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Skin in the Game: The Hidden Asymmetries in Daily Life

(Incerto #5)

Nassim Nicholas Taleb (Goodreads Author)

3.89 · Rating details · 22,246 ratings · 2,146 reviews

From the New York Times bestselling author of The Black Swan, a bold new work that challenges many of our long-held beliefs about risk and reward, politics and religion, finance and personal responsibility

In his most provocative and practical book yet, one of the foremost thinkers of our time redefines what it means to understand the world, succeed in a profession, contri From the New York Times bestselling author of The Black Swan, a bold new work that challenges many of our long-held beliefs about risk and reward, politics and religion, finance and personal responsibility

In his most provocative and practical book yet, one of the foremost thinkers of our time redefines what it means to understand the world, succeed in a profession, contribute to a fair and just society, detect nonsense, and influence others. Citing examples ranging from Hammurabi to Seneca, Antaeus the Giant to Donald Trump, Nassim Nicholas Taleb shows how the willingness to accept one’s own risks is an essential attribute of heroes, saints, and flourishing people in all walks of life.

As always both accessible and iconoclastic, Taleb challenges long-held beliefs about the values of those who spearhead military interventions, make financial investments, and propagate religious faiths. Among his insights:

• For social justice, focus on symmetry and risk sharing. You cannot make profits and transfer the risks to others, as bankers and large corporations do. You cannot get rich without owning your own risk and paying for your own losses. Forcing skin in the game corrects this asymmetry better than thousands of laws and regulations.
• Ethical rules aren’t universal. You’re part of a group larger than you, but it’s still smaller than humanity in general.
• Minorities, not majorities, run the world. The world is not run by consensus but by stubborn minorities imposing their tastes and ethics on others.
• You can be an intellectual yet still be an idiot. “Educated philistines” have been wrong on everything from Stalinism to Iraq to low-carb diets.
• Beware of complicated solutions (that someone was paid to find). A simple barbell can build muscle better than expensive new machines.
• True religion is commitment, not just faith. How much you believe in something is manifested only by what you’re willing to risk for it.

The phrase “skin in the game” is one we have often heard but rarely stopped to truly dissect. It is the backbone of risk management, but it’s also an astonishingly rich worldview that, as Taleb shows in this book, applies to all aspects of our lives. As Taleb says, “The symmetry of skin in the game is a simple rule that’s necessary for fairness and justice, and the ultimate BS-buster,” and “Never trust anyone who doesn’t have skin in the game. Without it, fools and crooks will benefit, and their mistakes will never come back to haunt them.” ...more

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Published June 1st 2018 by Allen Lane

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Mar 01, 2018 Ryan Boissonneault rated it liked it

Skin in the Game is at the same time thought-provoking and original but also contradictory and sometimes absurd.

Let’s start with the cons:

1. I certainly won’t be the first to notice that Taleb can be mean-spirited. But why does he insist on presenting his views in this way? The communication of his ideas, often profound, does not require a mean-spirited or condescending tone. For however brilliant Taleb thinks he is, his skills in persuasion are severely lacking; he’s alienating a significant r ...more

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Apr 07, 2018 Philippe rated it it was amazing

Shelves: systems-thinking, innovation, futures-thinking

Taleb’s ‘Skin in the Game’ has been put together in a somewhat disorderly way, but the reasoning goes as follows:

1. The world in which we live is complex and eludes our sense-making faculties.

2. Our society has cultivated a privileged class of Intellectuals Yet Idiots (IYIs). These people monopolize positions of authority and routinely take decisions to intervene in that complex world, without however doing the effort to think through the cascading impacts of these decisions and being convenient ...more

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Mar 01, 2018 Nilesh rated it did not like it

Shelves: economic-and-finance

SITG is an angry rant. It lacks structure. The core message - mainly because of the author’s often misplaced and wrong arguments against his self-created adversaries - is never examined beyond the title’s most known or intuitive conventional meaning. The basic concept is at least as old as the adage itself. The author does little to bolster the claim while spending all efforts on slamming real or imagined opponents. The book’s frequent diversions along with internal contradictions amid a rather ...more

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Sep 18, 2018 David Rubenstein rated it it was amazing

Shelves: mathematics, nonfiction, philosophy, politics, ethics, psychology, economics

From the back cover of the book jacket:

The problem with Taleb is not that he's an asshole. He is an asshole. The problem with Taleb is that he is right.

