Just like Antaeus, you cannot separate knowledge from contact with the ground. Actually, you cannot separate anything from contact with the ground. And the contact with the real world is done via skin in the game—having an exposure to the real world, and paying a price for its consequences, good or bad. The abrasions of your skin guide your learning and discovery.
One should not mess with a system if the results are fraught with uncertainty, or, more generally, should avoid engaging in an action with a big downside if one has no idea of the outcomes.
The principle of intervention, like that of healers, is first do no harm (primum non nocere); even more, we will argue, those who don’t take risks should never be involved in making decisions. Further, we have always been crazy but weren’t skilled enough to destroy the world. Now we can.
Historically, all warlords and warmongers were warriors themselves, and, with a few curious exceptions, societies were run by risk takers, not risk transferors. Prominent people took risks—considerably more risks than ordinary citizens.
Bureaucracy is a construction by which a person is conveniently separated from the consequences of his or her actions.
Decentralization is based on the simple notion that it is easier to macrobullshit than microbullshit. Decentralization reduces large structural asymmetries. 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.
SYSTEMS LEARN BY REMOVING
Interventionistas don’t learn because they are not the victims of their mistakes, and, as we hinted at with pathemata mathemata: The same mechanism of transferring risk also impedes learning. More practically, You will never fully convince someone that he is wrong; only reality can. Actually, to be precise, reality doesn’t care about winning arguments: survival is what matters. For The curse of modernity is that we are increasingly populated by a class of people who are better at explaining than understanding, or better at explaining than doing. So learning isn’t quite what we teach inmates inside the high-security prisons called schools. In biology, learning is something that, through the filter of intergenerational selection, gets imprinted at the cellular level—skin in the game, I insist, is more filter than deterrence. Evolution can only happen if risk of extinction is present. Further, There is no evolution without skin in the game.
Systems learn by removing parts, via negativa.
Skin in the game keeps human hubris in check.
Universal behavior is great on paper, disastrous in practice. Why? As we will belabor ad nauseam in this book, we are local and practical animals, sensitive to scale. The small is not the large; the tangible is not the abstract; the emotional is not the logical. Just as we argued that micro works better than macro, it is best to avoid going to the very general when saying hello to your garage attendant. We should focus on our immediate environment; we need simple practical rules.
One practical extension of the Silver Rule (as a reminder, it is the one that says Do not do to others what you don’t want them to do to you): Avoid taking advice from someone who gives advice for a living, unless there is a penalty for their advice.
Skin in the game helps to solve the Black Swan problem and other matters of uncertainty at the level of both the individual and the collective: what has survived has revealed its robustness to Black Swan events and removing skin in the game disrupts such selection mechanisms.
Those who talk should do and only those who do should talk.
Things designed by people without skin in the game tend to grow in complication (before their final collapse).
People have two brains, one when there is skin in the game, one when there is none. Skin in the game can make boring things less boring. When you have skin in the game, dull things like checking the safety of the aircraft because you may be forced to be a passenger in it cease to be boring. If you are an investor in a company, doing ultra-boring things like reading the footnotes of a financial statement (where the real information is to be found) becomes, well, almost not boring.
Even if regulations had a small net payoff for society, I would still prefer to be as free as possible, but assume my civil responsibility, face my fate, and pay the penalty if I harm others. This attitude is called deontic libertarianism (deontic comes from “duties”): by regulating you are robbing people of freedom. Some of us believe that freedom is one’s first most essential good. This includes the freedom to make mistakes (those that harm only you); it is sacred to the point that it must never be traded against economic or other benefits.
If you do not take risks for your opinion, you are nothing.
One of the best pieces of advice I have ever received was the recommendation by a very successful (and happy) older entrepreneur, Yossi Vardi, to have no assistant. The mere presence of an assistant suspends your natural filtering—and its absence forces you to do only things you enjoy, and progressively steer your life that way. (By assistant here I exclude someone hired for a specific task, such as grading papers, helping with accounting, or watering plants; just some guardian angel overseeing all your activities). This is a via negativa approach: you want maximal free time, not maximal activity, and you can assess your own “success” according to such metric. Otherwise, you end up assisting your assistants, or being forced to “explain” how to do things, which requires more mental effort than doing the thing itself.
