypal activities of the Village is electoral politics (largely from the D ballot) and nothing is a bigger risk than electoral politics. The average state-house candidate in a coastal-urban state is spending thousands of dollars, and months of their time, on what is often at best a fifty/fifty proposition. This is making bets on a level that would gag a professional poker player, not just the money but the time and the reputation; you risk not just monetary loss but potential disgrace and embarrassment. You’re risking making your family a laughingstock. Friends of mine who ran for local positions, got tangled up in school board politics about trans kids in bathrooms and CRT; you risk not just your money spent running, but that some portion of your neighbors thinking you’re a transphobic nutcase obsessed with genital testing, or another portion thinking you’re in favor of boys committing rape in the girl’s bathroom! The risk goes for safe seats just as well as for contested ones, where the result in the general is already determined then the politics reverts to the primary. Where the primary is fixed by the local party machine, the politics reverts back to maneuvering for years prior to the seat opening up. If you want to be a judge, or a city councilman, or a mayor, you’re often spending years sucking up to the right people, going to the right parties, giving money to the right committees. That’s a series of investments, long term slow bets that might never pay off, that would look absurd on any VC spreadsheet. Similar Villager occupations like Academia and Media are positions that one reaches against vast odds (leaving aside nepotism) with enormous odds of failure, and extremely high variance between successful outcomes. A successful hedge fund investor might hit a few 100x deals and might lose 1x, a popular writer or musician hits, what, 1000000x what an unsuccessful writer or musician gets?
Meanwhile, some of the model Riverians* he cites strike me as rather weak in their risk tolerance or in their calculation of expected value. US Army generals get where they got not through bold risk taking, but mostly through careerism and political maneuvering, though perhaps you could cite their risk-averseness as the problem with US Military performance in the past sixty years. Maybe we need to increase upside for great generals, rather than putting them in situations where the upside to success is largely identical to while the downside to apparent failure is large.He cites Bill Ackman’s twitter tantrums about supposed academic anti-semitism as symbolic of the conflict between the River and the Village; I can think of nothing more Villager (collectivist, tribal, risk averse) and less Riverian (individualistic, analytical, risk neutral) than advocating for your ethnic and tribal interests to be privileged over those of others. Nate doesn’t really talk about Idpol, and where he does reference it he associates it with the Village, but Ackman (and Trump to some extent) are clearly engaging in classic Idpol plays, just for a different team than the Village.
The softness in the categorization, along with the way that Silver’s categories overlap and intersect with other versions, gives me suspicion that we’re dealing with the parable of the blind men and the elephant. Silver’s Village is very like SA’s Blue Tribe, Moldbug’s Cathedral, the various Republican conceptions of the Liberal Establishment and the Woke or of Cultural Marxism, even elements of Richard Florida’s Creative Class. Every version gropes towards a vision of the Them, this great other that is suffocating, strangling the writer. They can feel this out group out there, they can feel Them, but they can’t see Them, they can’t properly describe Them, even if they think they can. The way this out group becomes such a potent Them, the way they describe some things exactly the same but others completely differently, the way it includes or excludes those the writer and his friends, tend to tell me that none of them are exactly accurate, rather that all are grasping at some aspect of the Elephant, and none are really describing it. SA and Yarvin and Silver all want Sillicon Valley in their friends, and outside the Them. Most MAGA Republicans very much categorize Sillicon Valley elites as the core of the Them! Alexander, Yarvin, Silver, and Florida are all Smart Guys, so the fact that they keep trying to come up with a new concept to describe what is largely the same concept rather than building off of each other should tell us that they don’t think the concept has been properly described yet.**
Silver’s River, in turn, has more in common with SA’s Grey Tribe, Moldbug’s Dark Elves, and other elements of Florida’s Creative Class. While Yarvin talks of most people being Hobbits, Silver doesn’t make room for most people at all in his worldview. It might simply be that he doesn’t intend the book to be all encompassing, but at times it feels weird that his map doesn’t include anything outside of these two power centers. Where are the Mountains, or the Deserts, or the Plains? He shares with Florida and SA a tendency to smuggle into his classification system a glorification of a group that he identifies with, places free from the flaws of the rest of the hierarchy. It’s unclear if The River is a classification, or an achievement. At times Silver seems to treat it as a qualification, saying Trump “doesn’t quite make it” on several occasions. So to some extent, it feels as though Silver kicks you out of the River if you lose on too many bets, which is obviously problematic to Silver himself as he points out how randomness can cause even a skilled Poker player or sports gambler to go through long cold streaks. It also calls out a glaring blindspot:
The Only Game in Town
Inasmuch as there is a clear concept at the heart of The River, I’d say that Silver identifies it as a focus on Expected Value, the River is risk-neutral on postive EV bets. If you’re ruthlessly thinking about finding the odds, and happy to make a bet that has only a 5% advantage making it +EV, then you’re a Riverman. Nate’s assumption is that the games are completely fair, if random in nature. Where the odds are unfair or predictably -EV such as slot machines, it is predictably unfair.