This is the third book I've read by Nassim Taleb (The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable and Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder: Here is my review of Antifragile.) And this book, Skin in the Game is more quirky than either of his previous books--if that is at all possible. This book is poorly written. It jumps around from ...more

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Sep 25, 2018 ☘Misericordia☘ ⚡ϟ⚡⛈⚡☁ ❇️❤❣ rated it it was amazing

Shelves: groundbreaking

I’m improperly awed and professionally depressed by this guy. While I’ve been in love with the concept of asymmetry since, like, forever, he puts on it such an excruciating spin that… a lot of professions suddenly attain the unmistakable bullshit (or maybe swanshit!) flavor.

Anyway, this book lost a bit of its charm due to aggressive and seemingly random things aggregated together. I'm sure it's another case of 'it's not you, it's me', still, I felt the previous volumes were better grounded and m ...more

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Apr 23, 2018 Satyajeet rated it it was ok

Shelves: on-a-break

Cherry-picking meets ignorance of human nature meets naive interpretation of history meets erroneous assumptions.

If you cherry-pick the data, you can make ANY ridiculous hypothesis sound convincing.

Unlike those who complain about Taleb’s unresolved teenage angst, his thin-skinned hubris, or his lack of civility, I couldn’t care less about his crass remarks. My problem is with the ideas in this book, not its author, although I do question the intelligence of its author when his prose lapses into ...more

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Aug 16, 2019 Daniel Clausen rated it it was amazing

Shelves: books-of-2020, top-books, books-of-2021, books-of-2019, books-of-2022

Update July 22, 2021: Read the book a 4th time. When I got annoyed with vulgarity or repetition, I skipped a bit. I usually never had to skip more than a paragraph or two. The book read much more smoothly. I also read this book a page or two at a time at the beach or on a bus. It's a great book to read for a fourth time this way.

Update September 4, 2020. I changed my mind. I decided to rate this book after all.
Any book that has passages that are better on the third reading deserves five stars. Update July 22, 2021: Read the book a 4th time. When I got annoyed with vulgarity or repetition, I skipped a bit. I usually never had to skip more than a paragraph or two. The book read much more smoothly. I also read this book a page or two at a time at the beach or on a bus. It's a great book to read for a fourth time this way.

Update September 4, 2020. I changed my mind. I decided to rate this book after all.
Any book that has passages that are better on the third reading deserves five stars. On my third reading, there were parts of the book I skipped, but most of the book was still remarkable, and I would argue even better on the third reading. Ergo, 5 stars are necessary. And anything less would be dishonest.

I will leave the original review as it was written around this time last year, but keep in mind that all my remarks about the book being unrateable have now been overturned.

1. I can't rate this book. This seems an absurd thing to say, but it's hard to rate a book that often comes off as a pre-pubescent twitter rant. I think the problem is that Taleb's classical (and anti-modern) sense of honor screeches against my modern ears. Also, his classical sense of honor often devolves into the aesthetics of blue-collar water cooler bullshit sessions (I've been around too many of these), twitter rants, and toxic masculinity.

2. The actual philosophy of this book is wonderful and deserves at least two readings. I own the paperback in question, so I can just cross out flagrant vulgarity with a black pen. There isn't that much of it (just enough to make the book unrateable).

3. If you've read Antifragile and Black Swan, much of what is written in this book (but not all) will seem redundant. I think once you've figured out the core of Taleb's philosophy you can start applying it to your own problems with ease. It does help, however, to go back and see how he applies it. I consider Fooled by Randomness to be less essential than Antifragile and Black Swan, but an interesting case study to understand how philosophies evolve.

Since apparently, I'm not a real man unless I deadlift, and deadlifting is more important than book lifting at a library, and since I haven't deadlifted since high school football, I guess I should get back to deadlifting. Sadly, 350 pounds was my max in high school and all I've been doing since then is trying to improve myself with book learning.

