Nate Silver, in his new book On the Edge: The Art of Risking Everything, creates a geographical metaphor to describe two different types of people with two different modes of thinking. Nate lays out a geography of “The River”[1] as follows: He finishes with: “The people in the River are my…
Category: Society
Rigorous Imagination
Summa Contra Argentum: Pars Secunda
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…
Popular Culture
Summa Contra Argentum: Pars Prima
My first objection to Nate Silver’s book is the title, or to be perfectly accurate, the subtitle: The Art of Risking Everything. I can only assume that some publisher or agent demanded this subtitle, because it seems to go against a fair amount of what is actually in the book. Risking everything is…
Artificial Intelligence
The Horserace Part 4: “The ‘Paul’s Dead’ Election”
I have frequently here decried the quality of our national political media outlets, writing that they focus on the horserace, not the impacts electing one or another candidate might bring to all of us. Many people have jumped (surely unknowingly) on my bandwagon, saying they want “less about the horserace,…
Economics
Robert Rubin’s Russian Roulette: “The Yellow Pad: Making Better Decisions in an Uncertain World”
February 5, 2024 The ignorance of even the best-informed investor about the more remote future is much greater than his knowledge, and he cannot but be influenced to a degree which would seem wildly disproportionate to anyone who really knew the future, and be forced to seek a clue mainly…
Economics
Artisanal Dark Ages
November 2, 2023 In 1908, John Laing Leal, a physician, was working for the Jersey City, NJ water supply. His father had suffered from amoebic dysentery as a result of service in the Civil War and consumption of infected water. Leal had previously held various posts in public health, and…