From Nassim Taleb’s “Skin in the Game”
“in academia there is no difference between academia and the real world; in the real world, there is.” (p. 3)
“In case you are giving economic views: Don’t tell me what you “think,” just tell me what’s in your portfolio.” (p. 4)
“I have shown in Antifragile that most things that we believe were “invented” by universities were actually discovered by tinkering and later legitimized by some type of formalization. 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.”(p. 7)
“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.” (p. 10)
“Prominent people took risks—considerably more risks than ordinary citizens. The Roman emperor Julian the Apostate, about whom much later, died on the battlefield fighting in the never-ending war on the Persian frontier—while emperor.” (p. 11)
“Bureaucracy is a construction by which a person is conveniently separated from the consequences of his or her actions.” (p. 12)
“it is government, not markets, that makes these things possible by the mechanisms of bailouts. It is not just bailouts: government interference in general tends to remove skin in the game.” (p. 13)
“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.” (p. 14)
“There is no evolution without skin in the game.” (p. 14)
“Skin in the game keeps human hubris in check.” (p. 15)
“Hammurabi’s best known injunction is as follows: “If a builder builds a house and the house collapses and causes the death of the owner of the house—the builder shall be put to death.” (p. 17)
“The Golden Rule wants you to Treat others the way you would like them to treat you . The more robust Silver Rule says 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. The Silver Rule can be seen as the Negative Golden Rule, and as I am shown by my Calabrese (and Calabrese-speaking) barber every three weeks, via negativa (acting by removing) is more powerful and less error-prone than via positiva (acting by addition).” (p. 19)
“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.” (p. 21)
“Avoid taking advice from someone who gives advice for a living, unless there is a penalty for their advice.” (p. 23)
“One, the fool, takes risks he doesn’t understand, mistaking his own past luck for skills, the other, the crook, transfers risks to others. Economists, when they talk about skin in the game, are only concerned with the second.” (p. 23)
“The agency problem (or principal-agent problem) also manifests itself in the misalignment of interests in transactions: a vendor in a one-shot transaction does not have his interests aligned to yours—and so can hide stuff from you.” (p. 23)
“We are much better at doing than understanding. There is a difference between a charlatan and a genuinely skilled member of society, say that between a macrobull***ter political “scientist” and a plumber, or between a journalist and a mafia made man. The doer wins by doing, not convincing. Entire fields (say economics and other social sciences) become themselves charlatanic because of the absence of skin in the game connecting them back to earth (while the participants argue about “science”).” (p. 24)
“I personally know rich horrible forecasters and poor “good” forecasters. Because what matters in life isn’t how frequently one is “right” about outcomes, but how much one makes when one is right. Being wrong, when it is not costly, doesn’t count—in a way that’s similar to trial-and-error mechanisms of research.” (p. 25)
“By definition, what works cannot be irrational; about every single person I know who has chronically failed in business shares that mental block, the failure to realize that if something stupid works (and makes money), it cannot be stupid.” (p. 25)
“What is rational is what allows the collective—entities meant to live for a long time—to survive.” (p. 26)
“Artisans have their soul in the game. Primo, artisans do things for existential reasons first, financial and commercial ones later. Their decision making is never fully financial, but it remains financial. Secundo, they have some type of “art” in their profession; they stay away from most aspects of industrialization; they combine art and business. Tertio, they put some soul in their work: they would not sell something defective or even of compromised quality because it hurts their pride. Finally, they have sacred taboos, things they would not do even if it markedly increased profitability.” (p. 34)
“Those who talk should do and only those who do should talk.” (p. 28)
“architects today build to impress other architects, and we end up with strange—irreversible—structures that do not satisfy the well-being of their residents; it takes time and a lot of progressive tinkering for that.” (p. 29)
“There is absolutely no benefit for someone in such a position to propose something simple: when you are rewarded for perception, not results, you need to show sophistication. Anyone who has submitted a “scholarly” paper to a journal knows that you usually raise the odds of acceptance by making it more complicated than necessary. Further, there are side effects for problems that grow nonlinearly with such branching-out complications. Worse: Non-skin-in-the-game people don’t get simplicity.” (p. 29)
