Medium: How to be Rational about Rationality

[One of the more technical (and optional) chapters, at the end of Skin of the Game]

Rory Sutherland claims that the real function for swimming pools is allowing 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 do. They are in the business of selling you overpriced liquor or Great Tuscan wines by the glass, yet get you into the door by serving you your low-carb (or low-something) dishes at breakeven cost. (This business model, of course, fails to work in Saudi Arabia).

Link: https://medium.com/incerto/how-to-be-rational-about-rationality-432e96dd4d1a

Medium Post: Only The Rich Are Poisoned

When people get rich, they shed their skin-in-the game driven experiential mechanism. They lose control of their preferences, substituting constructed preferences to their own, complicating their lives unnecessarily, triggering their own misery. And these are of course the preferences of those who want to sell them something. 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.

I once had dinner in a Michelin-starred restaurant with a fellow who insisted on eating there instead of my selection of a casual Greek taverna with a friendly owner operator, his second cousin as a manager and his third cousin once removed as a receptionist. The other customers seemed, as we say in Mediterranean languages, to have a cork plugged in their behind obstructing proper ventilation, causing the vapors to build on the inside of the gastrointestinal walls, leading to the irritable type of decorum you only notice in the educated upper classes. I note that, in addition to the plugged corks, all men wore ties.

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Medium Post: Facta non Verba: How to Own Your Enemies

The best enemy is the one you own by putting skin in his game and letting him know the exact rules that come with it. You keep him alive, in the knowledge that he owes this to your benevolence. The notion that an enemy you own is better than a dead one was perfected by the order of the Assassins, so we will do some digging into the work of that secret society.

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Nassim Taleb on Bitcoin: “Bitcoin is the beginning of something great”

In Nassim’s recent Ask Me Anything (AMA) on Reddit he was asked about Bitcoin. His response:

Bitcoin is the beginning of something great: a currency without a government, something necessary and imperative.

But I am not familiar with the specific product to assert whether it is the best potential setup.
And we need a long time to establish confidence. I only talk from skin-in-the-game.
If I had money in bitcoin, I would have reported it. But I don’t yet.
I am waiting to understand it better, not with my brain, but with my experience…

http: // www. reddit. com/ r/ IAmA/ comments/1a…