That, or I can embrace a very hidden asymmetrical truth about modernity. Modernity has unlocked the once hidden power of women -- women thinkers, women writers (some who deadlift, many who don't) -- thus, roughly doubling the amount of ingenuity and talent (at least in places that are modern). An interesting question, one I think deserves some thought: How do intelligent, working women -- and to be fair entrepreneurs -- read Taleb? I think I'll explore the Goodreads comment sections and find out. ...more

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Feb 21, 2018 Magnus Ahmad rated it did not like it

Pop-science in it's lowest form. Book reads like a poorly researched, hastily written college essay. Strings together a few nuggets of common sense wisdom with sizeable amounts of unreferenced BS. Taleb is a shark, living off a reputation and using his own fanbase like an ATM. ...more

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Mar 04, 2018 Ivan rated it it was ok

In this book #4, Taleb is more arrogant and pretentious than ever. You can never let go of the feeling that this book is about him, rather than any other topic. He's become profoundly obnoxious and negative. Despite some good points in the book, reading it feels like carrying a burden.

In this new book Taleb goes to extra lengths to attack David Runciman, head of the politics department at Cambridge, and a Guardian book reviewer who had torn apart his previous "Antifragile" book. Runciman's crit ...more

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Nov 12, 2018 Gordon rated it liked it

Taleb has a few basic rules of writing, to wit:
* Never be boring
* Be sure to insult those you disagree with
* Remind the reader frequently of how smart you are, as evidenced by a multitude of quotations, in Latin wherever possible
* Mix the brilliant with the banal, the insightful with the sophomoric, the wise with the petty
* Keep the chapters short
* Roam widely across history to draw examples from, especially the classical world of the Eastern Mediterranean
* Remind the reader that although you ar Taleb has a few basic rules of writing, to wit:
* Never be boring
* Be sure to insult those you disagree with
* Remind the reader frequently of how smart you are, as evidenced by a multitude of quotations, in Latin wherever possible
* Mix the brilliant with the banal, the insightful with the sophomoric, the wise with the petty
* Keep the chapters short
* Roam widely across history to draw examples from, especially the classical world of the Eastern Mediterranean
* Remind the reader that although you are, like, really smart, you are also salt of the earth, in fact much more salt of the earth than your worthless critics with their fancy degrees and their secure tenured perches who probably never ever go to New York gyms reeking of stale sweat and never ever do dead-lifts
* Never mention "moral hazard", even though that's what the book is mainly about, because moral hazard sounds dull and well-worn whereas "skin in the game" sounds like a man's man kind of thing

In short, the author is erudite and entertaining even if his style is often cringe-worthy and irritating, possessing a personality that shines through on every page. That personality reminds the reader of a much, much smarter version of a certain orange-faced head of state given to frequent outbursts on Twitter. I don't think Taleb is the tweeting sort but if he were his tweets would be...Trumpian, but coherently so, with many more polysyllabic words, and probably without the Random Capitalization so characteristic of our Dear Leader. But I digress.

The main idea of this book is that you shouldn't trust the opinions of people without skin in the game, who won't suffer painful consequences, financial or otherwise, if their opinions are wrong. An extension of this idea is that you shouldn't trust people who don't have first-hand, in-the-trenches experience in whatever their chosen profession may be, from cutting hair to running companies to leading armies. However, Taleb leaves little doubt that the best profession of all is being a Wall St. trader, which he was for 20-odd years. The author's curiously narrow working experience, of little value to society or to the economy, consists of skimming some profit off the river of money coursing through the financial exchanges, while avoiding taking major losses from the markets' periodic wild gyrations. At this, Taleb excelled, by his own account, which I have no reason to doubt. But he wasn't even an investor, let alone an entrepreneur, much as he glorifies the entrepreneur. He was a risk-taker, but of the short-term speculator variety. It's by no means a dishonorable profession, and certainly a challenging if lucrative one. But it does tend to shape a certain worldview, especially towards risk. And what Taleb is all about is managing risk, and understanding it quantitatively.

