Playing for the Highest Stakes

Abstract

Poker has often been used as a metaphor for international relations and existential threats such as nuclear weapons. Nate Silver’s On the Edge: The Art of Risking Everything is a lengthy, often meandering but always entertaining exploration of this metaphor and its salience in the twenty-first century, from the world of professional gambling to existential risks such as climate change, nuclear weapons and artificial intelligence. The book has two entangled but independent threads: a discussion on how to think about risk, and a sociocultural conceit that modern elites, especially in the United States, can be meaningfully divided into two tribes competing for power and influence. What separates these groups are not, as Silver contends, cognitive and psychological traits, but in-group jargon and cultural references. Silver’s discussions and insights about how to think about risk do not need this dichotomy to be real or sound; in fact; the conceit offers more distraction than insight.