The End of Homo Sapiens Across time, wars have become responsible for less deaths. Sugar has become more dangerous than gunpowder. Whereas in ancient agricultural societies human violence caused about 15 per cent of all deaths, during the twentieth century violence caused only 5 per cent of deaths, and in the early twenty-first century it … Read more
The Ascent of Money by Niall Ferguson is the story of how money developed throughout history- and how the world was shaped and reshaped by the many financial innovations that accompanied our dependence on money. There have been countless failures in finance, but the general trend has consistently been upwards. The Foundations of Finance In … Read more
In Beijing, a debate took place between billionaires Jack Ma and Elon Musk. There was no moderator, it was just two unrestrained egos dueling. Some moments were awkward, almost comedic, but inadvertently so. The debate was about the future of jobs and life: what skills are going to be needed, and what we should be … Read more
Taleb’s Incerto concludes with Skin In The Game. This book makes the argument that some people, who are not engaging directly with reality, are not capable of understanding risks. This class of people includes academics (especially in the social sciences), bureaucrats, and advisers. What these people have in common is that they are isolated from … Read more
Rational about Rationality You don’t need science to survive, but you need to survive to do science. The best definition of rationality: actions that increase the chances of survival. Herbert Simon formulated the idea of bounded rationality; we can’t deal with the world as if we were a computer – we need shortcuts and distortions … Read more
My lifetime motto is that mathematicians think in (well, precisely defined and mapped) objects and relations, jurists and legal thinkers in constructs, logicians in maximally abstract operators, and…fools in words. Words have ambiguous meanings – this is bad for decision making. Philosophy was born out of the need for rigor in discourse – Socrates asked … Read more
Taleb’s point in Skin in the Game can be summed up with this observation. Anyone who needs to appease his colleagues to make progress, or his superiors, or deal with commentators, will have to take on the role of an actor, and by doing so, they trade results in the real world for their position … Read more
Jesus was a risk taker In Christianity, it would have been easier to separate Jesus from God, but there was an insistence on the Trinity. The duality of Jesus (being both man and God) is central, and has caused monotheists to see traces of polytheism in Christianity and Christians to be beheaded by the Islamic … Read more
The Skin of Employees Employees exist because they have a lot of skin in the game, they share risk with their employers – enough for it prevent them from being undependable. With employees, you are buying dependability. And dependability is a driver behind many transactions. People of some means have a country house—which is inefficient … Read more
An intolerant minority will set the rules for everyone else. People in the U.S eat Kosher food not because most of the U.S is Jewish, but because non-Jews tolerate Kosher while Jews don’t tolerate non-Kosher. This asymmetry informs us about what will happen with GMO’s. Companies can promote genetically modified food, but it only takes … Read more