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A photograph of a man in a yellow polo at a glass podium. Behind him there is an enormous electric screen showing the bitcoin logo inside the number 22 on a large orange coin that is sunken into the sand of a tropical beach. The word “App” is also visible on the screen.
Peter Thiel addresses a conference for the cryptocurrency Bitcoin in Miami Beach in 2022.
Peter Thiel 将于 2022 年在迈阿密海滩举行的加密货币比特币会议上发表讲话。
Credit...Chandan Khanna/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
钱丹·卡纳/法新社 — 盖蒂图片社
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Nonfiction 非小说类

Nate Silver Gives Us Good Odds for a Bad Future
内特·西尔弗 (Nate Silver) 为我们带来了美好的未来

In “On the Edge,” the election forecaster argues that the gambler’s mind-set has come to define modern life.
在《边缘》中,选举预测者认为,赌徒的心态已经决定了现代生活。


Tim Wu is a law professor at Columbia University and the author, most recently, of “The Curse of Bigness: Antitrust in the New Gilded Age.”
蒂姆·吴(Tim Wu)是哥伦比亚大学法学教授,最近着有《大的诅咒:新镀金时代的反垄断》一书。

When you purchase an independently reviewed book through our site, we earn an affiliate commission.
当您通过我们的网站购买一本独立评论的书籍时,我们会赚取附属佣金。

ON THE EDGE: The Art of Risking Everything, by Nate Silver
边缘:冒着一切风险的艺术,作者:Nate Silver


A common trope in dystopian fiction — “The Hunger Games,” “Chain-Gang All-Stars” — is the wealthy society that devotes itself to ever more exotic and expansive forms of gambling. Nate Silver, best known as a statistician and election modeler, makes the case that we are at least partway there.
反乌托邦小说中的一个常见比喻——《饥饿游戏》、《链帮全明星》——是富裕社会致力于更加奇异和广泛的赌博形式。内特·西尔弗(Nate Silver)以统计学家和选举建模师而闻名,他认为我们至少已经完成了一半。

We haven’t quite started taking bets on the survivors of a televised battle royale, but in his engaging and entertaining new book, “On the Edge,” Silver describes how the decision-making methods of the professional gambler have spread to encompass a wide swath of human activities, from cryptocurrency investment to the pursuit of a more ethical life. He offers readers an interview-driven tour of the parts of America where the outlooks and incomes depend on sophisticated forms of risk-taking. The result is a glimpse of the economy of the future.
我们还没有完全开始对电视转播的大逃杀的幸存者下注,但西尔弗在他引人入胜且有趣的新书《边缘》中描述了职业赌徒的决策方法如何传播到更广泛的领域。从加密货币投资到追求更加道德的生活,人类活动的范围不断扩大。他为读者提供了一次由采访驱动的美国部分地区之旅,这些地区的前景和收入取决于复杂的冒险形式。其结果是对未来经济的一瞥。

Not all of these human calculators are the same. Silver and his subjects live along what he calls “the River.” Upstream are the economists and philosophers who do math and solve logic puzzles for lofty reasons like maximizing happiness. Float on a little ways and you will spot the Wall Street traders and stockbrokers. Keep going all the way down to the place where the River meets the shore and you’ll find yourself bobbing among the small-time crypto investors and card sharks. Now you’re really at sea.
并非所有这些人类计算器都是一样的。西尔弗和他的臣民住在他所说的“河”沿岸。上游是经济学家和哲学家,他们出于幸福最大化等崇高原因进行数学计算和解决逻辑难题。稍微漂浮一下,您就会发现华尔街的交易员和股票经纪人。一直走到河与岸的交汇处,你会发现自己在小型加密货币投资者和信用卡骗子中间徘徊。现在你真的在海上了。