“A confession. When I don’t have skin in the game, I am usually dumb.” (p. 30)
“If you do not take risks for your opinion, you are nothing. And I will keep mentioning that I have no other definition of success than leading an honorable life. We intimated that it is dishonorable to let others die in your stead.” (p. 33)
“Entrepreneurs are heroes in our society. They fail for the rest of us.” (p. 36)
“people fail to realize that the principal thing you can learn from a professor is how to be a professor—and the chief thing you can learn from, say, a life coach or inspirational speaker is how to become a life coach or inspirational speaker.” (p. 38)
“Book 3, “That Greatest Asymmetry,” is about the minority rule by which a small segment of the population inflicts its preferences on the general population. The (short) appendix for Book 3 shows 1) how a collection of units doesn’t behave like a sum of units, but something with a mind of its own, and 2) the consequences of much of something called social “science.” (p. 45)
“even if you are independent and have f*** you money, you are vulnerable if people you care about can be targeted by evil corporations and groups.” (p. 45)
“The group invited him to join them and offered him the turtles to eat. Detecting that he was only invited to relieve them of the unwanted food, he forced them all to eat the turtles, thus establishing the principle that you need to eat what you feed others.” (p. 51)
“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.” (p. 51)
“One expert salesman candidly explained to me: “If I buy the client, someone working for the finance department of a municipality who buys his suits at some department store in New Jersey, a bottle of $2,000 wine, I own him for the next few months. I can get at least $100,000 profits out of him. Nothing in the mahket gives you such return.” (p. 52)
“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.” (p. 55)
“Modernity put it in our heads that there are two units: the individual and the universal collective—in that sense, skin in the game for you would be just for you, as a unit. In reality, my skin lies in a broader set of people, one that includes a family, a community, a tribe, a fraternity. But it cannot possibly be the universal.” (p. 60)
“Everyone, including the anchor, chipped in. My turn came: “I own no Microsoft stock, I am short no Microsoft stock [i.e., would benefit from its decline], hence I can’t talk about it.” I repeated my dictum of Prologue 1: Don’t tell me what you think, tell me what you have in your portfolio.” (p. 63)
“How? The problem resides in the reliance on metrics. Every metric is gameable—the cholesterol lowering we mentioned in Prologue 1 is a metric-gaming technique taken to its limit. More realistically, say a cancer doctor or hospital is judged by the five-year survival rates of patients, and needs to face a variety of modalities for a new patient: what choice of treatment would they elect to do? There is a tradeoff between laser surgery (a precise surgical procedure) and radiation therapy, which is toxic to both patient and cancer.” (p. 64)
“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.” (p. 64)
“His objective is, naturally, to avoid a lawsuit, something that can prove disastrous to his career.” (p. 65)
“In sum, both the doctor and the patient have skin in the game, though not perfectly, but administrators don’t—and they seem to be the cause of the troubling malfunctioning of the system. Administrators everywhere on the planet, in all businesses and pursuits, and at all times in history, have been the plague.” (p. 65)
“a certain type of intransigent minority—with significant skin in the game (or, better, soul in the game) to reach a minutely small level, say 3 or 4 percent of the total population, for the entire population to have to submit to their preferences. Further, an optical illusion comes with the dominance of the minority: a naive observer (who looks at the standard average) would be under the impression that the choices and preferences are those of the majority. If it seems absurd, it is because our scientific intuitions aren’t calibrated for this.” (p. 69)
“Among other things, many other things, the minority rule will show us how all it takes is a small number of intolerant, virtuous people with skin in the game, in the form of courage, for society to function properly.” (p. 70)
“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.” (p. 71)
“Consider that transgenic-GMO eaters will eat non-GMOs, but not the reverse. So it may suffice to have a tiny percentage—say, no more than 5 percent—of an evenly spatially distributed population of non-genetically modified eaters for the entire population to have to eat non-GMO food.” (p. 73)
