I Belong in The River
A book review of Nate Silver's On The Edge
I. The Book
Like nearly all of Nate Silver’s work, I enjoyed On The Edge. I had a hard time putting this book down and, if I had to bet ;), I’d wager it will have a lasting impact on my life. However, none of these statements are because of On The Edge’s literary merits, though I do really like Silver’s writing style. Rather, this book featured and connected many of my existing interests, which I did not previously realize shared such strong underpinnings. I was fascinated with the material because the topics that Silver spotlights all interest me and the way the different groups featured in On The Edge think is also the way I think. I didn’t take me long to realize I belong in The River.
Due to this realization, this attempt at a book review is injected with many personal notes, especially in the latter half. In some ways, this is similar to how Silver’s own life looms large over the book despite no chapters being explicitly about Silver’s life. Silver wrote about a subset of society as a part of that same subset so he manages to seamlessly weave in personal stories and beliefs. Since I guess I’m a part of this subset too, I’m writing about it similarly. For a more typical review of this book, try this.
Despite my praise above, I have some gripes with the work itself. My main critique is that the book isn’t really about anything. There’s no driving narrative. I found this book most comparable to a fun and hip academic textbook focused on analyzing risk, expected value, and their real-world applications. The chapters build upon each other somewhat, but the content of each is mostly siloed from the rest. The book describes circumstances and careers that have a consistent throughline in their thought process and ideologies, but that’s about it. In another review, the author said it much better:
The book lacks a unifying concept/theory and is something between a memoir and gonzo journalism. There is no big idea, it’s a interview-driven tour of how people of the River (Silicon Valley, Wall Street, gamblers) use probability, and their relationship to The Village (the Liberal Establishment).
I felt similarly when reading Silver’s prior book The Signal and The Noise. The ideas are all related but each chapter seems to just introduce something new that exists in the general world of the given book. The Signal does at least directly advocate for using probability and Bayesian methods to properly evaluate the world. On The Edge advocates for maximizing your expected value in life but comparatively indirectly and without presenting any concrete strategies, except if you play poker or bet on sports.
Another consistent complaint I have with both of Silver’s books is their length. They are quite long and don’t necessarily need to be so. A certain someone, who features heavily in On The Edge, once said:
I’m very skeptical of books. I don’t want to say no book is ever worth reading, but I actually do believe something pretty close to that. I think, if you wrote a book, you fucked up, and it should have been a six-paragraph blog post.
Like a lot of things SBF did, this is probably incorrect, but there is some truth in it. On The Edge could have been condensed. Though I acknowledge that my background on everything Silver discusses is not that of the average reader. I’ll get to this in a bit.
Finally, I felt “The River” was a bit of a forced analogy. I don’t see an inherent reason why these groups should belong to something called The River, other than the fact that this term comes from poker and poker features in the book. There certainly is a connection between the ideas and people presented throughout this book, but a river doesn’t traditionally signify any of the core facets that unite these groups. Regardless, Silver’s nomenclature is now etched into my brain and I can’t think of anything better.
So, why did I open by saying that I couldn’t put this book down? Why did I feel like it was too long? And, importantly, why do I expect it to have a lasting impact on me?
Well, through reading, I realized I am a part of The River. I was already excited to read about each topic individually even before realizing Silver was creating the unifying theory across them all. The book was engrossing because, as the commonalities added up, Silver was defining my tribe, a tribe that I did not previously realize existed.
It was honestly a bit uncanny how much overlap there was between the interviewees in this book and the people and topics that pique my interest. I already follow on Twitter and/or actively read the blog posts from nearly every single one of the people mentioned in the book: Scott Alexander is one of my favorite writers, I follow prominent VCs on Twitter, I’ve researched ‘tight aggressive’ poker strategy, I donate 10% of my annual income to the charities recommended by GiveWell, an institution based on Effective Altruism’s principles, I got super into the Garrett Adelstein-Robbi Jade Lew scandal, etc. The book forced me to reconsider my position that, over time, I became interested in a bunch of disparate topics. Maybe, instead, I became interested in any topic that involves Riverian thinking, as Silver calls it, and that’s why these things intrigued to me.
Consequently, I felt like I already knew everything in the book. I know I’m overstating for simplicity’s sake, but these chapters felt like reviews. I can claim the book could have been distilled into a blog post only because I have immersed myself in these topics over the last several years. The book didn’t introduce much novel information.
Still, understanding that all these camps fit under a single umbrella may be a watershed moment in my life. I now believe, because I‘ve happened to be innately drawn to The River, that I should have a career in The River (or at least seek to maximize the EV of my career more aggressively). I didn’t think this way before reading the book. So, for this, I give the book significant kudos.
I’m not overly shocked any of this happened though. I have been a huge fan of Silver’s work since I discovered 538 in high school. Almost everything Silver published there interested me, particularly his Elo-based sports models. I was an immediate subscriber to his great Substack. If something is interesting to Nate Silver, it is probably is also interesting to me and this book certainly satisfied that criteria.
II. The Upshot
Despite all my interest in Riverian topics and EV-maximizing, I don’t necessarily put any of this into practice. I hardly bet on anything and my young career has not been directly tied to anything mentioned in the book. That should probably change.