No matter their vocation or chosen hobbies, citizens of the River are united in their point of view; to them, everything is a probability, a question of “expected value.” River people look everywhere for an “edge” — an insight into something hard to predict that will give them a profitable betting strategy over the long term. Might the markets be systematically underestimating the New York Mets or Robert F. Kennedy Jr.? Pick the right pony, and there could be a reliable path to wealth and glory.
无论他们的职业或选择的爱好如何,河流居民的观点都是一致的。对他们来说,一切都是概率,都是“期望价值”的问题。河牌圈的人到处寻找“优势”——对难以预测的事物的洞察力,这将为他们带来长期有利可图的投注策略。市场是否会系统性地低估纽约大都会队或小罗伯特·F·肯尼迪?选择合适的小马,就有可能找到通往财富和荣耀的可靠之路。

“When I began working on this book, I knew I’d have conversations with poker players, venture capitalists and cryptocurrency enthusiasts,” Silver writes. “I didn’t think I’d spend a lot of time talking with philosophers.” But Silver found that a lot of the philosophers — and many of the artificial intelligence coders — he spoke to were associated with an intellectual movement related to gambling: effective altruism.
“当我开始写这本书时,我知道我会与扑克玩家、风险投资家和加密货币爱好者进行对话,”西尔弗写道。 “我认为我不会花很多时间与哲学家交谈。”但西尔弗发现,他采访过的许多哲学家——以及许多人工智能程序员——都与一场与赌博相关的智力运动有关:有效的利他主义。

Like a gambler or an investment banker (or the 18th-century utilitarian Jeremy Bentham), effective altruists are focused on ethical calculations based on outcomes. If you’re comfortable allowing one man to die to save five or if you like worrying about whether we’re grossly underinvested in protecting Earth from asteroid collisions (low odds, but an enormous loss in value), you’re probably in the tribe. “Many poker players and many people in finance” don’t care about other people, the Oxford philosopher and leading light of effective altruism Will MacAskill tells Silver. “But some do.”
就像赌徒或投资银行家(或 18 世纪的功利主义者杰里米·边沁)一样,有效的利他主义者专注于基于结果的道德计算。如果你愿意让一个人死去来拯救五个人,或者你喜欢担心我们在保护地球免受小行星碰撞方面的投资是否严重不足(几率很低,但价值损失巨大),那么你可能就属于这个部落。牛津哲学家、有效利他主义的领军人物威尔·麦克阿斯基尔 (Will MacAskill) 告诉西尔弗,“许多扑克玩家和许多金融界人士”并不关心其他人。 “但有些人会。”

ImageThe cover of “On the Edge” is a solid green background with a white line crossing it diagonally. The line becomes blurred on either end.

In his quest to understand people who are obsessed with risk, Silver draws on a wide range of insights. Poker, for example, has taught him that “it’s not just that you should play different hands in different ways; you should play the same hand in different ways” — this randomness creates a fear of the unknown in your opponent, he argues, akin to the unpredictable horror that keeps Russia from dropping the bomb on Ukraine. The bioethicist Peter Singer, a kind of godfather to the effective altruists, has lessons too: In terms of outcomes, someone who allows a child to drown and someone who spends $5,000 on a single high-end sushi dinner instead of on alleviating poverty have the same level of moral culpability.
在寻求了解那些痴迷于风险的人的过程中,西尔弗汲取了广泛的见解。例如,扑克教会了他“不仅仅是你应该以不同的方式玩不同的牌;你还应该用不同的方式玩不同的牌”。你应该以不同的方式玩同一手牌”——他认为,这种随机性让你的对手产生了对未知事物的恐惧,类似于阻止俄罗斯向乌克兰投下炸弹的不可预测的恐惧。生物伦理学家彼得·辛格(Peter Singer)是有效利他主义者的教父,他也有教训:就结果而言,一个让孩子淹死的人,一个花 5,000 美元买一顿高端寿司晚餐而不是用于扶贫的人,同等程度的道德罪责。

