Skin in the Game: Hidden Asymmetries in Daily Life

by Nassim Nicholas Taleb

To emit a Yogiberrism, in academia there is no difference between academia and the real world; in the real world, there is.

Don’t tell me what you “think,” just tell me what’s in your portfolio.

The knowledge we get by tinkering, via trial and error, experience, and the workings of time, in other words, contact with the earth, is vastly superior to that obtained through reasoning, something self-serving institutions have been very busy hiding from us.

In general, when you hear someone invoking abstract modernistic notions, you can assume that they got some education (but not enough, or in the wrong discipline) and have too little accountability.

Bureaucracy is a construction by which a person is conveniently separated from the consequences of his or her actions.

You will never fully convince someone that he is wrong; only reality can.

The curse of modernity is that we are increasingly populated by a class of people who are better at explaining than understanding,

“Deal with weaker states as you think it appropriate for stronger states to deal with you.”

Avoid taking advice from someone who gives advice for a living, unless there is a penalty for their advice.

Anything you do to optimize your work, cut some corners, or squeeze more “efficiency” out of it (and out of your life) will eventually make you dislike it.

Laws come and go; ethics stay.

I am, at the Fed level, libertarian; at the state level, Republican; at the local level, Democrat; and at the family and friends level, a socialist.

“Why didn’t the Poles in Warsaw help their Jewish neighbors more?,” responded that they generally did. But it took seven or eight Poles to help one Jew. It took only one Pole, acting as an informer, to turn in a dozen Jews. Even if such select Polish anti-Semitism is contestable, we can easily imagine bad outcomes stemming from a minority of bad agents. STABILITY

The market is like a large movie theater with a small door.

What matters isn’t what a person has or doesn’t have; it is what he or she is afraid of losing.

You can risk people’s lives, but you remain a slave. The entire structure of the civil service is organized that way.

likewise it is easier to trust the word of an autocrat than a fragile elected official.

If you do not undertake a risk of real harm, reparable or even potentially irreparable, from an adventure, it is not an adventure.

The way to make society more equal is by forcing (through skin in the game) the rich to be subjected to the risk of exiting from the 1 percent.fn4

Use laws that are old but food that is fresh.

And recall that, a free person does not need to win arguments—just win.

And if we are lucky enough to have people who do not look the part, it is thanks to the presence of some skin in the game, the contact with reality that filters out incompetence, as reality is blind to looks.

And nobody today will come to console you for having a mansion—few will realize that it is quite sad to be there on Sunday evening.

You can criticize either what a person said or what a person meant.

to be or to be seen as such.

Never engage in virtue signaling; 2) Never engage in rent-seeking; 3) You must start a business. Put yourself on the line, start a business.

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

The rationality of an action can be judged only in terms of evolutionary considerations.

“never cross a river if it is on average four feet deep.”

No muscles without strength, friendship without trust, opinion without consequence, change without aesthetics, age without values, life without effort, water without thirst, food without nourishment, love without sacrifice, power without fairness, facts without rigor, statistics without logic, mathematics without proof, teaching without experience, politeness without warmth, values without embodiment, degrees without erudition, militarism without fortitude, progress without civilization, friendship without investment, virtue without risk, probability without ergodicity, wealth without exposure, complication without depth, fluency without content, decision without symmetry, science without skepticism, religion without tolerance, and, most of all: nothing without skin in the game.