Skin in the Game
von Nassim Taleb
To emit a Yogiberrism, in academia there is no difference between academia and the real world; in the real world, there
If you give an opinion, and someone follows it, you are morally obligated to be, yourself, exposed to its consequences. In case you are giving economic views: Don’t tell me what you “think,” just tell me what’s in your portfolio.
We retain from this first vignette that, just like Antaeus, you cannot separate knowledge from contact with the ground. Actually, you cannot separate anything from contact with the ground. And the contact with the real world is done via skin in the game—having an exposure to the real world, and paying a price for its consequences, good or bad.
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.
Their three flaws: 1) they think in statics not dynamics, 2) they think in low, not high, dimensions, 3) they think in terms of actions, never interactions.
The principle of intervention, like that of healers, is first do no harm (primum non nocere); even more, we will argue, those who don’t take risks should never be involved in making decisions.
(because academics know practically nothing about risk),
Avoid taking advice from someone who gives advice for a living, unless there is a penalty for their advice.
You do not want to win an argument. You want to win. Indeed you need to win whatever you are after: money, territory, the heart of a grammar specialist, or a (pink) convertible car. For focusing just on words puts one on a very dangerous slope, since We are much better at doing than understanding.
Because what matters in life isn’t how frequently one is “right” about outcomes, but how much one makes when one is right. Being wrong, when it is not costly, doesn’t count—in a way that’s similar to trial-and-error mechanisms of research.
By definition, what works cannot be irrational; about every single person I know who has chronically failed in business shares that mental block, the failure to realize that if something stupid works (and makes money), it cannot be stupid.
Those who talk should do and only those who do should talk
This explains the more severe problems of landscaping and architecture: architects today build to impress other architects, and we end up with strange—irreversible—structures that do not satisfy the well-being of their residents; it takes time and a lot of progressive tinkering for that.
Specialization, as I will keep insisting, comes with side effects, one of which is separating labor from the fruits of labor.
Anyone who has submitted a “scholarly” paper to a journal knows that you usually raise the odds of acceptance by making it more complicated than necessary.
Entrepreneurs are heroes in our society. They fail for the rest of us.
The skills at making things diverge from those at selling things.
Read the texts themselves: Seneca, Caesar, or Marcus Aurelius, when possible.
By some mysterious mental mechanism, people fail to realize that the principal thing you can learn from a professor is how to be a professor—and the chief thing you can learn from, say, a life coach or inspirational speaker
Is it that academia (and journalism) is fundamentally the refuge of the stochastophobe tawker?
What I call the Bob Rubin trade connects to my business as a trader (as we saw, when these people make money, they keep the profits; when they lose, someone else bears the costs while they do their Black Swan invocation).
Simply: if you can’t put your soul into something, give it up and leave that stuff to someone else.
For after finishing Antifragile, I thought of retiring my pen for a while and settling into the comfortable life of a quarter university position, enjoying squid-ink pasta in bon vivant company, lifting weights with my blue-collar friends, and playing bridge in the afternoon, the kind of tranquil, worry-free life of the nineteenth-century gentry.
For those familiar with the idea of nonlinear effects from Antifragile, learning is rooted in repetition and convexity, meaning that the reading of a single text twice is more profitable than reading two different things once, provided of course that said text has some depth of content.
How? There is, here again, a skin-in-the-game problem: a conflict of interest between professional reviewers who think they ought to decide how books should be written, and genuine readers who actually read books because they like to read books.
The ethical is always more robust than the legal. Over time, it is the legal that should converge to the ethical, never the reverse.
A saying by the brothers Geoff and Vince Graham summarizes the ludicrousness of scale-free political universalism. 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.
This is called an “emergent” property of the whole, by which parts and whole differ because what matters are the interactions between such parts. And interactions can obey very simple rules.
They may hate McDonald’s, but they certainly hate uncertainty even more.
other species (animals, economists), etc.
Perhaps, by definition, an employable person is the one you will never find in a history book, because these people are designed to never leave their mark on the course of events. They are, by design, uninteresting to historians.