For those familiar with the idea of nonlinear effects from Antifragile, learning is rooted in repetition and convexity, meaning that the reading of a single text twice is more profitable than reading two different things once, provided of course that said text has some depth of content.
Beware of the person who gives advice, telling you that a certain action on your part is “good for you” while it is also good for him, while the harm to you doesn’t directly affect him.
The ethical is always more robust than the legal. Over time, it is the legal that should converge to the ethical, never the reverse. Hence: Laws come and go; ethics stay.
No person in a transaction should have certainty about the outcome while the other one has uncertainty.
The “tragedy of the commons,” as exposed by economists, is as follows—the commons being a collective property, say, a forest or fishing waters or your local public park. Collectively, farmers as a community prefer to avoid overgrazing, and fishermen overfishing—the entire resource becomes thus degraded. But every single individual farmer would personally gain from his own overgrazing or overfishing under, of course, the condition that others don’t. And that is what plagues socialism: people’s individual interests do not quite work well under collectivism. But it is a critical mistake to think that people can function only under a private property system. What Ostrom found empirically is that there exists a certain community size below which people act as collectivists, protecting the commons, as if the entire unit became rational. Such a commons cannot be too large. It is like a club. Groups behave differently at a different scale. This explains why the municipal is different from the national. It also explains how tribes operate: you are part of a specific group that is larger than the narrow you, but narrower than humanity in general. Critically, people share some things but not others within a specified group.
The skin-in-the-game definition of a commons: a space in which you are treated by others the way you treat them, where everyone exercises the Silver Rule.
A doctor is pushed by the system to transfer risk from himself to you, and from the present into the future, or from the immediate future into a more distant future.
The Most Intolerant Wins: The Dominance of the Stubborn Minority
A kosher (or halal) eater will never eat nonkosher (or nonhalal) food, but a nonkosher eater isn’t banned from eating kosher. Or, rephrased in another domain: A disabled person will not use the regular bathroom, but a nondisabled person will use the bathroom for disabled people.
Someone with a peanut allergy will not eat products that touch peanuts, but a person without such an allergy can eat items with peanut traces in them. Which explains why it is so hard to find peanuts on U.S. airplanes and why schools are often peanut-free (which, in a way, increases the number of persons with peanut allergies, as reduced exposure is one of the causes behind such allergies).
An honest person will never commit criminal acts, but a criminal will readily engage in legal acts. Let us call such minority an intransigent group, and the majority a flexible one. And their relationship rests on an asymmetry in choices.
Another example: do not think that the spread of automatic shifting cars is necessarily due to a majority preference; it could just be because those who can drive manual shifts can always drive automatic, but the reverse is not true.
My heuristic is that the more pagan, the more brilliant one’s mind, and the higher one’s ability to handle nuances and ambiguity. Purely monotheistic religions such as Protestant Christianity, Salafi Islam, or fundamentalist atheism accommodate literalist and mediocre minds that cannot handle ambiguity.
Let us conjecture that the formation of moral values in society doesn’t come from the evolution of the consensus. No, it is the most intolerant person who imposes virtue on others precisely because of that intolerance. The same can apply to civil rights.
Outcomes are paradoxically more stable under the minority rule—the variance of the results is lower and the rule is more likely to emerge independently across separate populations. What emerges from the minority rule is more likely to be black-and-white, binary rules.
Yes, an intolerant minority can control and destroy democracy. Actually, it will eventually destroy our world. So, we need to be more than intolerant with some intolerant minorities. Simply, they violate the Silver Rule. It is not permissible to use “American values” or “Western principles” in treating intolerant Salafism (which denies other peoples’ right to have their own religion). The West is currently in the process of committing suicide.
The average behavior of the market participant will not allow us to understand the general behavior of the market.
The psychological experiments on individuals showing “biases” do not allow us to automatically understand aggregates or collective behavior, nor do they enlighten us about the behavior of groups.
Understanding how the subparts of the brain (say, neurons) work will never allow us to understand how the brain works. Understanding the genetic makeup of a unit will never allow us to understand the behavior of the unit itself.
