Skin in the Game: Hidden Asymmetries in Daily Life

by Nassim Nicholas Taleb

ANOTHER BUSINESS OF INTERVENTION 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. Some rules: People who are bred, selected, and compensated to find complicated solutions do not have an incentive to implement simplified ones. And it gets more complicated as the remedy has itself a skin-in-the-game problem. This is particularly acute in the meta-problem, when the solution is about solving this very problem. In other words, 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 do. There is absolutely no gain for someone in such a position to propose something simple: you are rewarded for perception, not results. Meanwhile, they pay no price for the side effects that grow nonlinearly with such complications. This also holds true when it comes to solutions that are profitable to technologists.