Skin in the Game (book)

If an actor pockets some rewards from a policy they enact or support without accepting any of the risks, economists consider it to be a problem of "missing incentives". In contrast, to Taleb, the problem is more fundamentally one of asymmetry: one actor gets the rewards, the other is stuck with the risks.[1]

Taleb argues that "For social justice, focus on symmetry and risk sharing. You cannot make profits and transfer the risks to others, as bankers and large corporations do... Forcing skin in the game corrects this asymmetry better than thousands of laws and regulations."[6][7][8]

Intellectual Yet Idiot (IYI) is a term coined by Nassim Nicholas Taleb in his essay by the same name that refers to the semi-intelligent well-pedigreed "who are telling us 1) what to do, 2) what to eat, 3) how to speak, 4) how to think… and 5) who to vote for". They represent a very small minority of people but have an overwhelming impact on the vast majority because they affect government policy. IYI are often policy makers, academics, journalists, and media pundits.

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 "red necks" or English non-crisp-vowel class who voted for Brexit. When plebeians do something that makes sense to them, 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 the plebeians dare voting in a way that contradicts his preferences.[10]

Taleb points out that being educated and "intellectual" does not always mean that someone isn't an idiot for most purposes. "You can be an intellectual yet still be an idiot. 'Educated philistines' have been wrong on everything from Stalinism to Iraq to low-carb diets."

Taleb dedicates a chapter to IYIs in his book Skin in the Game.

Branko Milanović wrote that Taleb has created "a full system that goes from empirics to ethics, a thing which is exceedingly rare in modern world."[22] The Economist described reading the book as similar to "being trapped in a cab with a cantankerous and over-opinionated driver."[23] Matthew Syed of The Times was "mostly persuaded" by the main argument of the book.[24] The Guardian published an ambivalent review, noting that Taleb's "combination of fearlessness, self-belief and immodesty adds up to charisma on the page" but that "every idea that sounds as if it might work in the abstract fails in the particular".[25] Taleb responded with a list of the flaws and "reading comprehension" in the reviews in The Economist and The Guardian (claiming that journalists have an agency problem with subjects criticizing their profession for lack of skin of the game).[26]

• The knowledge we get by tinkering, via trial and error, experience, and the workings of time, in other words, contact with the earth, is vastly superior to that obtained through reasoning, something self-serving institutions have been very busy hiding from us.[28]
• Bureaucracy is a construction by which a person is conveniently separated from the consequences of his or her actions.[29]
• Avoid taking advice from someone who gives advice for a living, unless there is a penalty for their advice.[30]
• Seeing the psychologist Steven Pinker making pronouncements about things intellectual has a similar effect to encountering a drive-in Burger King while hiking in the middle of a national park.[31]
• Evidence of submission is displayed by the employee’s going through years depriving himself of his personal freedom for nine hours every day, his ritualistic and punctual arrival at an office, his denying himself his own schedule, and his not having beaten up anyone on the way back home after a bad day. He is an obedient, housebroken dog.[32]
• What we saw worldwide from 2014 to 2018, from India to the U.K. to the U.S., was a rebellion against the inner circle of no-skin-in-the-game policymaking “clerks” and journalists-insiders, that class of paternalistic semi-intellectual experts with some Ivy League, Oxford-Cambridge or similar label-driven education who are telling the rest of us 1) what to do, 2) what to eat, 3) how to speak, 4) how to think, and… 5) whom to vote for.[33]
• People who are bred, selected, and compensated to find complicated solutions do not have an incentive to implement simplified ones.[34]
• If your private life conflicts with your intellectual opinion, it cancels your intellectual ideas, not your private life.[35]
• Survival comes first, truth, understanding, and science later.[36]

• The Times review
• Financial Times review
• The Guardian review
• The Economist review