Under the right market structure, a collection of idiots produces a well-functioning market. Furthermore: It may be that be that some idiosyncratic behavior on the part of the individual (deemed at first glance “irrational”) may be necessary for efficient functioning at the collective level. More critically for the “rationalist” crowd, Individuals don’t need to know where they are going; markets do. Leave people alone under a good structure and they will take care of things.
How to Legally Own Another Person
Those who use foul language on social networks (such as Twitter) are sending an expensive signal that they are free—and, ironically, competent. You don’t signal competence if you don’t take risks for it—there are few such low-risk strategies. So cursing today is a status symbol, just as oligarchs in Moscow wear blue jeans at special events to signal their power. Ironically the highest status, that of a free man, is usually indicated by voluntarily adopting the mores of the lowest class.
Consider that English “manners” were imposed on the middle class as a way of domesticating them, along with instilling in them the fear of breaking rules and violating social norms.
What matters isn’t what a person has or doesn’t have; it is what he or she is afraid of losing. The more you have to lose, the more fragile you are.
Society likes saints and moral heroes to be celibate so they do not have family pressures that may force them into the dilemma of needing to compromise their sense of ethics to feed their children. The entire human race, something rather abstract, becomes their family. It is no secret that large corporations prefer people with families; those with downside risk are easier to own, particularly when they are choking under a large mortgage. And of course most fictional heroes such as Sherlock Holmes or James Bond don’t have the encumbrance of a family that can become a target. Let us go one step further. To make ethical choices you cannot have dilemmas between the particular (friends, family) and the general.
Explicit communal punishment can be used where other methods of justice have failed, provided they are not based on an emotional reaction, but on a well-outlined method of justice defined prior to the event, so that it becomes a deterrent. One who is sacrificing himself for a perceived upside for a given collective needs a deterrent, so it is a form of injection of skin in the game where there are no other methods. And the skin is visible: that very collective. The only way we have left to control suicide-terrorists would be precisely to convince them that blowing themselves up is not the worst-case scenario for them, nor the end scenario at all. Making their families and loved ones bear a financial burden—just as Germans still pay for war crimes—would immediately add consequences to their actions. The penalty needs to be properly calibrated to be a true disincentive, without imparting any sense of heroism or martyrdom to the families in question. But I feel queasy about transferring a crime from one unit, an individual, to another, a collective. What I do not feel bad about is preventing the family of the perpetrators of terrorist acts from benefiting from those acts—many terrorist groups reward the families of suicide bombers, and this can be safely terminated without any ethical dilemma.
Being Alive Means Taking Certain Risks
Scars signal skin in the game. People can detect the difference between front- and back-office operators.
Take some Fat Tony wisdom: always do more than you talk. And precede talk with action. For it will always remain that action without talk supersedes talk without action.
The Intellectual Yet Idiot
The IYI pathologizes others for doing things he doesn’t understand without ever realizing it is his understanding that may be limited. He thinks people should act according to their best interests and he knows their interests, particularly if they are “rednecks” or from the English non-crisp-vowel class who voted for Brexit. When plebeians do something that makes sense to themselves, but not to him, the IYI uses the term “uneducated.” What we generally call participation in the political process, he calls by two distinct designations: “democracy” when it fits the IYI, and “populism” when plebeians dare to vote in a way that contradicts IYI preferences.
Typically, the IYI get first-order logic right, but not second-order (or higher) effects, making him totally incompetent in complex domains.
Inequality and Skin in the Game
In countries where wealth comes from rent-seeking, political patronage, or regulatory capture (which, I remind the reader, is how the powerful and the insiders use regulation to scam the public, or red tape to slow down competition), wealth is seen as zero-sum.fn2 What Peter gets is extracted from Paul. Someone getting rich is doing so at other people’s expense. In countries such as the U.S., where wealth can come from destruction, people can easily see that someone getting rich is not taking dollars from your pocket; odds are he is even putting some in yours.
True equality is equality in probability. Skin in the game prevents systems from rotting.
