Skin in the Game: Hidden Asymmetries in Daily Life

by Nassim Nicholas Taleb

WHERE TO FIND A COCONUT But the problem is the one-eyed following the blind: these self-described members of the “intelligentsia” can’t find a coconut on Coconut Island, meaning they aren’t intelligent enough to define intelligence, hence fall into circularities—their main skill is a capacity to pass exams written by people like them, or to write papers read by people like them. Some of us—not Fat Tony—have been blind to their serial incompetence. With psychology studies replicating less than 40 percent of the time, dietary advice reversing after thirty years of dietary fat phobia, macroeconomics and financial economics (while trapped in an intricate Gargantuan patch of words) scientifically worse than astrology (this is what the reader of the Incerto has known since Fooled by Randomness), the reappointment of Bernanke (in 2010) who was less than clueless about financial risk as the Federal Reserve boss, and pharmaceutical trials replicating at best only a third of the time, people are perfectly entitled to rely on their own ancestral instincts and to listen to their grandmothers (or to Montaigne and such filtered classical knowledge), who have a better track record than these policymaking goons.