“When there are few choices, McDonald’s appears to be a safe bet. It is also a safe bet in shady places with few regulars where the food variance from expectation can be consequential—I am writing these lines in the Milan train station and, as offensive as it can be to someone who spent all this money to go to Italy, McDonald’s is one of the few restaurants there. And it is packed. Shockingly, Italians are seeking refuge there from a risky meal. They may hate McDonald’s, but they certainly hate uncertainty even more.” (p. 77)
“Rory wrote to me about the beer-wine asymmetry and the choices made for parties: “Once you have 10 percent or more women at a party, you cannot serve only beer. But most men will drink wine. So you only need one set of glasses if you serve only wine—the universal donor, to use the language of blood groups.” (p. 77)
“The market is like a large movie theater with a small door.” (p. 87)
“Science isn’t the sum of what scientists think, but exactly as with markets, it is a procedure that is highly skewed. Once you debunk something, it is now wrong. Had science operated by majority consensus, we would be still stuck in the Middle Ages, and Einstein would have ended as he started, a patent clerk with fruitless side hobbies.” (p. 87)
“Society doesn’t evolve by consensus, voting, majority, committees, verbose meetings, academic conferences, tea and cucumber sandwiches, or polling; only a few people suffice to disproportionately move the needle. All one needs is an asymmetric rule somewhere—and someone with soul in the game. And asymmetry is present in about everything. *” (p. 88)
“The average behavior of the market participant will not allow us to understand the general behavior of the market.” (p. 89)
“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.” (p.89)
“Groups are units on their own. There are qualitative differences between a group of ten and a group of, say, 395,435. Each is a different animal, in the literal sense, as different as a book is from an office building. When we focus on commonalities, we get confused, but, at a certain scale, things become different.” (p.89)
“Under the right market structure, a collection of idiots produces a well-functioning market.” (p.91)
“They were, simply, totally free. They were financially free, and secure, not because of their means but because of their lack of wants. Ironically, by being beggars, they had the equivalent of f*** you money, which we can more easily get by being at the lowest rung than by joining the income-dependent classes.” (p. 96)
“In short, every organization wants a certain number of people associated with it to be deprived of a certain share of their freedom. How do you own these people? First, by conditioning and psychological manipulation; second, by tweaking them to have some skin in the game, forcing them to have something significant to lose if they disobey authority—something hard to do with gyrovague beggars who flout their scorn for material possessions.” (p. 96)
“People you find in employment love the regularity of the payroll, with that special envelop on their desk the last day of the month, and without which they would act as a baby deprived of mother’s milk. You realize that had Bob been an employee rather than something that appeared to be cheaper, that contractor thing, then you wouldn’t be having so much trouble.” (p. 97)
“Someone who has been employed for a while is giving you strong evidence of submission. 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.” (p. 98)
“the dog boasts to the wolf all the contraptions of comfort and luxury he has, almost prompting the wolf to enlist. Until the wolf asks the dog about his collar and is terrified when he understands its use. “ Of all your meals, I want nothing. ” He ran away and is still running . *3 The question is: what would you like to be, a dog or a wolf?” (p. 102)
“Another aspect of the dog vs. wolf dilemma: the feeling of false stability. A dog’s life may appear smooth and secure, but in the absence of an owner, a dog does not survive.” (p. 103)
“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.” (p. 105)
“People whose survival depends on qualitative “job assessments” by someone of higher rank in an organization cannot be trusted for critical decisions.” (p. 107)
“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.” (p. 110)
“To make ethical choices you cannot have dilemmas between the particular (friends, family) and the general.” (p. 111)
“Financial independence is another way to solve ethical dilemmas, but such independence is hard to ascertain: many seemingly independent people aren’t particularly so. While, in Aristotle’s days, a person of independent means was free to follow his conscience, this is no longer as common in modern days. Intellectual and ethical freedom requires the absence of the skin of others in one’s game, which is why the free are so rare.” (p. 111)
“To be free of conflict you need to have no friends.” (p. 113)
“ If the architect built a house and the house subsequently collapses, killing the firstborn son of the master, the firstborn son of the architect shall be put to death.” The individual as we understand it today did not exist as a standalone unit; the family did.” (p. 114).
