On the Edge: The Art of Risking Everything

The River is a sprawling ecosystem of like-minded people that includes everyone from low-stakes poker pros just trying to grind out a living to crypto kings and venture-capital billionaires. It is a way of thinking and a mode of life. People don’t know very much about the River, but they should. Most Riverians aren’t rich and powerful. But rich and powerful people are disproportionately likely to be Riverians compared to the rest of the population.

They knew that they would lose, they are not dupes,” Schüll told me. “They are very different than the strategic poker players. But they are not dupes in the sense that they’re, like, dumb and think that they’re going to win. They know very well what they want—what they’re playing for and what trumps the jackpot—is continuing to play.

Finally, there is reciprocity. This is the most Riverian principle of all, since it flows directly from game theory. Treat other people as intelligent and capable of reasonable strategic behavior. The world is dynamic, and although people may not be strictly rational, they’re usually smart about adapting to their situation and achieving the things that matter most to them. Play the long game.

According to PitchBook, just 2 percent of VC funding in the United States goes to female-only founders or founding teams. Another 16.5 percent goes to women who are paired with men. The latter figure has increased in recent years, but the former one hasn’t.

There’s a phenomenon called ‘lemons ripen early,’ which is that the companies that fail fail before the companies that succeed succeed,” said Andreessen.

wrote a 2016 book on con artists called The Confidence Game.

In 1982, only 40 percent of the Forbes 400 had started their own business; the majority were simply scions of inherited wealth.

Successful risk-takers take a raise-or-fold attitude toward life. They abhor mediocrity and they know when to quit.

Yudkowsky is also known for his Harry Potter fanfic, such as the 122-chapter-long Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality.

The irony is that if you trust the experts on expertise—meaning trusting people like Tetlock—they’ll tell you that you should be pretty damned skeptical of the experts,

The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man. —George Bernard Shaw

A bet is a tax on bullshit,

Bostrom (the writer of the extremely influential book Superintelligence)

But sportsbooks and racebooks make up only about 2 percent of gaming revenues at Las Vegas Strip casinos and 1 percent of overall revenues. They can be a bigger part of the business at off-Strip properties like Westgate and Circa, where sportsbooks help to draw in huge crowds on football weekends. Ultimately, however, sports betting is a medium-sized business. In 2022, the legal online sports-betting market in the U.S. generated about $7.5 billion in net betting revenue. That’s not nothing, and the market will grow as more states legalize it. But the Vegas Strip alone generates more gambling revenue than that. Heck, the frozen pizza market in the U.S. is worth about $20 billion annually.

Lightcone Infrastructure, the company that runs the rationalist blog LessWrong and owns the Berkeley microcampus that hosted Manifest.

Josh Wolfe, of Lux Capital, is fond of the phrase “chips on shoulders put chips in pockets.

I always say expected value is the probability of success times the degree of impact. That math works easily, but people are very uncomfortable in the low-probability domains,” said Vinod Khosla,

Now it's your turn to decide whether to push the button. Except, it's not the "go" button that I imagined Sam Bankman-Fried pressing. Instead, it's a big red octagonal button labeled STOP. If you press it, further progress on AI will stop permanently and irrevocably. If you don't, you won't get another chance to press the button for ten years. Do you push the button? Do you opt out of the gamble that civilization is taking with AI – or do you go where the action is?I wouldn't push the button. I wouldn't push it because I think the case for secular stagnation is reasonably strong, enough to alter the balance of risk and reward for AI. I wouldn't push it because I believe in optionality, giving ourselves more choice in the future rather than fewer. I wouldn't push it because I think it's self-serving; my standard of living is high, but 85 percent of the world still lives on less than $30 a day; this is not considered extreme poverty, but it's a long way from a prosperous life. And I wouldn't push it because I think it's a cop-out. Civilization needs to learn to live with the technology we've built, even if that means committing ourselves to a better set of values and institutions.

isothymia

René Girard—Peter Thiel’s favorite philosopher[*