I was recently in Munich where urban surfers ride a permanent wave on a river running through the middle of the city. The dudes shredding in the river seem a lot cooler than the spectators like me on the sidewalk.
I should get in The River.
Luckily, I do already have some mild examples of being in The River so it shouldn’t be such a crazy change. First, In 2022, I finished in the 99th percentile in 538’s (small world huh?) NFL prediction game. Check 88th place. I would have beat the Vegas markets and made good money if I had bet on the games that I identified as being mispriced just like the gamblers mentioned in the book, but I didn’t bet at all. I am beating the market again so far this year in Lee Sharpe’s recreation of the game and it’s kind of pissing me off that I am not making any money off this circumstance.
Someone once asked me about my process for making my predictions in this game, via LinkedIn DM. I remember this vividly because it’s probably the only interesting and legitimate cold outreach I’ve ever received on LinkedIn. Anyways, I reviewed the response I gave and it’s clearly the kind of thinking Nate discusses in his book:
I am a big NFL fan (and also a data analyst and problem solver). This was not my first season playing the 538 prediction game. I played last year and got smoked. I was way too overconfident in some predictions which is how you get punished in terms of points. I would put outcomes at 100%. This is almost a guaranteed way to not finish well.
My second insight from previous year was that their model performs very well compared to the population. It is always around the 90th percentile. So if you just copied the model you would perform very well.
Because of this I changed my strategy quite a bit this year. I would essentially use the model as a guide and adjust slightly off that. From there, I would target a few games per week that I felt the model was misjudging.
This year I felt the misjudgment was quite easy to identify and exploit. Specifically, there was a lot of poor inputs on 538's end related to their QB ELO rankings. They had the legacy QBs like Brady and Rodgers ranked too highly and unsung guys like Geno and Purdy ranked too low. I used this to my advantage.
No matter what, my prediction was within 15 percentage points of theirs. I happened to adjust onto the correct side of the actual outcome throughout the year and consistently beat the model (and most other people). My goal was to beat their model.
Towards the end of the season, I really wanted to move up in the rankings so I started to "press" and make some riskier predictions. This worked out in the short term, but it's not a sustainable strategy.
I don't have a model that I use, however I follow several people on twitter that do. I look at their predictions or advanced statistics weekly before making my predictions. My most important resource is Ben Baldwin. He posts his team EPA/play stats as well as his QB CPOE+EPA/play Index. These are two of the most useful stats IMO. He finished in like 11th place in the 538 game! So clearly whatever model he is running is working, but tailing the info you get from him is a great start.
I would consider myself sharp in terms of the NFL but that mainly comes from getting info from others who are sharper. IDK if this strategy is applicable elsewhere, but if you can find a super-predictor on a topic just follow what they say (or what their model says). And be humble enough to know that they will beat you over time.
I found this to be an interesting recent read:
Secondly, I used to work at a startup which offered me some equity in exchange for (probably) a lower salary when I began my employment. Thanks to reading Jonathan Bales, a quintessential Riverian who is actually not mentioned in the book, I came to understand that this decision may actually be less risky than working at a big and “safe” company because of the expected value of my equity. The larger company is less likely to fold, but you have no personal upside. It is not as safe because your expected value is lower. Thankfully, everything worked out for me as Bales described. The company was bought by a PE firm and I made some money from the equity. However, as soon as that deal went through I knew I was going to leave the company once my apartment’s lease expired. The upside was now gone. It would not be a +EV decision to stay and you should always be maximizing EV. This is Riverian thinking. Now, was the equity so great as to make up for the earnings difference of initially going to a banking or consulting firm over those four years? Probably not. Yet, the underlying lesson remains and it’s a career tradeoff I know I am comfortable with.
I need to be maximizing my upside going forwards. I need to seek out way more equity, to the point where I could make life-changing money. In order to acquire that equity I will need to take on way more risk and that means getting in much earlier or starting my own thing. It also makes the project more likely to fail and, therefore, the life-changing money to never arrive. But the failure is not guaranteed. It may just succeed and that makes it more worthwhile to pursue (given the math works out). Even if my next venture is not blatantly in The River based on its industry, my thought process for diving into whatever it is will be. EV-maxxing my potential earnings is something I had long thought would matter in my upcoming career moves, On The Edge cemented that it will.
Lastly and on a different note, this book helped me understand why some people are not like me. In the book, Silver creates The Village as a foil to The River, but this is not necessarily what I’m describing. Because the topics contained within On The Edge are correlatedly through the underlying commonalities Silver identifies, if you are interested in one you will likely be interested in most, as is the case with me. The flip side is that there are people where nothing in this book remotely interests them. The logic works inversely; if you aren’t interested in a single topic from this book you probably aren’t interested in any of them. The people forming this majority of society have fascinations, worldviews, and thoughts on risk that are fundamentally different from people like me and that is totally OK. A point Silver repeatedly emphasizes is that The River is overwhelmingly male and white. Other demographics are less likely to be interested in this stuff and knowing that difference exists should help me in deciding whether or not someone will be interested in a topic that I want to discuss. Not everyone is like me and I shouldn’t try to force them to enjoy what I enjoy. This is pretty obvious, but nevertheless useful to understand.
Thanks for reading. If any of this got the wheels in your head spinning, I recommend picking up a copy of On The Edge.