Static inequality is a snapshot view of inequality; it does not reflect what will happen to you in the course of your life. Consider that about 10 percent of Americans will spend at least a year in the top 1 percent, and more than half of all Americans will spent a year in the top 10 percent.fn3 This is visibly not the same for the more static—but nominally more equal—Europe. For instance, only 10 percent of the wealthiest five hundred American people or dynasties were so thirty years ago; more than 60 percent on the French list are heirs and a third of the richest Europeans were the richest centuries ago. In Florence, it was just revealed that things are even worse: the same handful of families have kept the wealth for five centuries. Dynamic (ergodic) inequality takes into account the entire future and past life. You do not create dynamic equality just by raising the level of those at the bottom, but rather by making the rich rotate—or by forcing people to incur the possibility of creating an opening. The way to make society more equal is by forcing (through skin in the game) the rich to be subjected to the risk of exiting from the 1 percent. Our condition here is stronger than mere income mobility. Mobility means that someone can become rich. The no-absorbing-barrier condition means that someone who is rich should never be certain to stay rich.
It is downright unethical to use public office for enrichment. A good rule for society is to oblige those who start in public office to pledge never subsequently to earn from the private sector more than a set amount; the rest should go to the taxpayer. This will ensure sincerity in, literally, “service”—where employees are supposedly underpaid because of their emotional reward from serving society. It would prove that they are not in the public sector as an investment strategy.
An Expert Called Lindy
That which is fragile has an asymmetric response to volatility and other stressors, that is, will experience more harm than benefit from it.
The idea of fragility helped put some rigor around the notion that the only effective judge of things is time—by things we mean ideas, people, intellectual productions, car models, scientific theories, books, etc. For time operates through skin in the game. Things that have survived are hinting to us ex post that they have some robustness—conditional on their being exposed to harm. For without skin in the game, via exposure to reality, the mechanism of fragility is disrupted: things may survive for no reason for a while, at some scale, then ultimately collapse, causing a lot of collateral harm.
That which is “Lindy” is what ages in reverse, i.e., its life expectancy lengthens with time, conditional on survival.
Note that thanks to Lindy, no expert is the final expert anymore and we do not need meta-experts judging the expertise of experts one rank below them. We solve the “turtles all the way down” problem. Fragility is the expert, hence time and survival.
You can define a free person precisely as someone whose fate is not centrally or directly dependent on peer assessment. Being reviewed or assessed by others matters if and only if one is subjected to the judgment of future—not just present—others. And recall that, a free person does not need to win arguments—just win.
One should give more weight to research that, while being rigorous, contradicts other peers, particularly if it entails costs and reputational harm for its author. Further, someone with a high public presence who is controversial and takes risks for his opinion is less likely to be a bullshit vendor.
The reason science works isn’t because there is a proper “scientific method” derived by some nerds in isolation, or some “standard” that passes a test similar to the eye exam of the Department of Motor Vehicles; rather it is because scientific ideas are Lindy-prone, that is, subjected to their own natural fragility. Ideas need to have skin in the game. You know an idea will fail if it is not useful, and can be therefore vulnerable to the falsification of time (and not that of naive falsificationism, that is, according to some government-printed black-and-white guideline). The longer an idea has been around without being falsified, the longer its future life expectancy.
An observation about modernity. Change for the sake of change, as we see in architecture, food, and lifestyle, is frequently the opposite of progress. As I have explained in Antifragile, too high a rate of mutation prevents locking in the benefits of previous changes: evolution (and progress) requires some, but not too frequent, variation.
Surgeons Should Not Look Like Surgeons
Say you had the choice between two surgeons of similar rank in the same department in some hospital. The first is highly refined in appearance; he wears silver-rimmed glasses, has a thin build, delicate hands, measured speech, and elegant gestures. His hair is silver and well combed. He is the person you would put in a movie if you needed to impersonate a surgeon. His office prominently boasts Ivy League diplomas, both for his undergraduate and medical schools. The second one looks like a butcher; he is overweight, with large hands, uncouth speech, and an unkempt appearance. His shirt is dangling from the back. No known tailor on the East Coast of the U.S. is capable of making his shirt button at the neck. He speaks unapologetically with a strong New Yawk accent, as if he wasn’t aware of it. He even has a gold tooth showing when he opens his mouth. The absence of diplomas on the wall hints at the lack of pride in his education: he perhaps went to some local college. In a movie, you would expect him to impersonate a retired bodyguard for a junior congressman, or a third-generation cook in a New Jersey cafeteria. Now if I had to pick, I would overcome my sucker-proneness and take the butcher any minute. Even more: I would seek the butcher as a third option if my choice was between two doctors who looked like doctors. Why? Simply the one who doesn’t look the part, conditional on having made a (sort of) successful career in his profession, had to have much to overcome in terms of perception. And if we are lucky enough to have people who do not look the part, it is thanks to the presence of some skin in the game, the contact with reality that filters out incompetence, as reality is blind to looks.
