My second objection to Nate’s book is his central dichotomy of “The River” and “The Village.”
Nate defines “The River” thusly in the glossary at the end of the work:
“A geographical metaphor for the territory covered in this book, a sprawling ecosystem of like-minded, highly analytical, and competitive people that includes everything from poker to Wall Street to AI. The demonym is Riverian.”[1]
Nate defines “The Village”:
“The rival community to the River, reflected most clearly in intellectual occupations with progressive politics, such as the media, academia, and government (especially when a Democrat is in the White House). To Riverians, the Village is parochial, excessively ‘political,’ and suffers from various cognitive biases. However, the Village has any number of cogent objections to the River, as outlined in the introduction. …Both the Village and the River consist overwhelmingly of “elites”; the vast majority of the population doesn’t fall into either group.”[2]
The headline of this book, in my opinion, comes in the introduction, where Nate says “the River is winning.” A few chapters later he says:
“[…T]he Village’s risk-aversion still makes it vulnerable to being on the losing side of all sorts of economic and cultural bets. But the River isn’t the underdog anymore. As I said in the prologue, the River is winning. It not only dominates Silicon Valley and Wall Street, but the nerds have taken over everything from baseball front offices to the casino business.”[3]
Now, Nate is right – “the River” is winning, if we define “the River” as, not a community, but as a general quantitative (e.g. Bayesian prognosticatory) approach to pretty much everything.
Why do I not want to define “the River” as a community of people? Because “the Village” has also become far more “Riverian” over the past few decades.
Think about the three “intellectual occupations” Nate identifies as being of “the Village:” “the media, academia, and government.” Do these occupations partake LESS of “Riverian” approaches than they used to, or far MORE? I would say it is incontrovertibly the latter:
Nate himself has helped (a little) to transform media into a numbers-driven hellscape, obsessed with eyeballs, dismissive of “truth” that cannot be numerically expressed, poll-driven, profit-driven, “highly analytical, and competitive.” Yet exactly while this is going on, trust in media has plummeted – reaching “record lows in 2023.”
Academia has been absolutely bowled over by the quantitative tsunami of “the River.” Harvard’s Jill LePore outlined this change in her own seemingly non-quantitative field of history: “[Data scientist Matthew] Connelly argues that ‘history as a data science has to prove itself in the most rigorous way possible: by making predictions about what newly available sources will reveal.’ But history is not a predictive science, and if it were it wouldn’t be history.”[4] But as LePore notes, “data science” is overwhelming academia. Stanford University used to be seen as a liberal arts college; now its brand is “the gateway to a Silicon Valley gig.”
Harvard also used to be a liberal arts university. Engineering was not even broken out from the Faculty of Arts and Sciences into a separate faculty until 2007. When I attended 40 years ago as an undergraduate, engineering majors were almost unheard of. Now they constitute almost 20% of students. In 2020, Harvard opened its Science and Engineering Complex, “the most significant new building constructed by Harvard in a generation.”
Nate writes, “In a 2015 Gallup poll, 57 percent of Americans said they had ‘quite a lot’ or a ‘great deal’ of confidence in higher ed. But by 2023, that had plunged to 36 percent, and the decline was registered among voters of all political parties, not just Republicans. …Although I’d expect Harvard and other elite colleges to be relatively resilient—they’ll still exist in fifty years, and many smart people will still want to be associated with them—it’s now easier to imagine elite universities playing a lesser role in American life.”
Yet this decline of trust in academia has accompanied a massive move on the part of academia to prioritize exactly the sort of “Riverian” quantitative approaches for which Nate seems to advocate.
Then there is the government. I suppose one could argue that the government has turned away from private-sector, profit-optimizing, “Riverian” approaches since the 2020 election, with Lina Khan heading the Antitrust Division of the Department of Justice. But this comes in the context of a forty-plus-year advancement of privatization, outsourcing, optimization, “reinventing government,” private-sector consultants overseeing critical aspects of government functions, quantitative methods of evaluation of everything. It would be hard to argue that government is less “Riverian” than it was ten or twenty or fifty years ago.
If “the River is winning,” who has been losing? One way or another, it’s a huge swath of the United States of America.
My generation of “symbolic analysts” created all sorts of spreadsheet programs to facilitate the “offshoring” of manufacturing and other middle class jobs, resulting in the hollowing out of much of American society. We used our “Riverian” skills to create insanely complex derivatives that allowed Wall Street to create securities that offered high interest rates to people who believed they were essentially risk-free. And when it turned out these securities were composed of mortgages given to people without assets or income, and the whole house of cards collapsed, was that the fault of “the Village?” Only to the extent that “the Village” had been taken in – and in many cases taken over – by “the River.”
So, yes, “the River” is winning. And what has been the result of its winning streak? Destruction of our societal institutions. Numbers, you see, seem to guarantee certainty. Bayesian forecasts are predictions by “experts.” To the extent that we demand these predictions in areas of fundamental uncertainty, we are guaranteeing further disillusionment.
I would say that our institutional decay is not the result of “the Village” refusing to use “Riverian” risk management approaches. Quite the opposite.
In almost every case, the destruction of societal trust has been the RESULT of the adoption of “Riverian” approaches by “the Village.” Media has lost trust? It’s because they are numbers-driven: polls, eyeballs, analytics, profits. Academia has lost trust? It’s because it has become an assembly line for Silicon Valley and Wall Street flim-flam people. Government has lost trust? It’s because government is being forced into a Procrustean bed of private-sector efficiency and profitability, when government’s sole raison d’etre is to operate in spheres in which effectiveness – ensuring the outcome, no matter the cost – is supposed to be the criterion, and government, unlike any private-sector utility-maximizer, must look to the whole of society and anticipate what has yet to be imagined.
The quantitative risk management approaches Nate Silver essentially advocates are entirely dependent on the past being able to be the basis for predicting the future. The truly strategic uncertainties of life are not amenable to “Riverian” approaches. Life is not poker – even John von Neumann was wrong about that. Poker is a defined game. Life is not. Game theory requires a game with rules. The most important “games” we play either have no rules, or have rules that can change on a dime.
What is missing from Nate’s book, and his geographic metaphor, is imagination. What has never been experienced can only be imagined. So “the River” is in one sense an apt metaphor. The river never dreams of the sea.
But someone has to.
[1] Nate Silver, On the Edge, https://books.apple.com/us/book/on-the-edge/id6474822705
[2] Ibid.
[3] Ibid.