A key concept in his idea of risk is his notion of "ergodicity", a branch of probability theory I have not studied. As Taleb uses the term, a system is ergodic if the probability of some outcome as a result of 100 independent iterations is the same as the probability of that outcome from one individual running 100 iterations. If 100 people jump off a cliff into the sea and #42 dies, while all the others survive, the chances of death are 1%. If one individual has to jump off that same cliff 100 times, the chances of death for that person approach 100%, not 1%. Hard to argue that you shouldn't run the same 1% risk 100 times and expect to survive if the 1% entails what Taleb calls "ruin". In the financial world, if you make enough speculative bets where one of the very low probability outcomes is financial disaster, you will eventually encounter financial disaster. Lone rogue traders have been known to take down entire banks.

So why is this idea interesting? As an individual, it tells you not to take repeated life-threatening and solvency-threatening risks if you can instead take smaller risks with expected positive outcomes -- and zero risk of ruin. Applying the idea to problems at the social level, such as GMOs and climate change, Taleb argues that these are the kind of risk scenarios where ruin is a real possibility, where the number of iterations of this risky bet is very high, and where we therefore should not take these risks in the first place. I didn't need any convincing of this with respect to climate change, but Taleb has definitely given me reason to re-assess what I think of GMOs. I am still not sure what to make of the high risk of our planet outrunning its food supply as population grows inexorably towards its peak somewhere between 10-12 billion VS. the risk of GMOs having unforeseen nasty consequences for both human and other forms of life. Taleb says the latter risk is too high because it could be terminal; he says nothing about the risk of the former.

A curious feature of the book is that Taleb, who worshipped behavioral economics in his previous book Fooled by Randomness, turns against it in this volume. He does not explicitly attack the fathers of the field, Tversky and Kahneman (who won the Nobel Prize in Economics for his work), but does go on the rampage against some of the other thinkers in the field, such as Cass Sunstein and Richard Thaler. The gist of Taleb's argument is that individuals' irrational behaviors due to cognitive biases don't amount to sub-optimal system behavior because systems are not simply the sum of the individual components. He illustrates this with the example of the invisible hand of the market, where purely self-interested individual behaviors nonetheless result in a market that efficiently self-regulates through price signals. I think this is major confusion on his part. Take retirement savings, a problem he mentions. American workers notoriously save too little and put too much of their savings in low interest money market accounts, due in part to certain cognitive biases such as weighting the pleasures of the present (spending the money NOW) disproportionately heavily relative to the the future (having much more money to spend in retirement). Meanwhile, the market does a very efficient job of pricing in myriad factors to determine the constantly-adjusted price of a typical ETF such as Vanguard's VT fund. Does this mean that the retirement savings behavior of individual American workers is going to add up to a rational, optimal retirement savings system somehow, just because the price of the fund these workers might invest in is efficiently determined?
Meanwhile, the behavioral economists of whom Taleb is so contemptuous have some very pragmatic ideas about how to nudge the behavior of workers today -- such as making voluntary enrollment in company 401K retirement plans the default rather than something the employee has to proactively select -- so that they will in fact make more rational retirement savings decisions that will serve them well in the future.

While there is much that I think Taleb is wrong about -- behavioral economics, the importance of economic inequality, the level of social mobility across classes, the role of government beyond the small scale, the role of a free press, the appropriate number of Latin quotations to put in books about risk and uncertainty ... -- there is much he is right about. And he's right about one central thing: beware of advice from people with no skin in the game, who will suffer no great discomfort if the advice they give you proves disastrous. ...more

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Feb 26, 2018 Muwaffaq rated it it was ok · review of another edition

I wanted to like this and I certainly did at the beginning. All of his insults are complex, original and amusing but he insults so many people so frequently that the process itself becomes tedious. I do enjoy his historical anecdotes, but again there are a large volume of them, and not always obviously with a point, other than a demonstration of his research or recall abilities. It is the fact that he criticises many individuals in passing with a specific but cryptic reference to something they ...more

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Mar 01, 2018 Jeffrey rated it it was amazing

Shelves: non-fiction, ikigai

Five stars only because six weren't available. ...more

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Mar 01, 2018 Gints Dreimanis rated it it was amazing

Hey, another one who doesn't give a fuck.

