Skin in the Game: Hidden Asymmetries in Daily Life

by Nassim Nicholas Taleb

REAL GYMS DON’T LOOK LIKE GYMS This education labeling provides a lot of cosmetic things but misses something essential about antifragility and true learning, reminiscent of gyms. People are impressed with expensive equipment—fancy, complicated, multicolored—meant to look as if it belonged on a spaceship. Things appear maximally sophisticated and scientific—but remember that what looks scientific is usually scientism, not science. As with label universities, you pay quite a bit of money to join, largely for the benefit of the real estate developer. Yet people into strength training (those who are actually strong across many facets of real life) know that users of these machines gain no strength beyond an initial phase. By having recourse to complicated equipment that typically targets very few muscles, regular users will eventually be pear-shaping and growing weaker over time, with skills that do not transfer outside of the very machine that they trained on. The equipment may have some use in a hospital or a rehabilitation program, but that’s about it. On the other hand, the simpler barbell (a metal bar with two weights on both ends) is the only standard piece of equipment that gets you to recruit your entire body for exercises—and it is the simplest and cheapest to get. All you need to learn are the safety skills to move off the floor at your maximum while avoiding injury. Lindy again: weight lifters have known the phenomenology for at least two and a half millennia. All ...