In any type of activity or business divorced from the direct filter of skin in the game, the great majority of people know the jargon, play the part, and are intimate with the cosmetic details, but are clueless about the subject.
In any activity, hidden details are only revealed via Lindy. Another aspect: What can be phrased and expressed in a clear narrative that convinces suckers will be a sucker trap.
Just as the slick fellow in a Ferrari looks richer than the rumpled centimillionaire, scientism looks more scientific than real science. True intellect should not appear to be intellectual.
People who have always operated without skin in the game (or without their skin in the right game) seek the complicated and centralized, and avoid the simple like the plague. Practitioners, on the other hand, have opposite instincts, looking for the simplest heuristics. Some rules: People who are bred, selected, and compensated to find complicated solutions do not have an incentive to implement simplified ones. And it gets more complicated as the remedy has itself a skin-in-the-game problem. This is particularly acute in the meta-problem, when the solution is about solving this very problem. In other words, many problems in society come from the interventions of people who sell complicated solutions because that’s what their position and training invite them to do. There is absolutely no gain for someone in such a position to propose something simple: you are rewarded for perception, not results. Meanwhile, they pay no price for the side effects that grow nonlinearly with such complications.
Only the Rich Are Poisoned: The Preferences of Others
If anything, being rich you need to hide your money if you want to have what I call friends. This may be known; what is less obvious is that you may also need to hide your erudition and learning. People can only be social friends if they don’t try to upstage or outsmart one another. Indeed, the classical art of conversation is to avoid any imbalance, as in Baldassare Castiglione’s Book of the Courtier: people need to be equal, at least for the purpose of the conversation, otherwise it fails. It has to be hierarchy-free and equal in contribution. You’d rather have dinner with your friends than with your professor, unless of course your professor understands “the art” of conversation. Indeed, one can generalize and define a community as a space within which many rules of competition and hierarchy are lifted, where the collective prevails over one’s interest. Of course there will be tension with the outside, but that’s another discussion. This idea of competition being lifted within a group or a tribe was, once again, present in the notion of a group as studied by Elinor Ostrom.
lifted within a group or a tribe was, once again, present
Facta non Verba (Deeds Before Words): Verbal threats reveal nothing beyond weakness and unreliability.
The Facts Are True, the News Is Fake
The precautionary principle: One does not need complex models as a justification to avoid a certain action. If we don’t understand something and it has a systemic effect, just avoid it. Models are error-prone, something I knew well with finance; most risks only appear in analyses after harm is done. As far as I know, we only have one planet. So the burden is on those who pollute—or who introduce new substances in larger than usual quantities—to show a lack of tail risk. In fact, the more uncertainty about the models, the more conservative one should be.
The Merchandising of Virtue
It is immoral to be in opposition to the market system and not live (somewhere in Vermont or Northwestern Afghanistan) in a hut or cave isolated from it. But there is worse: It is much more immoral to claim virtue without fully living with its direct consequences.
If your private life conflicts with your intellectual opinion, it cancels your intellectual ideas, not your private life. And a solution to the vapid universalism we discussed in the Prologue: If your private actions do not generalize, then you cannot have general ideas. This is not strictly about ethics, but information. If a car salesman tries to sell you a Detroit car while driving a Honda, he is signaling that the wares he is touting may have a problem.
Courage is the only virtue you cannot fake. If I were to describe the perfect virtuous act, it would be to take an uncomfortable position, one penalized by the common discourse.
Sticking up for truth when it is unpopular is far more of a virtue, because it costs you something—your reputation. If you are a journalist and act in a way that risks ostracism, you are virtuous. Some people only express their opinions as part of mob shaming, when it is safe to do so, and, in the bargain, think that they are displaying virtue. This is not virtue but vice, a mixture of bullying and cowardice.