There’s one incident which is discussed in the book in which a woman may have cheated on a poker stream. She made an incredibly lucky move, causing her opponent to lose a lot of money to her. As a result, many thought that she cheated. No one ever made it clear exactly how she supposedly cheated, or why, merely that they were certain she had done so because otherwise her actions were irrational. Evidence free, the accusations ultimately flounder, Nate lands on the alternative explanation that she forgot what was in her hand. But I think the implication was that she cheated by knowing what was in her opponents’ hand, and reacting accordingly.
What Nate doesn’t stop to consider, is why he assumes the cards were dealt at random. Why one would go on a poker stream on the internet, or watch one, and assume that it is all fair and on the up-and-up. What stops your host from stacking the decks, marking the cards subtly, rigging the whole room with actors like The Sting to take your money? This grimly appears in the section on VC money, where frauds like Theranos or WeWork are hand-waved as a cost of doing business. Oh, sometimes somebody steals a few billion, but it's fine as long as the whole system keeps rolling along.
Nate’s system can’t conceive of systematic cheating. We get an extensive view of sports gambling, but only the vaguest glance at the idea of cheating. Consider: Kyle Juszczyk, fullback for the 49ers, was a popular prop bet at +/- 4.5 yards receiving Week 1 on Monday night against the Jets. The theory was that Juice was quite likely to get a few extra targets with Christian McCaffrey out for the game, and 4.5 is really low, just one reception could easily break that. But 4.5 is also so low that it would be comically easy for just a few actors to force Juice to get the yards. If Shanahan or Brock Purdy decided to fix that bet, not the game just that prop bet, they could call a few plays designed to get the ball to Juice, and get him the yards pretty easily. Hell, if Saleh from the Jets and a couple linebackers on the defense decided they wanted to give Juice 10 yards, they could leave him open pretty easily. Juszczyk would finish with 2 receptions for 40 yards, winning the bet easily.
He spends a lot of the end of the book examining SBF and FTX, and how overconfident EV calculations about the unknowable are dangerous. But never does he consider the base-rate of unknowability that underlies the simple games he loves. Sports betting lines are no match for a career backup in the NBA with a "sore" knee. Online poker counts on code you can’t see to guarantee fairness, as you play against people you can’t even really prove exist; it could just as easily be a sophisticated slot machine pretending to be an online poker game while slowly taking your money.
Silver tries to cite NFL players as Riverians, but it falls flat again. Football players aren’t making +EV calculations in their decision making, or they never would have dedicated themselves to football in high school and college, knowing that the odds of making it to the NFL after college are just 1.6% while the odds of suffering a chronic injury as a D1 athlete are over 50%. (This calculus probably alters with NIL deals but I don’t follow college sports enough to really say). Rather than taking the odds, NFL players make their own odds. One of the paradoxes of the Moneyball revolution in sports, is that while the analytics are often very useful for analyzing the professional game, every player who arrives in the professional game did so by ignoring the analytics. The core axiom at the heart of most analytical approaches to sports management, the intuitive false hope that is called out over and over again as the core of “dumb” sports fandom is that players don’t really change outside of decline. Analytics is a world of entropy. Players don’t reliably tweak their swing, improve their plate approach, find a new pitch, get in the Best Shape of His Life in the off season, etc. Those stories are the chaff in the mill of traditional sports journalism, and the constant chatter of WIP sports radio call ins sure that if the coach just played this other player who looked good in limited time…
But no player gets to the pros by accepting things as they are. Every player who makes it to the Show believed that he was different, special, and he did change when he needed to. He did get in The Best Shape of His Life, he did adjust his swing or learn a new pitch, he did improve. He did exactly what they said you can’t really do.*** They, by definition, did not accept the odds. Dumb money can drive out smart money. If people are willing to take -EV odds, for reasons outside your model, then you’ll never get the edge you need to make +EV bets. This is the case in many risky professions, acting or athletics or politics, you have to take the long odds, they’re the only game in town.