Society likes saints and moral heroes to be celibate so they do not have family pressures that may force them into the dilemma of needing to compromise their sense of ethics to feed their children.
The IYI subscribes to The New Yorker, a journal designed so philistines can learn to fake a conversation about evolution, neurosomething, cognitive biases, and quantum mechanics. He never curses on social media. He speaks of “equality of races” and “economic equality,” but never goes out drinking with a minority cab driver (again, no real skin in the game, as, I will repeat until I am hoarse, the concept is fundamentally foreign to the IYI). The modern IYI has attended more than one TED talk in person or watched more than two TED talks on YouTube. Not only did he vote for Hillary Monsanto-Malmaison because she seemed electable or some such circular reasoning, but he holds that anyone who didn’t do so is mentally ill.
The IYI mistakes the Near East (ancient Eastern Mediterranean) for the Middle East. The IYI has a copy of the first hardback edition of The Black Swan on his shelf, but mistakes absence of evidence for evidence of absence. He believes that GMOs are “science,” that their “technology” is in the same risk class as conventional breeding. Typically, the IYI get first-order logic right, but not second-order (or higher) effects, making him totally incompetent in complex domains. The IYI has been wrong, historically, about Stalinism, Maoism, GMOs, Iraq, Libya, Syria, lobotomies, urban planning, low carbohydrate diets, gym machines, behaviorism, trans-fats, Freudianism, portfolio theory, linear regression, HFCS (High-Fructose Corn Syrup), Gaussianism, Salafism, dynamic stochastic equilibrium modeling, housing projects, marathon running, selfish genes, election-forecasting models, Bernie Madoff (pre-blowup), and p-values. But he is still convinced that his current position is right.fn1
So class envy doesn’t originate from a truck driver in South Alabama, but from a New York or Washington, D.C., Ivy League–educated IYI (say Paul Krugman or Joseph Stiglitz) with a sense of entitlement, upset some “less smart” persons are much richer.
So I doubt Piketty bothered to ask blue-collar Frenchmen what they want, as Michelle Lamont did (as we saw earlier in the chapter). I am certain that they would ask for better beer, a new dishwasher, or faster trains for their commute, not to bring down some rich businessman invisible to them. But, again, people can frame questions and portray enrichment as theft, as was done before the French Revolution, in which case the blue-collar class would ask, once again, for heads to roll.
The intelligentsia therefore feels entitled to deal with the poor as a construct; one they created. Thus they become convinced that they know what is best for them.
Traders, when they make profits, have short communications; when they lose they drown you in details, theories, and charts.
I had a rough time explaining that having rich people in a public office is very different from having public people become rich—again, it is the dynamics, the sequence, that matters.
Time is the expert. Or, rather, the temperamental and ruthless Lindy, as we see in the next chapter.
Likewise, Alfonso X of Spain, nicknamed El Sabio, “the wise,” had as a maxim: Burn old logs. Drink old wine. Read old books. Keep old friends.
Macroeconomics, for instance, can be nonsense since it is easier to macrobull***t than microbull***t—nobody can tell if a theory really works.
If you say something crazy you will be deemed crazy. But if you create a collection of, say, twenty people who set up an academy and say crazy things accepted by the collective, you now have “peer-reviewing” and can start a department in a university. Academia has a tendency, when unchecked (from lack of skin in the game), to evolve into a ritualistic self-referential publishing game.
In some areas, such as gender studies or psychology, the ritualistic publishing game gradually maps less and less to real research, by the very nature of the agency problem, to reach a Mafia-like divergence of interest:
The most convincing statements are those in which one stands to lose, ones in which one has maximal skin in the game; the most unconvincing ones are those in which one patently (but unknowingly) tries to enhance one’s status without making a tangible contribution (like, as we saw, in the great majority of academic papers that say nothing and take no risks).
