Skin in the Game: Hidden Asymmetries in Daily Life (Incerto) Kindle Edition

[TLDR] This practical and provocative book is mostly about:1) Uncertainty and the reliability of knowledge (b/s detection, theory vs practice, cosmetic vs true expertise, etc).2) Symmetry in human affairs (fairness, justice, responsibility, reciprocity). e.g.: to get the rewards you must also get some of the risks; not let others pay for your mistakes.3) Information in transactions4) Rationality in complex systems.The main aspect of "Skin in the game" (SITG) - a phrase probably made popular by Warren Buffet - is, in Taleb's view, about matching disincentives to incentives. For Taleb, SITG isn’t purely incentives (e.g.: just having a share of some benefits). It is SYMMETRY in both UPSIDE and DOWNSIDE. Taleb makes this important aspect extremely explicit since the very beginning of the book (page-4).If some actors pocket rewards from a policy they enact or support (without accepting risks/downside), various economists consider it to be a problem of "missing incentives". In contrast, for Taleb, the problem is more fundamentally one of asymmetry: one actor gets the rewards, others are stuck with the risks. Forcing SITG corrects this asymmetry (you cannot make profits and transfer the risks to others as some large corporations do; bankers being bailed out by the public are the antithesis of SITG). Actors, per Taleb, must always bear a symmetric cost when they fail the public (this is SITG!). A fund manager that gets a percentage on wins, but no penalty for losing is incentivised to gamble with his clients funds. Bearing no downside for one's actions, means that one has no "Skin In The Game"A few insights from the book:- Having exposure to the real world, with upside and downside, is the best (often the only) way to learn.- EXPOSURE TO REAL WORLD CONSEQUENCES beats Intellectualizing. Employed intellectuals, professional academics, or bureaucrats are rarely in love with thoughts & ideas. They are primarily in love with orthodoxies in their respective fields.- There are some risks we just cannot afford to take (e.g.: systemic risks). There are some risks we cannot afford to NOT take.- Intelligentsia have no downside for their actions (no SITG).- There is no evolution without skin in the game. Note how most academics (Economists, Psychologists, Sociologists, Social Scientists, etc) can be wrong for so long, while MOST businesses cannot (except the likes of Goldman Sachs and others, provided the Government bails them out when they mess up)- Government intervention, in general, tends to remove SITG, to weaken robustness in complex (economic, social, financial) systems.- Interventionists don't suffer the consequences of their bad actions, policies, etc- About the real world: think in dynamics, not statics. Think in high, not low dimensions. Think in terms of interactions as well as actions.- SITG doesn’t literally mean an eye for an eye. It just means there is a downside large enough (for individuals) to protect the overall system.- We know far more what is bad than what is good. Therefore, when treating others: no bad actions > good actions as a rule.- Universal behavior is great on paper, disastrous in practice. Why? We are local and practical animals, sensitive to scale. The small is not the large; the tangible is not the abstract; the emotional is not the logical. Most behaviors do not scale. Family members are not friends and random people on the street are not friends. What's worse: the general and abstract tend to attract self-righteous psychopaths.- Avoid taking advice from someone who gives advice for a living, unless there are also penalties for their bad advice.- The doer wins by doing, not convincing. e.g. if someone is trying to convince you how cool their life is then it is not cool- How often you forecast correctly is not so important. What matters more is which outcomes you can forecast correctly. The payoffs matter more.- SITG can help with solving black swan problems. That which has survived over time, with SITG, has proven its robustness.- People with SITG bring simplicity. People with SITG have no benefit for added complexity. Therefore be careful of people without SITG proposing complex solutions for a problem. They have incentive to seem sophisticated instead of just solving the actual problem- The average behavior of the market participant will not allow us to understand the general behavior of the market.- Careful of people who want more regulations as they have incentive to complexify it, so they are more needed.- People can be largely collaborative except when institutions get in the way.- Whenever there is a mismatch with "bonus period" (e.g.:1 year) and "statistical blowup" (e.g.:10 years) people will transfer as much risk as possible to the future (get the bonus in 1yr, worry about blowing up much later)- Learning is rooted in repetition and convexity, reading one book twice is often more useful than two books once.- Professional reviewers tend to want to impress other reviewers while normal people just say their opinions, so be careful of professional reviewers as they have a lack of SITG- Freedom entails risks, real skin in the game. Freedom is never free- Data does not imply rigor- Never pay for complexity of presentation when all you need is results.- Change for the sake of change is frequently the enemy of progress (inverse of the Lindy effect)- You can criticize what a person said or what a person meant. One is honorable, the other is embarrassing- Virtue is what you do when nobody is looking. Virtue is not something you advertise.- Survival comes first, truth, understanding, and science later.