“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.” (p. 115)
“Scars signal skin in the game. And People can detect the difference between front-and back-office operators. NEXT Before we end, 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.” (p. 122)
“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. WHERE TO FIND A COCONUT But the problem is the one-eyed following the blind: these self-described members of the “intelligentsia” can’t find a coconut on Coconut Island, meaning they aren’t intelligent enough to define intelligence, hence fall into circularities—their main skill is a capacity to pass exams written by people like them, or to write papers read by people like them.” (p. 123)
“people are perfectly entitled to rely on their own ancestral instincts and to listen to their grandmothers (or to Montaigne and such filtered classical knowledge), who have a better track record than these policymaking goons.” (p. 123)
“The Intellectual Yet Idiot (IYI) is a product of modernity, hence has been proliferating since at least the mid-twentieth century, to reach a local supremum today, to the point that we have experienced a takeover by people without skin in the game.” (p. 124)
“Typically, the IYI get first-order logic right, but not second-order (or higher) effects, making him totally incompetent in complex domains.” (p. 125)
“The Intellectual Yet Idiot knows at any given point in time what his words or actions are doing to his reputation. But a much easier marker: he doesn’t even deadlift.” (p. 127)
“In this chapter, I will propose that what people resent—or should resent—is the person at the top who has no skin in the game, that is, because he doesn’t bear his allotted risk, he is immune to the possibility of falling from his pedestal, exiting his income or wealth bracket, and waiting in line outside the soup kitchen.” (p. 129)
“someone without skin in the game—say, a corporate executive with upside and no financial downside (the type to speak clearly in meetings)—is paid according to some metrics that do not necessarily reflect the health of his company; these he can manipulate, hide risks, get the bonus, then retire (or go do the same thing at another company) and blame his successor for subsequent results.” (p. 130)
“True equality is equality in probability. and Skin in the game prevents systems from rotting.” (p. 130)
“In the more rural past, envy was rather controlled; wealthy people were not as exposed to other persons of their class. They didn’t have the pressure to keep up with other wealthy persons and compete with them. The wealthy stayed within their region, surrounded by people who depended on them, say a lord on his property. Except for the occasional season in the cities, their social life was quite vertical. Their children played with the children of the servants.” (p. 136)
“Traders, when they make profits, have short communications; when they lose they drown you in details, theories, and charts.” (p. 138)
“If you want to show that a person has more than, say $10 million, all you need is to show the $50 million in his brokerage account, not, in addition, list every piece of furniture in his house, including the $500 painting in his study and the silver spoons in the pantry.” (p. 138)
“That which is fragile has an asymmetric response to volatility and other stressors, that is, will experience more harm than benefit from it.” (p. 142)
“That which is “Lindy” is what ages in reverse, i.e., its life expectancy lengthens with time, conditional on survival.” (p. 143)
“You can define a free person precisely as someone whose fate is not centrally or directly dependent on peer assessment.” (p. 144)
“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.” (p. 145)
“If you say something crazy you will be deemed crazy. But if you create a collection of, say, twenty people who set up an academy and say crazy things accepted by the collective, you now have “peer-reviewing” and can start a department in a university. Academia has a tendency, when unchecked (from lack of skin in the game), to evolve into a ritualistic self-referential publishing game.” (p. 146)
“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 bull***t vendor.” (p. 147)
“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.” (p. 148)
“While our knowledge of physics was not available to the ancients, human nature was. So everything that holds in social science and psychology has to be Lindy-proof, that is, have an antecedent in the classics; otherwise it will not replicate or not generalize beyond the experiment.” (p. 150)
“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.” (p. 155)
“Consider the chief executive officers of corporations: they don’t just look the part, they even look the same. And, worse, when you listen to them talk, they sound the same, down to the same vocabulary and metaphors. But that’s their job: as I will keep reminding the reader, counter to the common belief, executives are different from entrepreneurs and are supposed to look like actors.” (p. 156)
