Table of Contents
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 in whatever artificial bureaucracy they find themselves in.
The IYI focuses on details that often don’t matter. The people that you understand most easily are the bullshitters.
REAL GYMS DON’T LOOK LIKE GYMS
People often get impressed by fancy equipment and scientism – things that look that they are painstakingly designed in some lab, but they are falling for an illusion. If they wanted to be scientific, they would do the things that really work, such as lifting free weights. Using fancy machines may be beneficial for a few people who are in a rehabilitation program, but for most people, using machines will not benefit them beyond a certain point. The simpler the equipment (barbell), the more muscles you work out, and the stronger you become over time (even outside the gym). All you need to know is the proper form to use to avoid injury.
Only the Rich are Poisoned
When people become rich, they become less experientially driven, they lose their skin-in-the-game mechanism. Their preferences are dictated to them by others, and this leads them to live complicated, miserable lives.
This is a skin-in-the-game problem, as the choices of the rich are dictated by others who have something to gain, and no side effects, from the sale. And given that they are rich, and their exploiters not often so, nobody would shout victim.
Wealthy people who don’t look the part are aware of this, they live in comfortable places and don’t move because they understand the headaches that come along with doing so. When wealth gives you fewer options instead of more, you’re doing something wrong.
CONVERSATION
If you want to be rich and have friends, you should hide your money, this is known. What is not so obvious is that you need to hide your learning and education. The only way people can be friends is if they don’t try to outsmart or upstage each other.
TAKE RISK
Young people who want to help humanity should do 3 things.
1) 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.
You should take risk, and if you get rich, spend generously on others. Society needs people to take bounded risks. The goal is to move people away from the macro and the abstract.
Courage (risk taking) is the highest virtue. We need entrepreneurs.
HISTORY SEEN FROM THE EMERGENCY ROOM
History is mostly peace, interrupted by wars, rather than the other way around. But we are prone to the availability heuristic – the salient is mistaken for the statistical, and the emotional effect of an event fools us into thinking that it occurs more often than it does. This makes us more prudent and careful, but it is not good for scholarship.
Political science scholars confuse intensity with frequency.
In the five centuries preceding the unification of Italy, there was supposed to be “a lot of warfare” ravaging the place. Therefore, many of these scholars insist, unification “brought peace.” But more than six hundred thousand Italians died in the Great War, during the “period of stability,” almost one order of magnitude higher than all the cumulative fatalities in the five hundred years preceding it. Many of the “conflicts” that took place between states or statelings were between professional soldiers, often mercenaries, and much of the population was unaware of them.
