Skin in the Game: Hidden Asymmetries in Daily Life (Incerto, #5)

by Nassim Nicholas Taleb

The knowledge we get by tinkering, via trial and error, experience, and the workings of time, in other words, contact with the earth, is vastly superior to that obtained through reasoning, something self-serving institutions have been very busy hiding from us.

Their three flaws: 1) they think in statics not dynamics, 2) they think in low, not high, dimensions, 3) they think in terms of actions, never interactions.

The principle of intervention, like that of healers, is first do no harm (primum non nocere); even more, we will argue, those who don’t take risks should never be involved in making decisions.

Bureaucracy is a construction by which a person is conveniently separated from the consequences of his or her actions.

You will never fully convince someone that he is wrong; only reality can.

The curse of modernity is that we are increasingly populated by a class of people who are better at explaining than understanding,

Avoid taking advice from someone who gives advice for a living, unless there is a penalty for their advice.

By definition, what works cannot be irrational; about every single person I know who has chronically failed in business shares that mental block, the failure to realize that if something stupid works (and makes money), it cannot be stupid.

Things designed by people without skin in the game tend to grow in complication (before their final collapse).

The main idea behind complex systems is that the ensemble behaves in ways not predicted by its components. The interactions matter more than the nature of the units.

What matters isn’t what a person has or doesn’t have; it is what he or she is afraid of losing.