The deprostitutionalization of research will eventually be done as follows. Force people who want to do “research” to do it on their own time, that is, to derive their income from other sources. Sacrifice is necessary. It may seem absurd to brainwashed contemporaries, but Antifragile documents the outsized historical contributions of the nonprofessional, or, rather, the non-meretricious. For their research to be genuine, they should first have a real-world day job, or at least spend ten years as: lens maker, patent clerk, Mafia operator, professional gambler, postman, prison guard, medical doctor, limo driver, militia member, social security agent, trial lawyer, farmer, restaurant chef, high-volume waiter, firefighter (my favorite), lighthouse keeper, etc., while they are building their original ideas.
It is critical that it is not just that the books of the ancients are still around and have been filtered by Lindy, but that those populations who read them have survived as well.
While our knowledge of physics was not available to the ancients, human nature was. So everything that holds in social science and psychology has to be Lindy-proof, that is, have an antecedent in the classics; otherwise it will not replicate or not generalize beyond the experiment. By classics we can define the Latin (and late Hellenistic) moral literature (moral sciences meant something else than they do today): Cicero, Seneca, Marcus Aurelius, Epictetus, Lucian, or the poets: Juvenal, Horace, or the later French so-called “moralists” (La Rochefoucauld, Vauvenargues, La Bruyère, Chamfort). Bossuet is a class on his own. One can use Montaigne and Erasmus as a portal to the ancients: Montaigne was the popularizer of his day; Erasmus was the thorough compiler.
Cognitive dissonance (a psychological theory by Leon Festinger about sour grapes, by which people, in order to avoid inconsistent beliefs, rationalize that, say, the grapes they can’t reach got to be sour). It is seen first in Aesop, of course, repackaged by La Fontaine. But its roots look even more ancient, with the Assyrian Ahiqar of Nineveh.
Loss aversion (a psychological theory by which a loss is more painful than a gain is pleasant): in Livy’s Annals (XXX, 21) Men feel the good less intensely than the bad.fn6 Nearly all the letters of Seneca have some element of loss aversion.
Negative advice (via negativa): We know the wrong better than what’s right; recall the superiority of the Silver over the Golden Rule. The good is not as good as the absence of bad,fn7 Ennius, repeated by Cicero.
Skin in the game (literally): We start with the Yiddish proverb: You can’t chew with somebody else’s teeth. “Your fingernail can best scratch your itch,”fn8 picked up by Scaliger circa 1614 in Proverborum Arabicorum.
Antifragility: There are tens of ancient sayings. Let us just mention Cicero. When our souls are mollified, a bee can sting. See also Machiavelli and Rousseau for its application to political systems.
Time discounting: “A bird in the hand is better than ten on the tree.”fn9 (Levantine proverb)
Madness of crowds: Nietzsche: Madness is rare in individuals, but in groups, parties, nations, it is the rule. (This counts as ancient wisdom since Nietzsche was a classicist; I’ve seen many such references in Plato.)
Why? Simply the one who doesn’t look the part, conditional on having made a (sort of) successful career in his profession, had to have much to overcome in terms of perception. 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.
By the same reasoning, and flipping the arguments, skilled thieves at large should not look like thieves. Those who do are more likely to be in jail.
EDUCATION AS LUXURY GOOD Ivy League universities are becoming in the eyes of the new Asian upper class the ultimate status luxury good. Harvard is like a Vuitton bag and a Cartier watch. It is a huge drag on the middle class, who have been plowing an increased share of their savings into educational institutions, transferring their money to bureaucrats, real estate developers, tenured professors of some discipline that would not otherwise exist (gender studies, comparative literature, or international economics), and other parasites.
but remember that what looks scientific is usually scientism, not science.
As I am writing these lines I am checking the brochure of a fancy hotel where I will be spending the next two days. The brochure was put together by some MBA: it is glossy, shows all the machines and the jars of the color-rich juices to “improve” your health. They even have a swimming pool; but no barbell. And if gyms should not look like gyms, exercise should not look like exercise. Most gains in physical strength come from working the tails of the distribution, close to your limit.