And of course that brings us to Silver’s most famous project: election prediction. Nate spends a lot of time trying to defend his record on election modeling, pointing out that his “edge” over other models would be huge for a sports gambler or a hedge fund, even if he can’t predict with 100% accuracy. But how useful is it compared to the ability to steal an election? The polls all become so much noise if the vote counts aren’t real, just like calculations figuring out the correct number of yards that Kyle Juszczyk will run after catching a pass from Purdy becomes noise if the team decides they want him to get those points or if they don’t want him to get those points. This is a massive blindspot for his project, and inasmuch as it is coherent for the entire Riverian concept. Positive and negative EV assertions can only be reached by creating a closed universe, analogous to a poker game
Leaders don’t accept polls and determine a +EV path through them. That’s the path of the risk averse, the noise before defeat. Leaders don’t accept the facts, they change them. Trump didn’t accept the issue polling, he changed it. Tariffs were almost dead as a policy tool in a world where the Ds and Rs agreed on free trade, Trump has moved the needle to where the question isn’t whether tariffs will be imposed, it is how many and against whom. Problems are changeable, and then the polling will follow.
And of course leaders and sports stars don’t accept the rules. “If you ain’t cheatin’, you ain’t tryin’!” Silver can cite to his polls all he wants, and he can try to model them to reality, but they’re little use unless we grapple with the realities: examining the fundamentals of the race doesn’t matter if voters don’t really believe in reality anymore. If the same people look at the same data and see a good economy and a bad economy, what can economic indicators tell us? And if there were widespread cheating, how would Silver ever know? Eventually he’d just adjust the model to show a shift in the vote to mirror the persistent cheating, and have a good enough model, and be satisfied. But that wouldn’t get us much of anywhere here in the real world.
*One of my minor quibbles with Silver: I feel like he does the woke-writer thing of shoehorning in “diverse” characters wherever he can. He’ll say openly that most of his Riverdwellers are male, and hint that they are disproportionately white and asian in many cases; but his examples are plucked disproportionately from women for the group, and his hypotheticals are often female. Just enough to be noticeable, and sticks out to me a little.
**An alternative interpretation is that Silver is engaging in Hidden Power Levels, utilizing what is largely ripped from Yarvin or SA, but not acknowledging their influence to avoid being stoned by association with them.
***This is why fitness is, at some level, inherently associated with Rightism and individualism, by definition anyone who has achieved some level of fitness has personally put in effort and overcome adversity through hard work, in a visceral way, no one else could do the work for you.
Except that he has never actually cared about the election itself. He’s not interested in who wins. What he does is rather like a sports betting oddsmaker— he wants a model that reliably matches with the votes on Election Day so he can tell people who will win. He wants to tell you who wins the electoral Super Bowl, he doesn’t want to understand the game of football, or how the teams are winning.
The neo-reactionary crowd are not trying to tell you who wins the election. They’re trying to understand how the power dynamics work in American politics. They’re interested in the Laws of Power and War as they apply to the inner circle of American elites. Predicting an election wouldn’t impress them, though they’re often very interested in how power is gotten and how the cathedral shapes public opinion.
I suspect the public tends to use informal measures as they always have. If you’re going shopping and things cost more, that’s inflation and probably a sign of a bad economy. If you know of people getting laid off, again, that’s where people get their idea of a good or bad economy. The indicators that are used by silver and other prognosticators are very much lagging indicators because unlike prices at grocery stores or people in a given social circle getting laid off, they’re aggregate statistics and only released quarterly. To be blunt, by the time unemployment is officially up by enough for the economists to see it, it’s been long since noted by the public. I don’t think that’s distrust of official figures, just a reality of the system. He’s using numbers that come out quarterly. The public is using observation of things they see around them.
He's pretty clear on his blog that he wants Kamala to win, though.
It's true. He's been relentlessly pro-Kamala. But I think it's strange. He's trying to do that thing where he says "I'm a Democrat", but then he mostly criticizes Democrats.
If he was brutally honest with himself, he'd be a Trump voter. But that would entail losing his membership to the college of elites. Liberals would ceremonially remove his books from their shelves to avoid contagion. People would spit on the ground before they say his name. Etc...
So he has to stan for Kamala. If he wasn't a public figure, he'd probably be here in the Motte with the rest of us lowlifes.
As Upton Sinclair said "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his
salarysocial standing depends upon his not understanding it."It's definitely tied to his social circles, which have been largely inherited from legacy media.
I thought his departure from 538 was going to be his redpill moment. He's still bitter about it and it comes up every now and again in his substack. I think the fact, however, is that 9/10 of the people he regularly personally interacts with are multi-generational PMC types soaked in deep inky Blue Tribe.
If you do something that alienates 90% of the people you care about, your own identity is going to take a shot. When you start fucking with people's self-constructed identities, you can get wild results.
Yeah we can play at being dissidents on this forum but it’s another thing entirely to actually be one as a public figure. The amount of shit you have to take is just off the charts. I wouldn’t do it for any amount of money.
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