| title | Skin in the Game |
|---|---|
| author | Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
| year | 2018 |
| isbn | 9780425284643 |
the following are my notes on skin in the game. this isn't a summary.
- 12 - a system without skin in the game will blow up and self-repair if it survives - yeah i wish buddy, doesn't seem that way
- 22 - regulations facilitate risk-hiding
- 24 - "The doer wins by doing, not convincing" - selling has real value in the world. Some things require more than just yourself or more than you can show right now. selling a vision of the future is valuable bc only then can you actually make it happen
- 25 - can see results of evolution by cannot replicate bc causal opacity
- 26 - what works cannot be irrational, "if something stupid works, it cannot be stupid"
- 27 - using math when you don't need to isn't science
- 28 - as more tech, "there is a growing separation between the maker and the user"
- 31 - using math for practical problems "meant a deep understanding of the problem before writing the equations"
- 32 - "If a big corporation pollutes your neighborhood, you can get together with your neighbors and sue the hell out of it. Some greedy lawyer will have the paperwork ready. The enemies of the corporation will be glad to help. And the potential costs of the settlement would be enough of a deterrent for the corporation to behave." - incoherent example, what enemies? certainly not competitors bound to do similar things and who would open themselves up to similar lawsuits. also very easy to do irreparable damage. corporation would cease to exist perhaps but the pattern of behavior would persist. default to permission not forgiveness is a lot better for ruining neighborhoods. the corporation is more coherent than the neighborhood, already has lawyers ready for this stuff likely. neighborhood does not. haven't had this fight. terrible example.
- 32 - "If you can't effectively sure, regulate"
- 36 - "The skills at making things diverge from those at selling things." nope! making at scale w/o already existing wealth requires salesmanship
- 40 - protectionism is good because people can do things they care about - one of the less convincing reasons. money and government by skidelsky has a good section on protectionism
- 42 - law is rigorous, but unlike math / science doesn't offer surprises
- 56 - sharia has gharar, basically requirement of equality of uncertainty
- 59 - graeber observed that goldman sachs looks communist from within b/c partnership system of governance - don't think that's what graeber was saying, think it was more like when you have a job to do, you just help get it done. need to look at debt
- 74 - many automatic cars not bc it's what everyone wants but bc manual drivers can drive auto but not vice versa
- 79 - language follows minority rule, it travels; genes majority rule, do not travel as much
- 82 - "Purely monotheistic religions such as Protestant Christianity, Salafi Islam, or fundamentalist atheism accomodate literalist and medocre minds that cannot handle ambiguity" he's right, cataphatic theology stinks lol
- 85 - "Outcomes are paradoxically more stable under the minority rule - the variance of results is lower and the rul is more likely to emerge independently across separate populations."
- 88 - growth of society driven by small number of people
- general - lol i was the stubborn minority with linting, pep 8, testing, etc
- 92 - (man i wish this dude would have just done normal chapters)
- 92 - "Leave people alone under a good structure and they will take care of things" - sounds an awful lot like designing your way out of politics, strangely close to skinner for a libertarian
- 100 - company man has been replaced by companies man who worries about general employability
- 115 - weird ramble about punishing families of suicide bombers. at least we should stop the families from being compensated ... duh? idk not enlightening
- 121 - pascal's wager theologically weak because positive payoff if true, no downside, so it's a free option. proposes religion without skin in the game, purely academic
- 124 - disdain for sunstein and thaler who nudge bc they reason from first-order models. also prone to mistake group for aggregation of components - think that single individual lets us understand crowd / market - basically argument against micro foundations for macro which i of course like
- 126 - more crapping on pinker which i of course like
- 126 - "he has mentioned quantum mechanics at least twice in the past five years in conversations that had nothing to do with physics" lmao tru
- 130 - something respectable about losing $1B as long as it was yours
- 131 - only 10% of top 500 US dynasties >30 yrs old, 60% in france, 1/3 euro rich were rich for centuries
- 132 - large state correlates with little downward mobility for rich (got to posit better causal mechanism)
- 133 - "And no downside for some means no upside for the rest." - explain the mechanism b/c we don't live in a zero-sum world
- 135 - unsatisfying rebuke of piketty. better critiques out there. see the asset economy
- 135 - envy stays close (sounds like giraurd mimetic desire), doesn't originate with impoverished but clerical class who like piketty. like the real class war but not as good
- 137 - left data out of the black swan bc people flood stories with numbers when they don't have good arguments - of course i like this
- 146 - "Anything that smacks of competition destroys knowledge"
- 147 - "One should give more weight to research that, while being rigorous, contradicts other peers, particularly if it entails costs and reputational harm for the author"
- 158 - "people you understand most easily were necessarily the bull***tters" - ? wat
- 165 - society doesn't advance with education, wealth comes first (wish this was cited)
- 165 - "You can tell if a discipline is BS if the degree depends deverely on the prestige of the school granting it."
