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

by Nassim Nicholas Taleb

If I had a choice between paying $200 for a pizza or $6.95 for the French complicated experience, I would readily pay $200 for the pizza, plus $9.95 for a bottle of Malbec wine. Actually I would pay to not have the Michelin experience.

You will note that no explicit verbal threat was issued. Verbal threats reveal nothing beyond weakness and unreliability. Remember, once again, no verbal threats.

The London newspapers were actively misrepresenting something to their own public. Someone who read the paper was mistaking the journalist for an intermediary between him- or herself and the product, the piece of news. But if I eventually set the record straight, thanks to my bully pulpit, many can’t do the same. So clearly there is an agency problem. There is no difference between a journalist at The Guardian and the restaurant owner in Milan, who, when you ask for a taxi, calls his cousin who does a tour of the city to inflate the meter before showing up. Or the doctor who willfully misdiagnoses you to sell you a drug in which he has a vested interest.

The incentives are misplaced - news doesn't optimize profit by accurately interpreting people's intentions, it profits from conflict and will happily create conflict out of normal interactions if it pays

This will be the main topic of this chapter: exploiting virtue for image, personal gain, careers, social status, these kinds of things—and by personal gain I mean anything that does not share the downside of a negative action.

Kids with rich parents talk about “class privilege” at privileged colleges such as Amherst—but in one instance, one of them could not answer Dinesh D’Souza’s simple and logical suggestion: Why don’t you go to the registrar’s office and give your privileged spot to the minority student next in line? Clearly the defense given by people under such a situation is that they want others to do so as well—they require a systemic solution to every local perceived problem of injustice. I find that immoral. I know of no ethical system that allows you to let someone drown without helping him because other people are not helping, no system that says, “I will save people from drowning only if others too save other people from drowning.” Which brings us to the principle: If your private life conflicts with your intellectual opinion, it cancels your intellectual ideas, not your private life. And a solution to the vapid universalism we discussed in the Prologue: If your private actions do not generalize, then you cannot have general ideas. This is not strictly about ethics, but information. If a car salesman tries to sell you a Detroit car while driving a Honda, he is signaling that the wares he is touting may have a problem.

So these global causes—poverty (particularly children’s), the environment, justice for some minority trampled upon by colonial powers, or some as-yet-unknown gender that will be persecuted—are now the last refuge of the scoundrel advertising virtue. Virtue is not something you advertise. It is not an investment strategy. It is not a cost-cutting scheme. It is not a bookselling (or, worse, concert-ticket-selling) strategy.

Further, the highest form of virtue is unpopular. This does not mean that virtue is inherently unpopular, or correlates with unpopularity, only that unpopular acts signal some risk taking and genuine behavior. Courage is the only virtue you cannot fake. If I were to describe the perfect virtuous act, it would be to take an uncomfortable position, one penalized by the common discourse.