I've read Black Swan, Anti-Fragile and now this latest of Nassim Taleb's books, Skin In The Game. I think he's probably some kind of genius and I confess to being pretty much a Taleb fanboy at this point, but his stuff is never going to be to everyone's taste. His philosophical anarchism governs his literary style which makes a mockery out of structure. He also writes with a huge chip on his shoulder, which doesn't bother me so much because I generally share his biases, but many people will be right to take offence. It would make him happy knowing they're getting the point.One of his favorite recurring phrases is "F*** Y** money", by which he means the enviable state of possessing sufficient wealth not to have to take orders or even direction from anybody. I don't know anything about Taleb's finances, but he clearly thinks he enjoys F*** Y** celebrity nowadays, because he runs rough-shod over any semblance of editorial control. He says exactly what he wants to say without anything much more than rudimentary self-imposed filtering. Luckily he's economical with words and doesn't indulge himself in empty verbiage, so even though he might benefit from some macro-editing, he doesn't really need his copy checked.Taleb's essential thinking is consistent through all his books. He's a spiritual survivalist who believes that ongoing human existence requires that we continuously take manageable risks in life and adapt rationally to the consequences. Anything that gets in the way of this process is an existential threat and becomes the focus of Taleb's scorn. He's a bottom-up kind of guy and distains anything top-down. Hence, he hates government and corporate bureaucrats, bankers, macro-economists, socialists, Pentagon generals and anyone else he sees as dodging personal risk while creating structures that foist risk on the society around them. The people he respects are self-funding capitalists, experimental scientists, front-line soldiers and anyone who lives by putting his ideas or body into harm's way every day and using the results as his guide for survival the following day. These are the people with "skin in the game" who drive human evolution.I had always been curious about Taleb's religious beliefs, and he finally addresses the subject briefly in this book. He identifies himself as an Orthodox Christian, and devotes a short section to explicating Christianity's central drama, which is Christ's self-sacrifice and eventual resurrection. Taleb being Taleb of course re-shapes this story to his own purpose. He describes Jesus as the archetypal skin-in-the-game figure who puts everything on the line and pays the ultimate price before earning his passage safely through to the other side. He takes us with him if we follow his lead and put our own skin into the game. The Roman and Jewish bureaucrats of Christ's day take their appropriate places in Taleb's gallery of fools.Taleb began his professional life as an options trader on Wall Street, and the language of finance remains central to his worldview. He sees his core intellectual discipline now as probability theory and uses this mode of thought as a quantitative framework for understanding finance and just about everything else. He has what amounts to a dual publishing career at this point and manages a second body of highly technical treatises which give mathematical expression to the same ideas he writes about in his popular books. Skin In The Game itself has a short technical appendix. Even though I myself have a background in finance, I can't follow any of this stuff. I've always suspected financial writers and economists who employ a lot of obscure math are covering up the shallowness of their underlying ideas. I still believe this to be true in many cases, but Taleb is among the last people I would accuse of such subterfuge. I'm sure his formulas make sense to anyone with the patience to follow them.I recommend Skin In The Game to readers who are prepared for what they're getting.