375. Nate Silver with Clayton Aldern: On the Edge

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What can professional risk-takers — poker players and hedge fund managers, crypto true believers and blue-chip art collectors— teach us much about navigating the uncertainty of the twenty-first century?

In the bestselling The Signal and the Noise, statistician Nate Silver showed how forecasting would define the age of Big Data. Now, in his timely and riveting new book, On the Edge, Silver investigates “The River,” or those whose mastery of risk allows them to shape — and dominate — so much of modern life. People in “The River” have increasing amounts of wealth and power in our society, and understanding their mindset — including the flaws in their thinking — is key to understanding what drives technology and the global economy today. There are certain commonalities in this otherwise diverse group: high tolerance for risk, appreciation of uncertainty, affinity for numbers, skill at decoupling, self-reliance, and a distrust of conventional wisdom. For those in The River, complexity is baked in, and the work is how to navigate it, without going beyond the pale.

Taking us behind the scenes from casinos to venture capital firms, and from the FTX inner sanctum to meetings of the effective altruism movement, On the Edge is a deeply reported, all-access journey into a hidden world of power brokers and risk-takers.

Nate Silver is the founder of FiveThirtyEight and the New York Times bestselling author of The Signal and the Noise. He writes the Substack Silver Bulletin.

Clayton Page Aldern is a senior data reporter at Grist. A neuroscientist turned environmental journalist, he holds a master’s in neuroscience and a master’s in public policy from the University of Oxford, where he studied as a Rhodes Scholar. He is also a research affiliate at the Center for Studies in Demography and Ecology at the University of Washington. With Gregg Colburn, he is the author of Homelessness Is a Housing Problem. His book The Weight of Nature, on the effects of climate change on brain health, is out now from Dutton.

Buy the Book On the Edge: The Art of Risking Everything

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