Pun Salad

I heard about Nate Silver from pointers to his FiveThirtyEight website. He rose to fame from his statistic-driven predictions of political contest outcomes, which in many cases were uncannily accurate. Over the years, FiveThirtyEight grew in popularity, getting adopted by (first) the New York Times and (subsequently) ABC/ESPN. But Silver bailed out a couple years ago, and FiveThirtyEight was shuttered by ABC just a few days ago (as I type). Silver now lives at his substack, Silver Bulletin, where he publishes mostly on sports and politics.

Silver's politics are not mine. One of his recent headlines: "Democrats should have shut it down", a criticism of the Senate Democrats who voted for the continuing resolution to keep Uncle Stupid in business for the next few months. But that's OK, because when he's not on a partisan rant, he seems to be reality-based.

So, what about this book? Reader, it's all over the place. Silver rambles over many seemingly disparate fields, but (see the subtitle) they are all united by risk. Specifically, pushing the envelope on risky behavior. He argues, along the way, that in most cases people play it too safe, forgoing potential big "wins", not just in traditional gambling venues, but also …

Well, there's a lot about gambling. Silver loves poker. But he spends a surprising number of pages on a single hand which he wasn't even playing: in 2022, between Robbi Jade Lew and Garrett Adelstein. There's even a Wikipedia page about it! What we are supposed to learn from this I am not sure. But soon Silver travels to casino economics, sports betting, etc. Interesting observation, if true: many "problem" gamblers don't really want to win; they're just into the steady operation of their casino's slot machines.

Another interesting observation: as near as Silver can tell, and despite all the glitz and hype, nobody's getting very rich from sports betting. Not the bookmakers, nor their customers, not the state governments taking their cuts. I could be wrong, but I think this implies that it's a very "efficient" market; there are no $20 bills lying around you can pick up. It's like betting on a fair coin-flip. (Of course, if it's the Super Bowl, I think you can bet on the coin flip.)

Silver moves on to more respectable, and more out-there topics: venture capital, cryptocurrency, Sam Bankman-Fried, effective altruism, how the government calculates the Value of a Statistical Life, artificial intelligence, etc. He talks about various experts who make estimates of p(doom): the probability that some kind of combination of AI and nuclear weaponry is gonna kill us all, or at least most of us.

So: all in all, the book is a sprawl. A lot of these topics don't hold a lot of inherent interest for me, but I found myself getting caught up by Silver's apparent enthusiasm. (In some cases, that wasn't enough.)

But at the end, Silver quotes Deirdre McCloskey respectfully. That makes up for a lot of sins right there, Nate.