NNT is a bit of a diva, and it is obvious that he has some beef with a lot of people. He certainly sounds right. But is he? I don't know.

The book revolves around the notion that people not having skin in the game will fuck us up, somehow. Turns out that the idea of skin in the game can be applied to a wide variety of fields and professions. Especially the ones Taleb doesn't like, like academics, policy makers, journalists. Oh, and rationality as you kno ...more

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May 23, 2018 Leif Denti rated it it was ok

Taleb has lost it. Regrettably. This book is a good example of someone doing a "Lord Kelvin", that is, making strong claims about things that are not within your field of expertise. Taleb is a statistician, but of course that doesn't hinder him from having very strong opinions on other matters such as other researchers' fields, politics, banking, journalism, to mention just a few.

That's a shame because I loved his first two books. However since Antifragility, quality has been on a downward slop Taleb has lost it. Regrettably. This book is a good example of someone doing a "Lord Kelvin", that is, making strong claims about things that are not within your field of expertise. Taleb is a statistician, but of course that doesn't hinder him from having very strong opinions on other matters such as other researchers' fields, politics, banking, journalism, to mention just a few.

That's a shame because I loved his first two books. However since Antifragility, quality has been on a downward slope. In this book, Taleb doesn't even bother to back up his claims. Take this claim: old people is right 90 percent of the time but a psychologist is right only 10 percent of the time. Thats interesting for sure but where is the data? Why should I believe this? Last time old people did something they broke the UK by kicking it out of the EU via Brexit. He also claims that - because of the Lindy effect - the only theory that is worthwhile is theory that has "survived" the test of time. Like what the ancients wrote about: honor, love, cognitive dissonance. Of course he conveniently leaves out all the counter examples. Oppression, tyranny and dictatorship has survived the test of time. Are those things better ways of organizing a society than democracy? Machiavelli is a classic, and Aristotle maintained that society should be ruled by a thinking class (of philosophers of course, who did you think?). Is that good theory? It's sloppy thinking and I'm disappointed.

In fact, Taleb writes off whole professions with the stroke of his pen. The all-knowing, omnipotent thinker that he seem to think he is. Instead of actual corroboration of the many many, many claims, we get to read some ancient story about the Assyrians, or a very technical statistical term that seem to obscure Talebs claims instead of illuminating them. It's funny actually with the terminology in this book. I read a lot of science books and I rarely come across a book that uses so many obscure terms and concepts. For a guy who dislikes scientists (and scientism), he sure likes to sound like one.

In summary, the book is severely incoherent - ancient stories are mixed with Talebs observations about modern life, his dismissal of his thought up enemies, and disjointed anectodes from his life. Somehow I get the feeling that the book is actually about Taleb himself.

...more

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Dec 21, 2017 Anton rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: ideas, managing-self

3.5* - rounding up to 4.

Be warned: this book is a ranty, largely unstructured, flow-of-consciousness type stuff. It has an equal probability or either delighting the reader or driving them mad. I personally enjoy the erudite style of Taleb's argumentation and find his references and vignettes of the 'times gone by' intellectually stimulating. Also, the black-and-white bluntness of his position makes the book feel refreshing. You may not agree with Taleb's side, but you are never left in doubt wh ...more

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Mar 25, 2018 Ajay rated it it was amazing

Some really good insights in a very small book -

1. "When it comes to the country, I'm a libertarian, when it comes to the state, I'm a republican, when it comes to my city, I'm a Democrat, when it comes to my family, I'm a Socialist".
2. Cost benefit analysis is not possible when there is a probability of Ruin.
3. The west is in the process of committing ideological suicide (on minority rule).
4. Its easier to Macrobullshit than it is to Microbullshit.
5. What matters is not what a person has, but w ...more

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Dec 05, 2021 Pouri marked it as read_summary

Shelves: x_bplus_podcast, economics, to_read_full_version, finance, business, psychology, science, philosophy

“The curse of modernity is that we are increasingly populated by a class of people who are better at explaining than understanding, or better at explaining than doing.”
― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Skin in the Game: Hidden Asymmetries in Daily Life

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Apr 16, 2018 Martin Brochhaus rated it did not like it

Shelves: philosophy, rubbish, never-finished

First of all: I have no idea who the author is or why he matters or why *he thinks* he matters so much. There seems to be somewhat of a personal cult around him, so whatever, I'm going in unbiased.

