Skin In The Game (short Edition)

Nassim Nicholas Taleb sk in in the ga me Hidden Asymmetries in Daily Life BY THE SAME AUTHOR INCERTO, an investigation of opacity, luck, uncertainty, probability, human error, risk, and decision making when we don’t understand the world, expressed in the form of a personal essay with autobiographical sections, stories, parables, and philosophical, historical, and scientific discussions in non-overlapping volumes that can be accessed in any order. FOOLED BY RANDOMNESS (2001, 2004), on how we tend to mistake luck for skills, how randomness does not look random, why there is no point talking about performance when it is easier to buy and sell than fry an egg, and the profound difference between dentists and speculators. THE BLACK SWAN (2007, 2010), on how high-impact but rare events dominate history, how we retrospectively give ourselves the illusion of understanding them thanks to narratives, how they are impossible to estimate scientifically, how this makes some areas—but not others— totally unpredictable and unforecastable, how confirmatory methods of knowledge don’t work, and how thanks to Black Swan–blind “faux experts” we are prone to building systems increasingly fragile to extreme events. THE BED OF PROCRUSTES (Philosophical Aphorisms) (2010, 2016) ANTIFRAGILE (2012), on how some things like disorder (hence volatility, time, chaos, variability, and stressors) while others don’t, how we can classify things along the lines fragilerobust-antifragile, how we can identify (anti)fragility based on nonlinear response without having to know much about the history of the process (which solves most of the Black Swan problem), and why you are alive if and only if you love (some) volatility. SKIN IN THE GAME (2018), this volume. INCERTO’S TECHNICAL COMPANION, consisting of academic-style papers, miscellaneous notes, and (very) technical remarks and developments. Two men of courage: Ron Paul, a Roman among Greeks; Ralph Nader, Greco-Phoenician saint Book 1 introdu ction This book, while standalone, is a continuation of the Incerto collection, which is a combination of a) practical discussions, b) philosophical tales, and c) scientific and analytical commentary on the problems of randomness, and how to live, eat, sleep, argue, fight, befriend, work, have fun, and make decisions under uncertainty. It is about four topics in one: a) uncertainty and the reliability of knowledge, or in less polite words bull***t detection, b) symmetry in human affairs, that is, fairness, justice, responsibility, and reciprocity, c) information sharing in transactions, and d) rationality in complex systems and in the real world. That these four cannot be disentangled is something that is obvious when one has … skin in the game. It is not just that skin in the game is necessary for fairness, commercial efficiency, and risk management: skin in the game is necessary to understand the world. First, it is bull***t identification and filtering, that is, the difference between theory and practice, cosmetic and true expertise, and academia (in the bad sense of the word) and the real world. Second, it is about the distortions of symmetry and reciprocity in life: If you have the rewards, you must also get some of the risks, not let others pay the price of your mistakes. If you inflict risk on others, and they are harmed, you need to pay some price for it. You should treat others in the way you’d like to be treated. If you give an