Silver investigates "the River," the community of like-minded people whose mastery of risk allows them to shape—and dominate-—so much of modern life. These professional risk-takers—poker players and hedge fund managers, crypto true believers and blue-chip art collectors—can teach us much about navigating the uncertainty of the twenty-first century. By immersing himself in the worlds of Doyle Brunson, Peter Thiel, Sam Bankman-Fried, Sam Altman, and many others, Silver offers insight into a range of issues that affect us all, from the frontiers of finance to the future of AI.
Engaging and entertaining ... In his quest to understand people who are obsessed with risk, Silver draws on a wide range of insights ... Ultimately presents an unsympathetic vision of capitalism’s future.
So focused on bettors and the bets they bet that one might suspect it was written not by Nate Silver but by Nathan Detroit ... Silver is a serious poker player. Unless you are yourself serious about poker, you’re likely to find the author’s lengthy hand-by-hand description of his successes and failures a bit tiresome.
A hefty set of meditations on probabilistic thinking, only this time the author is taking in broader horizons ... Silver might have spent more time exploring domains where expected-value thinking may be even more consequential.
