
Takeaways from Nassim Taleb's New Book “Skin in the Game” - eric_cartman
http://www.nuggetsofthought.com/2018/03/02/skin-in-the-game-part-one/
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soVeryTired
I enjoyed the Guardian's (satirical) digest so much:

[https://amp.theguardian.com/books/2018/feb/25/skin-in-the-
ga...](https://amp.theguardian.com/books/2018/feb/25/skin-in-the-game-by-
nassim-nicholas-taleb-digested-read)

~~~
wand3r
> Having skin in the game means reading the Code of Hammurabi. And, because
> I’ve got skin in the game, I didn’t trust other people’s translations. I
> took time out to learn the ancient Babylonian script myself. Turns out the
> translations were pretty accurate after all.

I actually laughed out loud. The thing about Taleb that gets said often is if
he just shut the hell up after The Black Swan he would be hailed as a genius.

~~~
OscarTheGrinch
I enjoyed Black Swan: "Everyone is doing statistics wrong, except me" and was
about to read Anti-fragile... Maybe I will quit while he is ahead.

~~~
shaki-dora
I enjoyed Fooled by Randomness, and, to a lesser degree, Black Swan. But
recently Taleb has just taken a dive off the deep end.

~~~
whitepoplar
What, in particular, about his recent work makes you think he's taken a dive
off the deep end?

~~~
bko
His arguments are sometimes very fragile and overly broad.

He has this fetishism about past times. For example, He claims things that
stood the test of time have proved their worth. But he just ignores things
that have stood the test of time but are loathsome, like sexism and racism.
Not only have they stood the test of time but these ideas often co evolved
over diverse populations.

Much of his examples are extremely cherry picked and I’m really not into his
embrace of what basically amounts to grandma wisdom. It has a place but he
isn’t nuanced about it and is incredibly arrogant. I do think he has some
interesting ideas though but he strikes me as insufferable at times

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sincerely
Man, what happened to Nassim Taleb? I remember Black Swan (to a degree) and
Fooled by Randomness being pretty illuminating reads but I couldn't finish
Antifragile and his Twitter activity is...kind of unsettling, to say the
least.

~~~
tryitnow
Ironically, he has no real "skin in the game" on almost every topic he talks
about, which kind of proves the point of this book.

It's sad really. If he didn't have such a narcissistic personality and
possessed more modesty he could have been one of the great thinkers of our
day.

His life is a cautionary tale.

~~~
bbctol
It's so remarkable I'd almost think it's some kind of long performance art
piece. There's a very surreal moment when you've read a bunch of Taleb's
writing on the importance of honor and craft and the problems with detached,
thin-skinned pseudo-intellectuals who get involved in fields they don't
understand and constantly bullshit to prop up their egos... and then check out
his twitter. It's the best lesson of all: no one wants to do the hard part,
not even the ones telling you to do the hard part. Even writing a book about
how important it is to have skin in the game doesn't cover up not having skin
in the game.

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scrumper
Looks like it's time to add NNT to the Stephen Wolfram list of people whom
it's fashionable to criticize reflexively because of their style.

I've been reading the draft chapters of this latest book on Medium for a while
now. There is real insight here, at least to someone like me who isn't smart
enough to have figured the entire world out from first principles yet.

~~~
shaki-dora
No, you’re misunderstanding (some) of the criticism. I actually enjoyed Fooled
by Randomness mostly _because of_ the meandering style. I loathe his recent
work, both on paper and onTwitter, because he’s turned into just another “The
West is commiting suicide” islamophobe (plus the usual assortment of misogyny
and fawning over dictators like Duterte).

~~~
whitepoplar
That's not completely fair. In his latest interview with Gad Saad, he makes
the critical distinction between the danger of Salafism/Wahhabism and the
relative benign nature of Shiite Islam. He takes offense at "BS vendors" like
Sam Harris who lump all of Islam into a fearmongering category.

~~~
shaki-dora
The “suicide” line was a direct quote from a recent article of his. It just
struck a chord with me because that exact phrase happens to be one of the
slogans of my country’s alt-right party.

In the article, he mostly talked about the danger of allowing halal food in
“our” supermarkets. Since Shiites share their Sunni breathrens’ food
preferences, Taleb should maybe take more care to allow his nuanced view of
the world to shine through in his shorter works, lest he be misunderstood for
an old egomaniac trying to ride the current wave of hatred to one last moment
in the spotlight.

~~~
scrumper
Re: Halal - That part of the book[1] talks about minority rule and the idea of
'renormalization groups' (I suspect not really the same thing as the
identically-named concept in mathematics). It covers Kosher food, organic
food, non-GMO food, Halal food, Christian intolerance, and politics. So saying
it is about the "danger of halal food in our supermarkets" isn't accurate. It
is explaining the mechanism by which a small, intolerant minority is able to
have its views spread.

[1]
[http://fooledbyrandomness.com/minority.pdf](http://fooledbyrandomness.com/minority.pdf)

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shaki-dora
This reads like a collection of self-help motivational posters sold at a
Milwaukee alt-right “how to make money from home” convention.

~~~
IntronExon
Look at the list of top 100 favorite books on this site. At least half are
self-help.

Taleb sure knows his audience.

~~~
announcerman
What's the problem with self-help books? Do their authors generally lack skin
in the game?