The first 19% (can you even believe that?!) of this book is prologue and can only be described as a lose string of consciousness from a person that very obviously thinks very highly of themselves and seems to hate everything and everyone.

Nothing in this book makes any sense.

First of all, the chapters ...more

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Jun 20, 2019 Siah rated it liked it · review of another edition

By the end I was so tired of hearing a man child complaining about literally everything in the world. He complains about teachers, politicians, academics, doctors. There are a few good ideas but they are all wrapped in Talib’s aura of crap.

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Mar 20, 2018 Ill D rated it it was amazing

Taleb's the hero. ...more

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Mar 15, 2018 Stephan rated it did not like it

“The mark of a charlatan is to defend his position or attack a critic by focusing on some specific statement (“ look at what he said”) rather than blasting his exact position (“ look at what he means” or, more broadly, “look at what he stands for”)— for the latter requires an extensive grasp of the proposed idea.”

This quote from Mr. Taleb perfectly summarizes my problems with his book.

The general theme of the book is that one should be wary of those making decisions who lack consequences of thos ...more

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Feb 27, 2018 Gaurav Mathur rated it liked it

Aah, Taleb. I have read all his non-technical books at least twice, so of course it was with great enthusiasm that I bought this... SITG.

Bit of a bummer.

SITG has some great insights, but most of them were shared on his Twitter account, and his posts on Medium. That is:

(SITG book - Previous works - Medium posts = few new insights)

Also, a bit of complaining about how his ideas were not listened to.

But of course applaud the man for pursuing his ideas for more than 2 decades. Have learned quite a lo ...more

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Mar 09, 2018 Harsh Gupta rated it it was amazing

Brilliant book. Many chapters of the book are available on medium, for example https://medium.com/incerto/the-most-i...

Caveats:

* Taleb is **not** meant to be read literally.

* Read "Antifragile" or "Black Swan" before reading this to better appreciate the content, especially if Taleb's article on "Intellectual Yet Idiot" offends you https://medium.com/incerto/the-intell... Better get some "skin in the game" :D ...more

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Jul 07, 2018 Vance rated it liked it

Shelves: effective-leadership

I’ve read Taleb’s books The Black Swan and Fooled By Randomness so I’m accustomed to his lessons. With that said, I think this is a well-written book, as expected, but I don’t believe I learned much from it that I didn’t already know from his previous writings. The point that skin in the game is necessary for accurate examination of changes in the economy and policies is informative and one that economists often overlook, though I think Taleb exaggerates the rate economists overlook this point, ...more

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Feb 09, 2020 Yevgeniy Brikman rated it really liked it

As with most of Taleb's books, this one is poorly organized, full of childish insults and bravado, and makes some totally absurd claims. But this book also contains some startling, deep insights and ideas. It's frustrating to have to wade through a lot of bullshit to get to these interesting ideas, but when you finally get there, the pay off is pretty damn good. Here are some of the biggest insights I got from this book:

1. The central thesis is that "skin in the game" is essential for systems t ...more

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Dec 31, 2018 Laura Noggle rated it it was amazing

Shelves: would-will-read-again, nonfiction, 2018, favorites

Reads like the Burn Book from Mean Girls.

Taleb spares no one, ripping professions, beliefs, jobs, and people—by name—apart. Especially Steven Pinker, whom he calls out more than twice.

Highly offensive, I found this book a riotous good time, hilarious, and razor sharp.

This ended up being one of my favorite books of 2018, completed on December 31st.

I will read this one again next year, for, as Taleb points out:

"... learning is rooted in repetition and convexity, meaning that the reading of a sin Reads like the Burn Book from Mean Girls.

Taleb spares no one, ripping professions, beliefs, jobs, and people—by name—apart. Especially Steven Pinker, whom he calls out more than twice.

Highly offensive, I found this book a riotous good time, hilarious, and razor sharp.

This ended up being one of my favorite books of 2018, completed on December 31st.