When young people who “want to help mankind” come to me asking, “What should I do? I want to reduce poverty, save the world,” and similar noble aspirations at the macro-level, my suggestion is:
No peace proceeds from bureaucratic ink. If you want peace, make people trade, as they have done for millennia. They will be eventually forced to work something out.
RELIGION, BELIEF, AND SKIN IN THE GAME
There are people who are atheists in actions, religious in words (most Orthodox and Catholic Christians) and others who are religious in actions, religious in words (Salafi Islamists and suicide bombers) but I know of nobody who is atheist in both actions and words, completely devoid of rituals, respect for the dead, and superstitions (say a belief in economics, or in the miraculous powers of the mighty state and its institutions).
When we look at religion, and, to some extent, ancestral superstitions, we should consider what purpose they serve, rather than focusing on the notion of “belief,” epistemic belief in its strict scientific definition. In science, belief is literal belief; it is right or wrong, never metaphorical. In real life, belief is an instrument to do things, not the end product. This is similar to vision: the purpose of your eyes is to orient you in the best possible way, and get you out of trouble when needed, or help you find prey at a distance. Your eyes are not sensors designed to capture the electromagnetic spectrum. Their job description is not to produce the most accurate scientific representation of reality; rather the most useful one for survival.
Survival comes first, truth, understanding, and science later. In other words, you do not need science to survive (we’ve survived for several hundred million years or more, depending on how you define the “we”), but you must survive to do science. As your grandmother would have said, better safe than sorry.
REVELATION OF PREFERENCES
Before explaining the concept, consider the following three maxims: Judging people by their beliefs is not scientific. There is no such thing as the “rationality” of a belief, there is rationality of action. The rationality of an action can be judged only in terms of evolutionary considerations. The axiom of revelation of preferences (originating with Paul Samuelson, or possibly the Semitic gods), as you recall, states the following: you will not have an idea about what people really think, what predicts people’s actions, merely by asking them—they themselves don’t necessarily know. What matters, in the end, is what they pay for goods, not what they say they “think” about them, or the various possible reasons they give you or themselves for that. If you think about it, you will see that this is a reformulation of skin in the game. Even psychologists get it; in their experiments, their procedures require that actual dollars be spent for a test to be “scientific.”
It is therefore my opinion that religion exists to enforce tail risk management across generations, as its binary and unconditional rules are easy to teach and enforce. We have survived in spite of tail risks; our survival cannot be that random.
Superstitions can be vectors for risk management rules. We have as potent information that people who have them have survived; to repeat, never discount anything that allows you to survive.
The first principle we draw: There is a difference between beliefs that are decorative and different sorts of beliefs, those that map to action. There is no difference between them in words, except that the true difference reveals itself in risk taking, having something at stake, something one could lose in case one is wrong. And the lesson, by rephrasing the principle: How much you truly “believe” in something can be manifested only through what you are willing to risk for it.
The only definition of rationality that I’ve found that is practically, empirically, and mathematically rigorous is the following: what is rational is that which allows for survival. Unlike modern theories by psychosophasters, it maps to the classical way of thinking. Anything that hinders one’s survival at an individual, collective, tribal, or general level is, to me, irrational. Hence the precautionary principle and sound risk understanding.
The fact to consider is not that beliefs have survived a long time—the Catholic church as an administration is close to twenty-four centuries old (it is largely the continuation of the Roman Republic). The point is that people who have religion—a certain religion—have survived. Another principle: When you consider beliefs in evolutionary terms, do not look at how they compete with each other, but consider the survival of the populations that have them.
This allows us to summarize: Rationality does not depend on explicit verbalistic explanatory factors; it is only what aids survival, what avoids ruin. Why? Clearly as we saw in the Lindy discussion: Not everything that happens happens for a reason, but everything that survives survives for a reason.
The Logic of Risk Taking
A situation is deemed non-ergodic when observed past probabilities do not apply to future processes. There is a “stop” somewhere, an absorbing barrier that prevents people with skin in the game from emerging from it—and to which the system will invariably tend. Let us call these situations “ruin,” as there is no reversibility away from the condition. The central problem is that if there is a possibility of ruin, cost-benefit analyses are no longer possible.
