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August 15 - September 8, 2018
Science isn’t the sum of what scientists think, but exactly as with markets, it is a procedure that is highly skewed. Once you debunk something, it is now wrong. Had science operated by majority consensus, we would be still stuck in the Middle Ages,
Revolutions are unarguably driven by an obsessive minority.
Society doesn’t evolve by consensus, voting, majority, committees, verbose meetings, academic
All one needs is an asymmetric rule somewhere—and someone with soul in the game.
Human nature is not defined outside of transactions involving other humans.
Monogenic diseases, those for which a single gene plays a role, are quite tractable, but anything entailing higher dimensionality falls apart.
Under the right market structure, a collection of idiots produces a well-functioning
functioning market.
Leave people alone under a good structure and
they will take care of things.
You are buying dependability.
By being employees they signal a certain type of domestication.
An employee is—by design—more valuable inside a firm than outside of it; that is, more valuable to the employer than the marketplace.
The best slave is someone you overpay and who knows it, terrified of losing his status.
Because the further from headquarters an employee is located, the more autonomous his unit, the more you want him to be a
slave so he does nothing strange on his own.
the feeling of false stability. A dog’s life may appear smooth and secure, but in the absence of an owner, a dog does not survive.
A wolf is trained to survive.
Traders who made money, I realized, could get so disruptive that they needed to be kept away from the rest of the employees.
That’s the price you pay for turning individuals into profit
centers, meaning no other criteri...
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traders needed to be kept away from the rest of nonfree, non-risk-taking people.
Ironically the highest status, that of a free man, is usually indicated by voluntarily adopting the mores of the lowest class.*5
What matters isn’t what a person has or doesn’t have; it is what he or she is afraid of losing.
the higher you go in that business, the more insecure you get,
Putin has the equivalent of f***you money, projecting a visible “I don’t care,” which in turn brings him more followers and more support.
People whose survival depends on qualitative “job assessments” by someone of higher rank in an organization cannot be trusted for critical decisions.
If you do not undertake a risk of real harm, reparable or even potentially irreparable, from an adventure, it is not an adventure.
will propose that what people resent—or should resent—is the person at the top who has no skin in the game, that is, because he doesn’t bear his allotted risk,
by advertising his episode of bankruptcy and his personal losses of close to a billion dollars, he removed the resentment
There is something respectable in losing a billion dollars, provided it is your own money.
what we learn from professionals in the real world is that data is not necessarily rigor.
Just a little bit of significant data is needed when one is right, particularly when it is disconfirmatory empiricism, or counterexamples:
having rich people in a public office is very different from having public people become rich—again, it is the dynamics, the sequence, that matters.
(Regulators, you may recall, have an incentive to make rules as complex as possible so their expertise can later be hired at a higher price.)
vicious domain-dependence of expertise:
Ideas need to have skin in the game.
executives are different from entrepreneurs and are supposed to look like actors.
conditional on having had some success in spite of not looking the part, it is potent, even crucial, information.
the people you understand most easily were necessarily the bull***tters.
a business plan is a useful narrative for those who want to convince a sucker.
firms in the entrepreneurship business make most of their money packaging companies and selling them; it is not easy to sell without some strong narrative. But for a real business (as opposed to a fund-raising scheme), something that should survive on its own, business plans and funding work backward.
Never hire an academic unless his function is to partake of the rituals of writing papers or taking exams.
Just as the slick fellow in a Ferrari looks richer than the rumpled centimillionaire, scientism looks more scientific than real science.
Never pay for complexity of presentation when all you need is results.
Intellectual Yet Idiot.
People who have always operated without skin in the game (or without their skin in the right game) seek the complicated and centralized, and avoid the simple like the plague.
Practitioners, on the other hand, have opposite instincts, looking for the simplest heuristics.
many problems in society come from the interventions of people who sell complicated solutions because that’s what their position and training invite them to
Now the “techies” saw an angle of intervention. First, you show pictures of starving children to elicit sympathy and prevent further discussion—anyone who argues in the presence of dying children is a heartless a**hole. Second, you make it look like any critic of your method is arguing against saving the children. Third, you propose some scientific-looking technique that is lucrative to you and, should it cause a catastrophe or blight, insulates you from the long-term effects. Fourth, you
