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

by Nassim Nicholas Taleb

enlist journalists and useful idiots, people who hate things that appear “unscientific” in their unscientific eyes. Fifth, you create a smear campaign to harm the reputations of researchers who, not having f*** you money, are very vulnerable to the slightest blemish to their reputations. The technique

Simply, the minute one is judged by others rather than by reality, things become warped as follows.

The heuristic here would be to use education in reverse: hire, conditional on an equal set of skills, the person with the least label-oriented education.

In addition, people who didn’t go to Harvard are easier to deal with in real life.

Most gains in physical strength come from working the tails of the distribution, close to your limit.

It costs a lot of energy to fake that you’re not bored.

Poison is drunk in golden cups (Venenum in auro bibitur).

Very few people understand their own choices, and end up being manipulated by those who want to sell them something.

such an agency problem as that of the current press is systemic, as its interests will keep diverging from that of its public until the eventual systemic blowup

And you never cure structural defects; the system corrects itself by collapsing.

If your private life conflicts with your intellectual opinion, it cancels your

intellectual ideas, not your private life.

videri quam esse,

of people feeling useful engaging in the otherwise selfish activity of running marathons—no

We have argued that virtue is not an ornament, not something one can buy.

So true virtue lies mostly in also being nice to those who are neglected by others, the less obvious cases, those people the grand charity business tends to miss.

Yes, take risk, and if you get rich (which is optional), spend your money generously on others. We need people to take (bounded) risks.

Courage (risk taking) is the highest virtue. We need entrepreneurs.

No peace proceeds from bureaucratic ink. If you want peace, make people trade, as they have done for millennia. They will be eventually forced to work something out.

historians and policy scholaristas are selected from a cohort of people who derive their knowledge from books, not real life and business.

Love without sacrifice is theft

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.

In real life, belief is an instrument to do things, not the end product.

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

you must survive to do science.

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.

skin in the game means that you do not pay attention to what people say, only to what they do, and to how much of their necks they are putting on the line. Let survival work its wonders.

I find it incoherent to criticize someone’s superstitions if these are meant to bring some benefits, while at the same time having no problemo with the optical illusions in Greek temples.

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

The classical sophrosyne means precaution, self-control, and temperance all in one.

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.

This is conflating ensemble probability and time probability.

a situation is deemed non-ergodic when observed past probabilities do not apply to future processes. There is a “stop” somewhere, an absorbing barrier that prevents people with skin in the game from emerging from it—and

The central problem is that if there is a possibility of ruin, cost-benefit analyses are no longer possible.

Assume a collection of people play Russian roulette a single time for a million dollars—this is the central story in Fooled by Randomness. About five out of six will make money.

Ruin is indivisible and invariant to the source of randomness that may cause it.

Unless you are perfectly narcissistic and psychopathic—even then—your worst-case scenario is never limited to the loss of only your life.

individual ruin is not as big a deal as collective ruin.

my death at Russian roulette is not ergodic for me but it is ergodic for the system.

Selfish courage is not courage.

In a strategy that entails ruin, benefits never offset risks of ruin.