Alongside its axioms and aphorisms, “On the Edge” also serves as a rebranding party for Silver. You probably know him as the archetypical political math nerd; he gained attention during the Obama years with dazzling, baseball-like statistical models and election analysis on his website FiveThirtyEight, which for a while had a home at The New York Times. But like a classically trained jazz musician who has spent years playing bankable pop ballads, Silver would like you to know that he’s grown sick of the political world that made him big.
除了其公理和格言之外,“On the Edge”还充当了西尔弗的品牌重塑派对。你可能知道他是典型的政治数学书呆子。在奥巴马执政期间,他凭借其网站 FiveThirtyEight 上令人眼花缭乱的棒球式统计模型和选举分析而受到关注,该网站一度在《纽约时报》上占有一席之地。但就像一位受过古典音乐训练的爵士音乐家花了数年时间演奏可赚钱的流行民谣一样,西尔弗希望你知道他已经厌倦了使他出名的政治世界。

Silver’s disillusionment seems strongly tied to 2016 and the “nits” (normal, risk-averse people) who mistook his election projection that year (Hillary Clinton at a 71 percent chance of victory over Donald Trump) as a prediction instead of a probability. “From my standpoint — and from the standpoint of people in the River,” he writes, “this was a damned good forecast.” True: Others gave Trump even lower odds.
西尔弗的幻灭似乎与 2016 年和“尼特”(正常的、厌恶风险的人)密切相关,他们将他当年的选举预测(希拉里·克林顿有71% 的机会击败唐纳德·特朗普)误认为是预测而不是概率。 “从我的角度来看,从河里人的角度来看,”他写道,“这真是一个非常好的预测。”事实是:其他人给特朗普的赔率甚至更低。

In an inversion of the classic morality tale, Silver’s recovery has been a return to vice. “My Big Midlife Crisis Project,” he wrote in a recent blog post, “has been trying to fashion myself into a pretty darn good tournament poker player.” He has even ditched his ill-fitting suit and glasses for a more flattering baseball cap and beard. (Don’t worry, he is also still producing election forecasts this year for his newsletter Silver Bulletin.)

Now that he’s back to his roots, Silver mostly wants to celebrate his tribe. But what about someone like Sam Bankman-Fried, one of the best-known boosters of effective altruism and rationalist risk-taking as well as a convicted fraudster? Silver, who interviewed Bankman-Fried five times for this book, considers the crypto financier turned felon to be a false prophet. In a memorable chapter full of verbal sparring between the two quants, he confronts Bankman-Fried with all the ways that he was, in fact, highly irrational in his approach to risk. That (for Silver) seems almost as unforgivable as the $8 billion he stole from his customers.

Other potential conflicts in the logical universe of the River are more troubling to Silver. While not a work of political economy, “On the Edge” ultimately presents an unsympathetic vision of capitalism’s future. If wealth once belonged to those with industrial monopolies, Silver suggests, we are now headed toward a hyper-charged capitalism powered by artificial intelligence, in which the spoils disproportionately belong to those who understand risk. The economy might, he warns, become even “more casino-like: gamified, commodified, quantified, monitored and manipulated, and more elaborately tiered between the haves and have-nots.”

Silver seems exactly right to project a future that belongs to those in a position to take risks. Were he a Marxist perhaps he’d say that the class divide is now between those who fully benefit from expected value calculations and those who do not. Billionaire venture capitalists like Marc Andreessen and Peter Thiel, both of whom make appearances in “On the Edge,” have figured out their edge — how to never lose money in the long term. They are enjoying the enormous returns that are available from intelligent risk-taking.

The problem is that many more of us are now like gambling addicts stuck in front of Las Vegas slot machines, fooled into thinking that we’re playing a game we can win, but destined to lose (on a relative basis), and to lose more the longer we play.


ON THE EDGE: The Art of Risking Everything | By Nate Silver | Penguin Press | 559 pp. | $35

A version of this article appears in print on Sept. 15, 2024, Page 18 of the Sunday Book Review with the headline: Good Odds for a Bad Future. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe
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