I will read this one again next year, for, as Taleb points out:

"... learning is rooted in repetition and convexity, meaning that the reading of a single text twice is more profitable than reading two different things once, provided of course that said text has some depth of content."

"Extending such logic, we can show that much of what we call 'belief' is some kind of background furniture for the human mind, more metaphorical than real. It may work as therapy."

"Give me a few lines written by any man and I will find enough to get him hung" goes the saying attributed to Richelieu, Voltaire, Talleyrand (a vicious censor during the French revolution phase of terror), and a few others."

"The IYI (Intellectual Yet Idiot) joins a club to get travel privileges; if he is a social scientist, he uses statistics without knowing how they are derived (like Steven Pinker and psycholophasters in general); when in the United Kingdom, he goes to literary festivals and eats cucumber sandwiches, taking small bites at a time; he drinks red wine with steak (never white); he used to believe that dietary fat was harmful and has now completely reversed himself (information in both cases is derived from the same source); he takes statins because his doctor told him to do so; he fails to understand ergodicity, and, when explained to him, he forgets about it soon after; he doesn't use Yiddish words even when talking business; he studies grammar before speaking a language; he has a cousin who worked with someone who knows the Queen; he has never read FrédéricDark, Libanius Antiochus, Michael Oakeshott, John Gray, Ammianus Marcellinus, Ibn, Battuta, Saadia Gaon, or Joseph de Maistre; he has never gotten drunk with Russians; he never drinks to the point where he starts breaking glasses (or, preferably, chairs); he doesn't even know the difference between Hecate and Hecuba (which in Brooklyn's is 'can't tell sh**t from shinola'); he doesn't know that there is no difference between 'pseudointellectual' and 'intellectual' in the absence of skin in the game; he has mentioned quantum mechanics at least twice in the past five years in conversations that had nothing to do with physics." ...more

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Feb 28, 2018 Lucas Carlson rated it it was amazing

Love this book. Much smaller in number of words than his others, but equally dense if not more so with ideas. It’s a great compliment to the rest of his books and ties his ideas together well.

I’ve heard a lot of otherwise smart people criticize Taleb as trying to sound smart without saying anything new or special, but I can’t disagree more.

If I had to distill everything Taleb into one idea, I would focus on the last few sentences of this latest book, which I will summarize in my own memory of ...more

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Jul 09, 2018 Socraticgadfly rated it did not like it

Shelves: economics, politics-public-policy, bs-pabluim

Taleb, whose politics I did not pay attention to in Black Swan (and I skipped reading Antifragile), come off as a mix of right-neolib, classic liberal and Hayekian libertarian. It’s certainly possible, in addition, that he’s a Trump Train fellow traveler, though not riding the main line himself.

He’s anti-regulatory as part of libertarian part of him. Yes, agencies can suffer regulatory capture, but the libertarian idea espoused by him of regulation through private lawsuit doesn’t work. Most peop ...more

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Apr 12, 2022 Milan rated it liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: philosophy, non-fiction

Skin in the game is needed in a lot of things and I love Taleb’s books and ideas. However, this book has fewer interesting ideas and less depth compared to his previous works. I had a hard time looking at everything from the prism of skin in the game.

There were only a few appearances of likeable characters like fat Tony. He was using the same old punching bags that he likes: economists, institutions, academics, social sciences, etc. Though he has issues with behavior economics but he keeps pick Skin in the game is needed in a lot of things and I love Taleb’s books and ideas. However, this book has fewer interesting ideas and less depth compared to his previous works. I had a hard time looking at everything from the prism of skin in the game.

There were only a few appearances of likeable characters like fat Tony. He was using the same old punching bags that he likes: economists, institutions, academics, social sciences, etc. Though he has issues with behavior economics but he keeps picking and using what he finds useful from Daniel Kahneman and Gerd Gigerenzer to make his points.

Even the philosophical digressions were not very interesting in this book. Only when he talks about the ancient history i.e., Greeks and Romans is what make the book interesting in parts. I hope his next book is as interesting as his previous ones.

