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Skin in the Game: Silent asymmetries in Daily Life
— NassimNicholasTaleb (@nntaleb) July 19, 2017
Skin in the Game
A The Invisible Matrix of Daily Life
B The Hidden Symmetry in Daily Life
C Silent asymmetries in Daily Life— NassimNicholasTaleb (@nntaleb) July 19, 2017
Playing with the most representative title
— NassimNicholasTaleb (@nntaleb) July 18, 2017
There is inequality and inequality.
The first is the inequality people tolerate, such as one’s understanding compared to that of people deemed heroes, say Einstein, Michelangelo, or the recluse mathematician Grisha Perelman, in comparison to whom one has no difficulty acknowledging a large surplus. This applies to entrepreneurs, artists, soldiers, heroes, the singer Bob Dylan, Socrates, the current local celebrity chef, some Roman Emperor of good repute, say Marcus Aurelius; in short those for whom one can naturally be a “fan”. You may like to imitate them, you may aspire to be like them; but you don’t resent them.
The second is the inequality people find intolerable because the subject appears to be just a person like you, except that he has been playing the system, and getting himself into rent seeking, acquiring privileges that are not warranted –and although he has something you would not mind having (which may include his Russian girlfriend), he is exactly the type of whom you cannot possibly become a fan. The latter category includes bankers, bureaucrats who get rich, former senators shilling for the evil firm Monsanto, clean-shaven chief executives who wear ties, and talking heads on television making outsized bonuses. You don’t just envy them; you take umbrage at their fame, and the sight of their expensive or even semi-expensive car trigger some feeling of bitterness. They make you feel smaller.
Click through to read the rest of this post on Medium.
Nassim has posted the prologue of Skin in the Game on twitter:
Constantine Sandis
Oxford Brooks
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
NYU-Poly; Université Paris I Panthéon-Sorbonne – Centre d’Economie de la Sorbonne (CES)
July 30, 2013
Abstract:
Standard economic theory makes an allowance for the agency problem, but not the compounding of moral hazard in the presence of informational opacity, particularly in what concerns high-impact events in fat tailed domains. But the ancients did; so did many aspects of moral philosophy. We propose a global and morally mandatory heuristic that anyone involved in an action which can possibly generate harm for others, even probabilistically, should be required to be exposed to some damage, regardless of context. While perhaps not sufficient, the heuristic is certainly necessary hence mandatory. It is supposed to counter risk hiding and transfer in the tails. We link the rule to various philosophical approaches to ethics and moral luck.
http:// papers. ssrn. com/ sol3/ papers.cfm? abstract_id=2298292
Nassim Taleb of NYU-Poly talks with EconTalk host Russ Roberts about his recent paper (with Constantine Sandis) on the morality and effectiveness of “skin in the game.” When decision makers have skin in the game–when they share in the costs and benefits of their decisions that might affect others–they are more likely to make prudent decisions than in cases where decision-makers can impose costs on others. Taleb sees skin in the game as not just a useful policy concept but a moral imperative. The conversation closes with some observations on the power of expected value for evaluating predictions along with Taleb’s thoughts on economists who rarely have skin in the game when they make forecasts or take policy positions.
Website: http:// www. econtalk. org/ archives/ 2013/ 09/ taleb_ on_ skin_i. html
Direct Link (mp3): http:// files. liberty fund. org/ econtalk / y2013 /Taleb skin. mp3
Link to the Paper: http:// papers. ssrn. com/ sol3/ papers.cfm? abstract_id= 2298292
From Nassim Taleb’s Facebook Page:
Friends, comments are invited for this draft on a philosophy paper w/ Constantine Sandis, “ETHICS AND ASYMMETRY: SKIN IN THE GAME AS A REQUIRED HEURISTIC FOR ACTING UNDER UNCERTAINTY
C. Sandis & N.N. Taleb
Abstract: We propose a global and mandatory heuristic that anyone involved in an action that can possibly generate harm for others, even probabilistically, should be required to be exposed to some damage, regardless of context. We link the rule to various philosophical approaches to ethics and moral luck.
Link to Paper: http://www. fooled by randomness. com/ SandisTaleb.pdf
Link to Facebook Discussion: https://www. facebook. com/ permalink.php? story_fbid= 515541175165176&id=13012333374
“Those who have the upside are not necessarily those who incur the downside. For example, bankers and corporate managers get bonuses for “performance,” but not reverse bonuses for negative performance, and they have an incentive to bury risks in the tails of the distribution –& in other words, to delay blowups.
The ancients were fully aware of this incentive to hide risks,& and implemented very simple but potent heuristics. About 3,800 years ago, the Code of Hammurabi specified that if a house collapses and causes the death of its owner, the house’s builder shall be put to death.”
Link: http://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/improving-managers–incentives-by-nassim-nicholas-taleb
The Covid-19 pandemic came as an external shock, almost unprecedented. How can we navigate the uncertainty of the post-pandemic future? We talked to the author of bestselling books ‘The Black Swan’, ‘Antifragile’, and ‘Skin in the Game’, risk analyst Nassim Nicholas Taleb.
SophieCo Visionaries is an Interview show on RT hosted by Sophie Shevardnadze where she talks to people who look beyond today and see the bigger picture.
Link to Podcast – soundcloud.com/rttv/sophieco-visionaries-nassim-taleb…
Link to Transcript – rt.com/shows/sophieco-visionaries/497321-taleb…
Nassim Nicholas Taleb (@nntaleb) joins us on the #BNPodcast to discuss his latest book SKIN IN THE GAME and his unique point of view on how we make our way in a fundamentally uncertain world: spr.ly/6012DWxFp pic.twitter.com/ptpH03snzK
— Barnes & Noble (@BNBuzz) July 3, 2018
Taleb is a very difficult person to pin down. As Ralph Nader put it last month: “You cannot pigeonhole him!” But I think that introduction to his insight (and foresight) should suffice to convince even those who have never heard of him before that he’s worth listening to.
Taleb is a former trader, a professor at NYU, and the author of several best-sellers including Fooled by Randomness, The Black Swan, Antifragile, and his just-released Skin in the Game. But perhaps its best to classify him as a “flaneur,” someone who — according to the Oxford Dictionary, “saunters around observing society.”
Also see written article here: https:// www. fool. com/ investing/ 2018/ 04/ 03/ motley- fool- interview- nassim- nicholas- taleb.aspx