~~~
IntronExon
It’s a huge industry which typically makes outlandish and largely unfounded
claims... it’s the homeopathy of literature. Like homeopathy it typically
targets the desperate and insecure.

~~~
rtx
Hard Things About Hard Things really helped my career. It could be a placebo.

~~~
IntronExon
I don’t think that justifies the industry as a whole, but I believe that for
the right person at the right time, these books can be of some use. I suspect
that the people, such as yourself, who get something out of them would have
found what they were looking for anyway however. The commonalities in people
who benefit from occasional self help seem to be committed to change, to
improvement, and I think _that_ more than anything else is the active
ingredient.

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marklgr
Are there new ideas in this book that were not discussed in his previous ones?
I can grind my teeth and put up with the insufferable style if there is
something valuable to learn, but from what I've seen so far, it seems to be
the same themes, with different emphasis.

~~~
ssivark
I’ve found that watching his hour long talks is a better way to get the ideas
than reading his books. Which is a pity, because his books could pack quite a
punch if they had an editor who could cut the size down by 2/3\. Many authors
might have the arrogance but Taleb also has the money — he can afford to not
listen to an editor :P

That said, while his style can be annoying, I find his ideas to be a breath of
fresh air.

Haven’t read SITG fully, but it seems like the book is a natural follow-up to
Antifragile, analyzing social setups and human institutions from the viewpoint
of whom they render fragile/anti fragile.

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arbuge
>> No person in a transaction should have certainty about the outcome while
the other one has uncertainty.

Ironic in view of the top post on HN right now. Doctors and surgeons pretty
much always have certainty about their part of the transaction (receiving
payment for their services) in medical interventions. The patient's outcome
tends to be much more uncertain.

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longerthoughts
>Avoid taking advice from someone who gives advice for a living

So by taking his advice we're ignoring his advice and by ignoring his advice
we're taking his advice? Well isn't this a fun little paradox.

~~~
TuringNYC
Originally, the distinction was that Nassim Tableb literally had skin in the
game via his hedge fund that essentially invested in the Black Swan strategy
([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Empirica_Capital](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Empirica_Capital))

Now it seems he wants to be a full-time author (I wasn't seeing purchasing a
book as purchasing advice as much as reading a literary work from someone I
admire.)

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kristianc
The best thing you can say about Taleb is that he appeals to the kind of guys
who put modal email signup boxes on their websites.

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bradknowles
Telling me I’m useless if I don’t start my own business ... well, that’s a
pretty good way to get me to ignore everything he might say.

There’s lots of things I can do in this world, but I have learned first hand
that I am worse than useless at the starting/running a business thing.

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guiomie
I really liked Black Swan, but I started following Nassim on Twitter and he is
really annoying. He's got this superiority complex, and I'm not sure I want to
subsidize his ego by buying this book.

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csomar
This guy has became annoying. At least to me.

> Laws come and go; ethics stay.

Ethics? Really? What are ethics? Who set them? Who enforces them? Where do
they come from?

We should first agree that there is no god.

Therefore, there is no such thing as "universal ethics". Everything is
relative to the person.

More like: Have a set of ethics and stick to them. Everyone is free to have
his own ethics but if you are a serious person you should not switch your
ethics because of the situation.

But then maybe your ethic is to be flexible toward the situation. Then you
should change them every time the situation changes. Oh, this is messy better
look up to what the law says.

> If you hear advice from a grandmother or elders, odds are that it works 90
> percent of the time.

No. 90% of what my grand-father says and recommend is completely irrelevant to
todays' world and harmful due to his lack of knowledge about finance,
economics and the modern world.

~~~
contact_fusion
It sounds like you have a particular viewpoint - atheistic ethical relativism.
I'm sure you can appreciate that the existence of god and the existence of
universal ethics are two separate questions. (Example: a universe with a god,
just one that is morally ambiguous.)

Of course Taleb has condensed several different thoughts into a single
aphorism. One might be that laws (civilizations, governments) tend to not last
as long as broad ethical traditions. Another is the observation that what is
legal is rarely what is right. Yet another is framing what should be a guide
to your behavior: do what is most consistent with what you believe is right,
not what is legal.

Some of what you are saying is related to the grand challenge of ethical
philosophy. But your solution, relying on the law, will probably result in
some pretty bad consequences, especially when you think about how laws are
made - and that laws are sometimes used as a cover for bad behavior. Taleb is
saying (among other things) that you should think about your ethical choices
on the terms of your own ethics rather than appealing to some other authority
(the law) as a guide for your actions. He is being a bit pretentious while
making this point but the logic is sound, I think.

Personally I agree that Taleb's point about grandmotherly knowledge is a bit
silly, but I think the underlying idea is well taken. Absent any fundamental
understanding of how the world works, people still had to figure out how to
survive in that world. Those that survived probably have made some choices
that - perhaps in hindsight - aren't that dumb. That being said, the world is
changing faster than ever before, so I think Taleb's analogy is very weak. I
also find his point to be in contradiction with other things he has said
before: notice that he has assigned some meaningless quantification of
uncertainty ("90%") to the quality of this grandmotherly knowledge. Such a
number has no basis in reality, and stinks of the type of probabilistic
ignorance he rails against.