He makes a few interesting points:

“Courage is the only virtue you cannot fake.”
“You can define a free person precisely as someone whose fate is not centrally or directly dependent on peer assessment.”
“Bureaucracy is a construction by which a person is conveniently separated from the consequences of his or her actions.”
“Don’t tell me what you think, tell me what you have in your portfolio.”
“Entrepreneurs are heroes in our society. They fail for the rest of us.”
“When you buy a thick book with tons of graphs and tables used to prove a point, you should be suspicious. It means something didn’t distill right!”
“Treasury secretary Tim Geithner was overtly rewarded by the industry he helped bail out. He helped bankers get bailouts, let them pay themselves from the largest bonus pool in history after the crisis, in 2010 (that is, using taxpayer money), and then got a multimillion-dollar job at a financial institution as his reward for good behavior.”
“Robert Rubin, a former Secretary of the United States Treasury, one of those who sign their names on the banknote you just used to pay for coffee, collected more than $120 million in compensation from Citibank in the decade preceding the banking crash of 2008. When the bank, literally insolvent, was rescued by the taxpayer, he didn’t write any check—he invoked uncertainty as an excuse. Heads he wins, tails he shouts “Black Swan.” Nor did Rubin acknowledge that he transferred risk to taxpayers.” ...more

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Mar 24, 2018 Tim O'Hearn rated it it was amazing

I read this book a few months ago and enjoyed it. Taleb is kind of dickish but he often succeeds in making me question whether I'm smart enough to grasp what he's saying. This brings a special level of excitement to reading any of his works. To me, they present a challenge. A crossword puzzle of intellect with some pseudo elements.

The underlying concept in this book is evident from the title. It's an extrapolation of the principle-agent problem. Most of my notes from my original reading have bee I read this book a few months ago and enjoyed it. Taleb is kind of dickish but he often succeeds in making me question whether I'm smart enough to grasp what he's saying. This brings a special level of excitement to reading any of his works. To me, they present a challenge. A crossword puzzle of intellect with some pseudo elements.

The underlying concept in this book is evident from the title. It's an extrapolation of the principle-agent problem. Most of my notes from my original reading have been lost, unfortunately, but I managed to dig up one passage that jives:

"One problem with Taleb's writing is that when he goes out of his range, you can apply the same systematic ripping-you-a-new-one rebuttal that he applies to his own pieces.

He makes the argument that high class restaurants are primarily a way to separate yuppies like me from their money. This is tied to the fact that, as you ascend the ladder of society, life becomes more complicated, social posturing becomes more important, and thus more people are able to more easily extract money from you. The example he provides is that a lot of people order steak when they'd actually prefer a burger because burgers contain more fat. My experience of living in a big city validates part of this argument--that some yuppies spend money wrecklessly. I go through manic spending periods of my own. However, my opinion on the steak vs burger thing is that you go to a steakhouse for an environment and classification of food that you couldn't get at a burger joint. I love going to steakhouses and ordering burgers. I love going to steakhouses and ordering steaks. But a top-class steak at a top-class steakhouse kicks the shit out of a $20 burger at a top-class steakhouse. So the truth here is that his statement is not true.

I don't know. It's plausible that yuppies genuinely enjoy socializing at restaurants that may cost a lot. The burger/steak comparison irks me because if you're eating out period you're spending frivolously. I usually spend $17 at McDonald's to eat my fill." ...more

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About Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

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Nassim Nicholas Taleb spent 21 years as a risk taker (quantitative trader) before becoming a flaneur and researcher in philosophical, mathematical and (mostly) practical problems with probability.  

Taleb is the author of a multivolume essay, the Incerto (The Black Swan, Fooled by Randomness, Antifragile, and Skin in the Game) an investigation of opacity, luck, uncertainty, probability, human erro ...more

Other books in the series

Incerto (5 books)

Books by Nassim Nicholas Taleb

The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable

Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets

Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder

The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms

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Quotes from Skin in the Game:...

“I am, at the Fed level, libertarian;
at the state level, Republican;
at the local level, Democrat;
and at the family and friends level, a socialist.
If that saying doesn’t convince you of the fatuousness of left vs. right labels, nothing will.” — 101 likes

“The curse of modernity is that we are increasingly populated by a class of people who are better at explaining than understanding, or better at explaining than doing.” — 80 likes

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