- 165 - physics arXiv papers ok, finance needs to be in prestigious journals
- 168 - funny anecdote about what i assume is molecular gastronomy. he says it sucks. of course i like this
- 171 - "I am certain that if pizza were priced $200, the people with corks plugged in their behinds would be lining up for it."
- 171 - rich people get sold stuff that sucks, more expensive gets worse = negative utility
- 181 - "You can criticize either what a person said or what a person meant" - sounds like hierarchy of disagreement
- 182 - hayek didn't misrepresent keynes but addressed his points, helped that keynes was feared for intellect and aggression
- 182 - "The principle of charity stipulates that you try to understand a message as if you were yourself its author."
- 184 - "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." - lol ok
- 185 - "If your private life conflicts with your intellectual opinion, it cancels your intellectual ideas, not your private life."
- 191 - "If you want peace, make people trade"
- 202 - christianity, judaism, shiite islam evolved by moving away from the literal (sounds apophatic)
- 204 - pascal's wager lacks symmetry between what you pay and what you get
- 214 - floor of parthenon is curved so we see it straight, columns unevenly spaced so they looked lined up (didn't know that! wow!)
- 217 - religion exists to enforce tail risk across generations, rules easy to teach
- 220 - don't look at beliefs as they compete w/ each other but at survival of populations who have them
- 221 - kashrut laws followed by population that survived, people had to eat together, so stayed together
- 226 - bc risk adds up and ruin happens only once, paranoia about low-probability events is rational
- 227 - easy to come up with story about how you're overpaying for insurance, but person may have other liabilities / risks they need to cover
- 228 - lmao another thaler jab, pinker jab - which of course i like
- 231 - "It doesn't cost me much to go with my "refined paranoia," even if wrong. For all it takes is for my paranoia to be right once, and it saves my life."
- general - market dips coincide with personal turmoil
- 242 - "virtue merchandising" is using virtue as marketing strategy, like save the environment. like modern indulgences
- crappy notes section bc by theme alone and no page numbers. ok to do theme but pls include page numbers!
- 59 - yaneer bar-yam
- 76 - serge galam social renormalization
- 78 - aramaic in mongolia
- 91 - thomas schelling cellular automata
- 91 - dhananjay gode and shyam sunder 1993
- 100 - ronald coase firm
- 126 - michael oakeshott
- 129 - joan c williams on working class
- 129 - michele lamont on the dignity of working men
- 184 - simone weil
- 196 - paul veyne a history of private life
- 196 - ferdnand braudel
- 218 - jared diamond papua new guinea
- 233 - paul embrechts
- 255 - altham 1994 uncertainty and ethics
- 255 - derek parfit 2011 on what matters
- 256 - lamont 2009 dynamic inequality
- 256 - good section on satisficing but not in the main book!
- 261 - t nagel 1970 the possibility of altruism
- 263 - b williams shame and necessity
- 263 - mj zimmerman 2008 living with uncertainty: the moral significance of ignorance