There is also a personality cluster that can be found in the River. These traits are a little bit more self-explanatory. People in The River are trying to beat the market. In sports betting, the average player loses money because the house takes a cut of every bet. So if you follow the consensus, you’ll eventually go broke. Investing is more forgiving; just putting your money in index funds still has a positive expected value. Still, professional traders are trying to do better than the market-average return.
So part of the job of people in The River inherently involves being critical of consensus thinking, often to the point of being contrarian. Silicon Valley in particular is proud of its contrarianism—although it can be conformist in its own way. Some people in The River can turn these traits off in interpersonal settings, but others can have a hard time. It’s not a coincidence many Riverians like to get in fights about politics on the Internet.
Relatedly, people in The River are often intensely competitive. They’re so competitive, in fact, that they make decisions that can be irrational, gambling even once they’re essentially already set for life (think about Elon Musk’s decision to buy Twitter when he was then the world’s richest person and one of its most admired). If you haven’t gambled against other people before, I have to tell you: it can be quite stimulating. Winning money feels good, feeling as though you’ve outsmarted an opponent feels good, and when the two coincide, your brain is literally flooded with dopamine. It’s no surprise that people chase the rush, sometimes to their own demise.
Finally, I put risk tolerance in the personality cluster because being willing to break from the herd and go against the consensus is certainly not the safest professional path. Entrepreneurs tend to have high levels of openness to experience and low levels of neuroticism, the “Big 5” personality traits that correlate best with risk tolerance.
The River vs. The Village
There’s another community that competes with The River for power and influence. I call it The Village. I think of The Village as a mid-sized city, like Washington DC or Boston, the sort of place that’s just small enough where everyone knows one another and is a little self-conscious about it. It consists of people who work in government, in much of the media and in parts of academia (although perhaps excluding some of the more quantitative academic fields such as economics). It has distinctly left-of-center politics associated with the Democratic Party.
Part of it may be a personality clash—remember, Riverians love decoupling and Villagers hate it—but the communities find themselves increasingly at odds. Media coverage is now much more adversarial toward the tech sector, and generally skeptical of movements such as Effective Altruism (EA) and rationalism. But the grudge cuts in both directions: people within The River are seeking more political influence. Sam Bankman-Fried had wanted to become a major political player, donating millions of dollars openly to Democrats, but also covertly to Republicans. Meanwhile, Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter in 2022 was treated as a matter of existential importance by people in The Village. I think that reaction was silly, but it shows the extent to which these communities see themselves as rivals and are ready to go to battle. And there are high-stakes debates to come, such as about the regulation of AI.
I have a unique vantage point as someone who passes back and forth between these worlds. To be clear, I am not an unbiased observer. People in The River are—for better or worse—my kind of people. Conversely, I’ve never quite taken to The Village, and I’ve often felt like media coverage of me and FiveThirtyEight was misinformed, particularly after the 2016 election.
But I do hear a lot of the complaints that these communities have about one another. I don’t think they are always articulated well, however. Even as a Riverian myself, I have quite a few criticisms of The River, and I think it could use critiques that hit the target more often. So here’s a quick attempt to outline what I think are steelman versions of them. A steelman argument—a favorite technique of EAs and rationalists—is the opposite of a straw man argument. The idea is to build a robust and well-articulated version of the other side’s position, even if it’s one that you disagree with. Let’s begin with The River’s critique of The Village since it’s the one I’m more naturally inclined to sympathize with.
The River’s steelman critique of the Village
A common complaint among people in The River is that Villagers are “too political.”
What does that mean, exactly? It means that Villagers are coupling when they should be decoupling. The River worries that The Village’s claims to academic, scientific and journalistic expertise are becoming increasingly hard to separate from Democratic political partisanship.