You were not eating, rather visiting some type of museum with an affected English major lecturing you on some artistic dimension you would have never considered on your own. There was so little that was familiar and so little that fit my taste buds: once something on the occasion tasted like something real, there was no chance to have more as we moved on to the next dish.
The investor Charlie Munger once said: “Look it. Would you rather be the world’s greatest lover, but have everyone think you’re the world’s worst lover? Or would you rather be the world’s worst lover but have everyone think you’re the world’s greatest lover?”
You must start a business. Put yourself on the line, start a business.
Yes, take risk, and if you get rich (which is optional), spend your money generously on others. We need people to take (bounded) risks. The entire idea is to move the descendants of Homo sapiens away from the macro, away from abstract universal aims, away from the kind of social engineering that brings tail risks to society. Doing business will always help (because it brings about economic activity without large-scale risky changes in the economy); institutions (like the aid industry) may help, but they are equally likely to harm (I am being optimistic; I am certain that except for a few most do end up harming). Courage (risk taking) is the highest virtue. We need entrepreneurs.
We are largely collaborative—except when institutions get in the way. I surmise that if we put those “people wanting to help” in the State Department on paid vacation to do ceramics, pottery, or whatever low-testosterone people do when they take a sabbatical, it would be great for peace.
HISTORY SEEN FROM THE EMERGENCY ROOM History is largely peace punctuated by wars, rather than wars punctuated by peace.
My friend Rory Sutherland claims that the real function of swimming pools is to allow the middle class to sit around in bathing suits without looking ridiculous. Same with New York restaurants: you think their mission is to feed people, but that’s not what they are about. They are in the business of overcharging you for liquor or Great Tuscan wines by the glass, yet get you in the door by serving you your low-carb (or low-something) dishes at break-even cost. (This business model, of course, fails to work in Saudi Arabia.)
Simon formulated the notion now known as bounded rationality: we cannot possibly measure and assess everything as if we were a computer; we therefore produce, under evolutionary pressures, some shortcuts and distortions.
What matters, in the end, is what they pay for goods, not what they say they “think” about them, or the various possible reasons they give you or themselves for that. If you think about it, you will see that this is a reformulation of skin in the game.
And the lesson, by rephrasing the principle: How much you truly “believe” in something can be manifested only through what you are willing to risk for
with the world. The only definition of rationality that I’ve found that is practically, empirically, and mathematically rigorous is the following: what is rational is that which allows for survival. Unlike modern theories by psychosophasters, it maps to the classical way of thinking. Anything that hinders one’s survival at an individual, collective, tribal, or general level is, to me, irrational. Hence the precautionary principle and sound risk understanding.
Consider a more extreme example than the casino experiment. Assume a collection of people play Russian roulette a single time for a million dollars—this is the central story in Fooled by Randomness. About five out of six will make money. If someone used a standard cost-benefit analysis, he would have claimed that one has an 83.33 percent chance of gains, for an “expected” average return per shot of $833,333. But if you keep playing Russian roulette, you will end up in the cemetery. Your expected return is … not computable.
I believe that risk aversion does not exist: what we observe is, simply, a residual of ergodicity. People are, simply, trying to avoid financial suicide and take a certain attitude to tail risks.
Indeed, it doesn’t cost us much to refuse some new shoddy technologies. It doesn’t cost me much to go with my “refined paranoia,” even if wrong. For all it takes is for my paranoia to be right once, and it saves my life.
All risks are not equal. We often hear that “Ebola is causing fewer deaths than people drowning in their bathtubs,” or something of the sort, based on “evidence.” This is another class of problems that your grandmother can get, but the semi-educated cannot. Never compare a multiplicative, systemic, and fat-tailed risk to a non-multiplicative, idiosyncratic, and thin-tailed one.
So we often see the headline that many more American citizens slept with Kim Kardashian than died of Ebola. Or that more people were killed by their own furniture than by terrorism. Your grandmother’s logic would debunk these claims. Just consider that: it is impossible for a billion people to sleep with Kim Kardashian (even her), but that there is a non-zero probability that a multiplicative process (a pandemic) causes such a number of Ebola deaths.