Taleb
<i>Skin in the Game</i> (2018)

p. 4--"If you give an opinion, and someone follows it, you are morally obligated to be, yourself, exposed to its consequences."

--"Do not mistake skin in the game as defined here and used in this book for just an incentive problem, just having a share of the benefits... No. It is about symmetry, more like having a share of the harm, paying a penalty if something goes wrong."

p. 5--"never engage in detailed overexplanations of <i>why</i> something important is important: one debases a principle by endlessly justifying it."

p. 10--"those who don't take risks should never be involved in making decisions."

Makes a lot of sense. It's funny, though, to anticipate situations where we actually have to search for someone who is at risk, and then lay the burden of the decision on them. The only reliable avoidance of this problem is through VERY local, small-scale self-government. In very small scale, everyone is affected by pretty much everything. Which sounds great today, but ask me tomorrow and I probably will have changed my mind.

p. 11--"We have always been crazy but weren't skilled enough to destroy the world. Now we can."

p. 12--"Some think that freeing ourselves from having warriors at the top means civilization and progress. It does not. Meanwhile,

<i>Bureaucracy is a construction by which a person is conveniently separated from the consequences of his or her actions.</i>"

This definition could catch on!

--[cont]"And, one may ask, what can we do since a centralized system will necessarily need people who are not directly exposed to the cost of errors?

"Well, we have no choice but to decentralize or, more politely, to localize; to have fewer of these immune decision makers.

<i>Decentralization is based on the simple notion that it is easier to macrobull***t than microbull***t.</i>"

Yes, but perhaps selective evidence here. The anonymity of big cities has certain benefits too, up to and including "survival" in a few cases. NNT and others here risk REIFYING "better fences" into actual physical barriers, whereas there are certain immaterial barriers which arise from diverse urban density.

--[cont.]<i>Decentralization reduces large structural asymmetries.</i>

But not to worry, if we do not decentralize and distribute responsibility it will happen by itself, the hard way: a system that doesn't have a mechanism of skin in the game, with a buildup of imbalances, will eventually blow up and self-repair that way. If it survives."

p. 14--"interventionistas don't learn <i>because they are not the victims of their mistakes</i>, and, as we hinted at with <i>pathemata mathematica:

The same mechanism of transfering risk also impedes learning.</i>

More practically,

<i>You will never fully convince someone that he is wrong; only reality can.</i>

Actually, to be precise, reality doesn't care about winning arguments: survival is what matters.

For

<i>The curse of modernity is that we are increasingly populated by a class of people who are better at explaining than understanding,</i>

or better at explaining than doing."

p. 19--"The Golden Rule wants you to <i>Treat others the way you would like them to treat you.</i> The more robust Silver Rule says <i>Do not treat others the way you would not like them to treat you. More robust? How? Why is the Silver Rule more robust?

"First, it tells you to mind your own business and not decide what is "good" for others. We know with much more clarity what is bad than what is good."

p. 23--"<i>Avoid taking advice from someone who gives advice for a living, unless there is a penalty for their advice.</i>"

p. 27--"Skin in the game is an overall necessity, but let us not get carried away in applying it to everything in sight in its every detail, particularly when consequences are contained. There is a difference between the interventionista of Prologue, Part 1 making pronouncements that cause thousands to be killed overseas, and a harmless opinion voiced by a person in a conversation... Our message is to focus on those who are <i>professionally</i> slanted, causing harm without being accountable for it, by the very structure of their own occupation."




Taleb
<i>Skin in the Game</i> (2018)


p. 36--"<b>Arrogant Will Do</b>

"Products or companies which bear the owner's name convey very valuable messages. They are shouting that they have something to lose. Eponymy indicates both a commitment to the company and a confidence in the product. A friend of mine, Paul Wilmott, is often called an egomaniac for having his name on a mathematical finance technical journal (<i>Wil-Mott</i>), which at the time of writing is undoubtedly the best. "Egomaniac" is good for the product. But if you can't get "egomaniac," "arrogant" will do."

p. 38--"the rise of <i>some</i> protectionism may have a strong rationale—and an economic one.

"...workers, people who do things, have each an artisan in them. For, contrary to what lobbyists paid by international large corporations are trying to make us believe, such protectionism does not even conflict with <i>economic</i> thinking, what is called neoclassical economics. It is not inconsistent with the <i>mathematical</i> axioms of economic decision making...

"We may be better off in a narrowly defined accounting sense (in the aggregate) by exporting jobs. But that's not what people may really want. ...

..."people might want to <i>do</i> things. Just to do things, because they feel it is a part of their identity."

p. 54--"There were people [other traders] with whom we [traders] had a <i>relational</i> rapport, others ["nontraders"/"the Swiss"] with whom we had a <i>transactional</i> one. The two were separated by an ethical wall, much like the case with domestic animals that cannot be harmed, while rules on cruelty are lifted when it comes to cockroaches.

"Diogenes held that the seller ought to disclose as much as civil law requires. As for Antipater, he believed that everything ought to be disclosed—beyond the law—so that there was nothing the seller knew that the buyer didn't know.

"Clearly Antipater's position is more robust—robust being invariant [54] to time, place, situation, and color of the eyes of the participants. Take for now that

<i>The ethical is always more robust than the legal. Over time, it is the legal that should converge to the ethical, never the reverse."

p. 59--"So we exercise our ethical rules, but there is a limit—from scaling—beyond which the rules cease to apply. It is unfortunate, but the general kills the particular. The question we will reexamine later, after deeper discussion of complexity theory, is whether it is possible to be both ethical and universalist. In theory, yes, but, sadly, not in practice. For whenever the "we" becomes too large a club, things degrade, and each one starts fighting for his own interest. The abstract way is too abstract for us. This is the main reason I advocate political systems that start with the municipality and work their way up...rather than the reverse, which has failed with larger states. Being somewhat tribal is not a bad thing—and we have to work in a fractal way in the organized harmonious relations between tribes, rather than merge all tribes in one large soup. In that sense, an American-style federalism is the ideal system.

--"better fences make better neighbors" [attributed here to Yaneer Bar-Yam]
























p. 86--"we need to be more that intolerant with <i>some</i> intolerant minorities. Simply, they violate the Silver Rule. It is not permissible to use "American values" or "Western principles" in treating intolerant Salafism..."






























p. 111--"<i>To make ethical choices you cannot have dilemmas between the particular (friends, family) and the general.</i>"















p. 129--"There may be something dissonant in the spectacle of a rich slave."

NNT adds that working-class people despise "high-paid professionals," i.e. "rich slaves," i.e. people who get paid much more than they do for easier work, but they do not necessarily despise "the rich" per se.

The "rich slave" remark captures perfectly the gestalt of a certain class of arts bureaucrat/manager/agent, and a few of the artists themselves as well.