If you incur a tiny probability of ruin as a “one-off” risk, survive it, then do it again (another “one-off” deal), you will eventually go bust with a probability of one hundred percent. Confusion arises because it may seem that if the “one-off” risk is reasonable, then an additional one is also reasonable. This can be quantified by recognizing that the probability of ruin approaches 1 as the number of exposures to individually small risks, say one in ten thousand, increases.
Unless you are perfectly narcissistic and psychopathic—even then—your worst-case scenario is never limited to the loss of only your life. Thus, we see the point that individual ruin is not as big a deal as collective ruin. And of course ecocide, the irreversible destruction of our environment, is the big one to worry about.
I have a finite shelf life, humanity should have an infinite duration. Or, I am renewable, not humanity or the ecosystem.
Courage is when you sacrifice your own well-being for the sake of the survival of a layer higher than yours. Selfish courage is not courage. A foolish gambler is not committing an act of courage, especially if he is risking other people’s funds or has a family to feed.
All risks are not equal. We often hear that “Ebola is causing fewer deaths than people drowning in their bathtubs,” or something of the sort, based on “evidence.” This is another class of problems that your grandmother can get, but the semi-educated cannot. Never compare a multiplicative, systemic, and fat-tailed risk to a non-multiplicative, idiosyncratic, and thin-tailed one. Recall that I worry about the correlation between the death of one person and that of another. So we need to be concerned with systemic effects: things that can affect more than one person should they happen.
One may be risk loving yet completely averse to ruin. The central asymmetry of life is: In a strategy that entails ruin, benefits never offset risks of ruin. Further: Ruin and other changes in condition are different animals. Every single risk you take adds up to reduce your life expectancy. Finally: Rationality is avoidance of systemic ruin.
No muscles without strength,
friendship without trust,
opinion without consequence,
change without aesthetics,
age without values,
life without effort,
water without thirst,
food without nourishment,
love without sacrifice,
power without fairness,
facts without rigor,
statistics without logic,
mathematics without proof,
teaching without experience,
politeness without warmth,
values without embodiment,
degrees without erudition,
militarism without fortitude,
progress without civilization,
friendship without investment,
virtue without risk,
probability without ergodicity,
wealth without exposure,
complication without depth,
fluency without content,
decision without asymmetry,
science without skepticism,
religion without tolerance,
and, most of all:
nothing without skin in the game.
Glossary
Rent Seeking: trying to use protective regulations or “rights” to derive income without adding anything to economic activity, without increasing the wealth of others. As Fat Tony would define it, it is like being forced to pay protection money to the Mafia without getting the economic benefits of protection. Revelation of Preferences: the theory, originating with Paul Samuelson (initially in the context of choice of public goods), that agents do not have full access to the reasoning behind their actions; actions are observables, while thought is not, which prevents the latter from being used for rigorous scientific investigation. In economics, experiments require an actual expenditure by the agent. Fat Tony’s summary is “tawk is always cheap.”
Agency Problem: misalignment of interest between the agent and the principal, say between the car salesman and you (the potential owner), or between the doctor and the patient.
Lindy Effect: when a technology, idea, corporation, or anything nonperishable has an increase in life expectancy with every additional day of survival—unlike perishable items (such as humans, cats, dogs, economic theories, and tomatoes). So a book that has been a hundred years in print is likely to stay in print another hundred years—provided its sales remain healthy.
Minority Rule: an asymmetry by which the behavior of the total is dictated by the preferences of a minority. Smokers can be in smoke-free areas but nonsmokers cannot be in smoking ones, so nonsmokers will prevail, not because they are initially a majority, but because they are asymmetric. It is held by the author that languages, ethics, and (some) religions spread by minority rule.
Golden Rule (symmetry): Treat others the way you would like them to treat you. Silver Rule (negative golden rule): Do not do to others what you would not like them to do to you. Note the difference from the Golden Rule, as the silver one prevents busybodies from attempting to run your life.
Principle of Charity: Exercise symmetry in intellectual debates; represent the argument of the opponent as accurately as you would like yours to be represented. The opposite of “strawman.”
Via negativa: the principle that we know what is wrong with more clarity than what is right, and that knowledge grows by subtraction. Also, it is easier to know that something is wrong than to find the fix. Actions that remove are more robust than those that add because addition may have unseen, complicated feedback loops.