“Much has been written about the millionaire next door: the person who is actually rich, on balance, but doesn’t look like the person you would expect to be rich, and vice versa. About every private banker is taught to not be fooled by the looks of the client and avoid chasing Ferrari owners at country clubs.” (p. 156)
“Never hire an academic unless his function is to partake of the rituals of writing papers or taking exams.” (p. 159)
“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.” (p. 160)
“People who are bred, selected, and compensated to find complicated solutions do not have an incentive to implement simplified ones.” (p. 162)
“Ivy League universities are becoming in the eyes of the new Asian upper class the ultimate status luxury good. Harvard is like a Vuitton bag and a Cartier watch.” (p. 164)
“The heuristic here would be to use education in reverse: hire, conditional on an equal set of skills, the person with the least label-oriented education. It means that the person had to succeed in spite of the credentialization of his competitors and overcome more serious hurdles. In addition, people who didn’t go to Harvard are easier to deal with in real life.” (p. 165)
“When people get rich, they shed their skin-in-the-game-driven experiential mechanism. They lose control of their preferences, substituting constructed preferences for their own, complicating their lives unnecessarily, triggering their own misery. And these constructed preferences are of course the preferences of those who want to sell them something.” (p. 167)
“It is easy to scam people by getting them into complications—the poor are spared that type of scamming. This is the same complication we saw in Chapter 9 that makes academics sell the most possibly complicated solution when a simple one can do. Further, the rich start using “experts” and “consultants.” An entire industry meant to swindle you will swindle you: financial consultants, diet advisors, exercise experts, lifestyle engineers, sleeping councilors, breathing specialists, etc. Hamburgers, to many of us, are vastly tastier than filet mignon because of the higher fat content, but people have been convinced that the latter is better because it is more expensive to produce.” (p. 168)
“Same with real estate: most people, I am convinced, are happier in close quarters, in a real barrio-style neighborhood, where they can feel human warmth and company. But when they have big bucks they end up pressured to move into outsized, impersonal, and silent mansions, far away from neighbors.” (p. 169)
“Very few people understand their own choices, and end up being manipulated by those who want to sell them something. In that sense, impoverishment might even be desirable.” (p. 169)
“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.” (p. 170)
“So long as society is getting richer, someone will try to sell you something until the point of degradation of your well-being, and a bit beyond that.” (p. 171)
“We used to live in small communities; our reputations were directly determined by what we did—we were watched. Today, anonymity brings out the a**hole in people. So I accidentally discovered a way to change the behavior of unethical and abusive persons without verbal threat . Take their pictures. Just the act of taking their pictures is similar to holding their lives in your hands and controlling their future behavior thanks to your silence. They don’t know what you can do with it, and will live in a state of uncertainty.” (p. 176)
“Models are error-prone, something I knew well with finance; most risks only appear in analyses after harm is done.” (p. 178)
“In fact, the more uncertainty about the models, the more conservative one should be.” (p. 178)
“So clearly there is an agency problem. There is no difference between a journalist at The Guardian and the restaurant owner in Milan, who, when you ask for a taxi, calls his cousin who does a tour of the city to inflate the meter before showing up. Or the doctor who willfully misdiagnoses you to sell you a drug in which he has a vested interest.” (p. 179)
“My social grandmother would have her “rounds” of visits of condolences some days in Beirut’s then-significant Greek Orthodox community, and knew practically everything down to the most insignificant details. If the child of someone prominent flunked an exam, she knew it. Practically every affair in town was detected. Unreliable people carried less weight than reliable ones. You can’t fool people more than twice. *” (p. 179)
“restaurant owners worry about the opinion of their customers, not those of other restaurant owners, which keeps them in check and prevents the business from straying collectively away from its interests.” (p. 180)
