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

by Nassim Nicholas Taleb

in geopolitics or grand abstract principles, but rather in having bread on the table, beer (or, for some, nonalcoholic fermented beverages such as yoghurt drinks) in the refrigerator, and good weather at outdoor family picnics.

Further, these people tend to see everything as geopolitics, as if the world was polarized into two big players, not a collection of people with diverse interests.

still insist on conflating relations between countries with relations between governments.

But to those of us on the ground, the objective was to make things work and have a life, not sacrifice our existence for the sake of geopolitics. Real people are interested

in commonalities and peace, not conflicts and wars.

If the “law of the jungle” means anything, it means collaboration for the most part, with a few perceptional distortions caused by our otherwise well-functioning risk-management intuitions.

History is largely peace punctuated by wars, rather than wars punctuated by peace.

But more than six hundred thousand Italians died in the Great War, during the “period of stability,” almost one order of magnitude higher than all the cumulative fatalities in the five hundred years preceding it.

Journalism is about “events,” not absence of events, and many historians and policy scholars are glorified journalists with high fact-checking standards who allow themselves to be a little boring in order to be taken seriously.

one-sided inequalities: what is absent from the data should be taken into account—absence

My lifetime motto is that mathematicians think in (well, precisely defined and mapped) objects and relations, jurists and legal thinkers in constructs, logicians in maximally abstract operators, and…fools in words.

philosophy was born as rigor in discourse and disentanglement of mixed-up notions, in precise opposition to the sophist’s promotion of rhetoric.

Different people rarely mean the same thing when they say “religion,” nor do they realize it.

Some beliefs are largely decorative, some are functional (they help in survival), others are literal.

atheists in actions, religious in words (most Orthodox and Catholic Christians) and others who are religious in actions, religious in words (Salafi Islamists and suicide bombers)

a) rationality resides in what you do, not in what you think or in what you “believe” (skin in the game), and b) rationality is about survival.

So when we look at religion, and, to some extent, ancestral superstitions, we should consider what purpose they serve, rather than focusing on the notion of “belief,” epistemic belief in its strict scientific definition.

In science, belief is literal belief; it is right or wrong, never

metaphorical. In real life, belief is an instrument to do things, not the end product. This is similar to vision: the purpose of your eyes is to orient you in the best possible way, and get you out of trouble when needed, or help you find prey at a distance. Your eyes are not sensors designed to capture the electromagnetic spectrum. Their job description is not to produc...

The same applies to distortions of beliefs. Are visual deceits any different from leading someone to believe in Santa Claus, if it enhances his or her holiday aesthetic experience? No, unless it causes harm.

Survival comes first, truth, understanding, and science later.

In other words, you do not need science to survive (we’ve survived for several hundred million years or more, depending on how you define the “we”), but you must survive to do science. As your grandmother would have said, better safe than sorry. Or as per the expression attributed to Hobbes: Primum vivere, deinde philosophari (First, live; then philosophize).

Rationality does not superficially look like rationality—just as science doesn’t look like science as we’ve seen.

the cognitive scientist and polymath Herb Simon, who pioneered artificial intelligence; the psychologist Gerd Gigerenzer; and the mathematician, logician, and decision theorist Ken Binmore, who spent his life formulating the logical foundations of rationality.

it is mostly organized and led by Gerd Gigerenzer (the one who critiqued Dawkins in Chapter 9), mapping how many things we do that appear, on the surface, illogical, but have deeper reasons.

Judging people by their beliefs is not scientific. There is no such thing as the “rationality” of a belief, there is rationality of action. The rationality of an action can be judged only in terms of evolutionary considerations.

you will not have an idea about

what people really think, what predicts people’s actions, merely by asking them—they themselves don’t necessarily know.

The subjects are given a monetary amount, and they watch how the subject formulates choices by examining how they spend the money.

I have shown in Antifragile that making some types of errors is the most rational thing to do, when the errors are of little cost, as they lead to discoveries.

For instance, most medical “discoveries” are accidental to something else.

only evolution knows if the “wrong” thing is really wrong, provided there is skin in the game to allow for selection.

It is therefore my opinion that religion exists to enforce tail risk management across generations, as its binary and unconditional rules are easy to teach and enforce.

Science is mainly rigor in the process.

To repeat, we do not have enough grounds to discuss “irrational beliefs.” We do with irrational actions.

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.

There is a difference between beliefs that are decorative and different sorts of beliefs, those that map to action.

There is no difference between them in words, except that the true difference reveals itself in risk taking, having something at stake, something one could lose in case one is wrong.

How much you truly “believe” in something can be manifested only through what you are willing to risk for it.

“reason” and “reasonable” were present in ancient thought, mostly embedded in the notion of precaution, or sophrosyne, this modern idea of “rationality” and “rational decision making” was born in the aftermath of Max Weber, with the works of psychologists, philosophasters, and psychosophasters.

It assumes absence of randomness, or a simplified random structure of our world. Also, of course, no interactions with the world.

Unlike modern theories by psychosophasters, it maps to the classical way of thinking. Anything that hinders one’s survival at an individual, collective, tribal, or

general level is, to me, irrational.

When you consider beliefs in evolutionary terms, do not look at how they compete with each other, but consider the survival of the populations that have them.

ex ante

It most certainly brought cohesion: people who eat together hang together. (To be technical, it is a convex heuristic.)

Rationality does not depend on explicit verbalistic explanatory factors; it is only what aids survival, what avoids ruin.

Not everything that happens happens for a reason, but everything that survives survives for a reason.

Recall that to do science (and other nice things) requires survival but not the other way around.