NATE SILVER'S NEW BOOK "On The Edge" >> If we want to keep up, we’ll have to learn the mind-set of the successful gambler.

The insight that there can be an optimal way to respond to uncertainty has successfully guided poker sharks, venture capitalists, and A.I. developers. 

But using the method to reach decisions in light of their effects on human society centuries into the future is not a safe gamble.Illustration by Josie Norton 

The Power of Thinking Like a Poker Player
Nate Silver’s “On the Edge” applies the lessons of modern gambling to the arenas of tech startups, artificial intelligence, and ethics.
By  Idrees Kahloon

September 2, 2024

". . .Probability and gambling have always been intimately intertwined. The mathematics of probability can be traced to a well-known stumper about how best to divide a pot, which a seventeenth-century gambling enthusiast posed to two leading mathematical luminaries of the time, Blaise Pascal and Pierre de Fermat. 

Their inquiry would spawn the powerful idea of “expected value”—the average outcome of an uncertain event, calculated by multiplying the outcome in every possible state of the world by the chance of it happening. 

How powerful? 

The once alien notion that humans could be precise about uncertainty gave rise to the discipline of statistics. A model in which people were treated as rational actors trying to maximize the expected value of their utility became the cornerstone of modern economics. 

And systems based on feeding statistical prediction models with gargantuan helpings of data and computing power have already started to roil this century.

Read more: “The Power of Thinking Like a Poker Player,” by Idrees Kahloon