“The great Karl Popper often started a discussion with an unerring representation of his opponent’s positions, often exhaustive, as if he were marketing them as his own ideas, before proceeding to systematically dismantle them.” (p. 182)
“It is much more immoral to claim virtue without fully living with its direct consequences.” (p. 184)
“If your private life conflicts with your intellectual opinion, it cancels your intellectual ideas, not your private life.” (p. 185)
“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.” (p. 185)
“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. TAKE RISK Finally, 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: 1) Never engage in virtue signaling; 2) Never engage in rent-seeking; 3) You must start a business. Put yourself on the line, start a business.” (p. 189)
“Reading a history book, without putting its events in perspective, offers a similar bias to reading an account of life in New York seen from an emergency room at Bellevue Hospital.” (p. 194)
“Two people can be using the same word, meaning different things, yet continue the conversation, which is fine for coffee, but not when making decisions,” (p. 199)
“Most Christians, when it comes to central medical, ethical, and decision-making situations (like myself, an Orthodox Christian) do not act any differently than atheists. Those who do (such as Christian scientists) are few. Most Christians have accepted the modern trappings of democracy, oligarchy, or military dictatorship, all these heathen political regimes, rather than seeking theocracies. Their decisions on central matters are indistinguishable from those of an atheist.” (p. 209)
“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)” (p. 210)
“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.” (p. 213)
“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.” (p. 214)
“Our knowledge of the world is fundamentally incomplete, so we need to avoid getting into unanticipated trouble. And even if our knowledge of the world were complete, it would still be computationally near-impossible to produce a precise, unbiased understanding of reality.” (p. 216)
“I have shown in Antifragile that making some types of errors is the most rational thing to do, when the errors are of little cost, as they lead to discoveries. For instance, most medical “discoveries” are accidental to something else. An error-free world would have no penicillin, no chemotherapy…almost no drugs, and most probably no humans.” (p. 217)
“Recall that skin in the game means that you do not pay attention to what people say, only to what they do, and to how much of their necks they are putting on the line. Let survival work its wonders.” (p. 217)
“And if you dream of making people use probability in order to make decisions, I have some news: more than ninety percent of psychologists dealing with decision making (which includes such regulators and researchers as Cass Sunstein and Richard Thaler) have no clue about probability, and try to disrupt our efficient organic paranoias.” (p. 217)
“How much you truly “believe” in something can be manifested only through what you are willing to risk for it.” (p. 219)
“Rationality” was forged during the post-enlightenment period, at a time when we thought that understanding the world was around the corner. It assumes absence of randomness, or a simplified random structure of our world. Also, of course, no interactions with the world.” (p. 219)
“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.” (p. 220)
“Rationality does not depend on explicit verbalistic explanatory factors; it is only what aids survival, what avoids ruin.” (p. 221)
“Not everything that happens happens for a reason, but everything that survives survives for a reason.” (p. 221)
“Anyone who has survived in the risk-taking business more than a few years has some version of our by now familiar principle that “in order to succeed, you must first survive.” My own has been: “never cross a river if it is on average four feet deep.” (p. 224)
“I believe that risk aversion does not exist: what we observe is, simply, a residual of ergodicity. People are, simply, trying to avoid financial suicide and take a certain attitude to tail risks.” (p. 228)
“Unless you are perfectly narcissistic and psychopathic—even then—your worst-case scenario is never limited to the loss of only your life.” (p. 228)
“Let us return to Warren Buffett. He did not make his billions by cost-benefit analysis; rather, he did so simply by establishing a high filter, then picking opportunities that pass such a threshold. “The difference between successful people and really successful people is that really successful people say no to almost everything,” he said.” (p. 231)
“Never compare a multiplicative, systemic, and fat-tailed risk to a non-multiplicative, idiosyncratic, and thin-tailed one.” (p. 232)
“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.” (p. 233)