He would use theories to make a case for employment contracts. He would talk about repetitional and other types of SITG - but, only where it suits his preformed specific conclusions. Rationality, according to the author, is not in beliefs or words but in revealed preferences and actions. Rational, it seems, is anything that helps you survive over a period despite the tail risks that exist for existence.
By this logic, combined with the Lindy, slavery and misogyny need undergo no modification. The author does not attempt to apply this principle too rigidly for sciences, but he occasionally flirts there too in dismissing whatever technological or scientific achievements he disapproves under scientism. The author never realises how his definition of rationality - even if right - would only cause my granny versus your granny type of arguments best case without any progress towards universal truths or technological advancement.
So, perhaps the only option as per the author is for her to put the body at risk? Many may far likely have problems with the kind the author likes that benefit from few lucky calls initially through disproportionate gains by simply placing right bets with little efforts before they get anything wrong. One begins to pity the author - supposedly smart - who cannot notice even the most obvious of errors. By this definition, who is the author to pass value-judgment on the boringness of academic reports?
This is such a hogwash that anyone who breathes knows this from time immemorial- the chances of one breathing the next breath is very high but eventually all die! In academic theories too, joint probability is as old as the probability science. Take another example: he indirectly bashes Mr Pinkel, perhaps his top pet hate, for not recognising that violence is down because the vigilance is up. The author shouts that the violence going down is perhaps the reason to step up the vigilance, rather than what the others seem to claim as per the author.
Surprisingly, this is exactly the point Mr. Pinkel makes. Such contradictions are supplemented by contortions to prove that only the way he does things is right: for example, the right level of transparency is what the author employs in his investment methods and not more or less. The right amount of armchair criticising is what he does, like in this book.
Same about the skin in the game - where his risk-taking is great but not of many others who take far higher risks that he will not understand. The author does make many good points in between. There is an admirable section on scale-dependent political ideology - why he is a libertarian at the federal level, a republican at the state level, at a municipal level a democrat and a socialist with friends and family. The discussion on dynamic inequality through the concept of ergodicity, was exceptionally good if one removed the vitriol towards others and too perfunctory a dismissal of inequality conclusions without sufficient proof.
The author shines when talking about Lindy effect, although this topic was better covered in the previous book on anti-fragility. Those who survive have a stronger chance of surviving longer is a good concept. Given the simple and singular nature of the main theme , the book has many unrelated diversions through contradictions, contortions, critiquing where the author makes more interesting points: apart from the one on politics above, there is a good section on how a minority stringent choice impact could have on overall impact on the broad population choice.
Another unrelated topic is the differential spread of different religions due to differences in laws a non-Muslim marrying a Muslim has to convert while in cases under Judaism or Zoroastrianism, the follower might be ostracised. Overall, the author could have used his fame and popularity better to make more constructive points, even if obvious, rather than waste so much energy bashing some other highly relevant and important analysis.
View all 16 comments. Sep 18, David Rubenstein rated it it was amazing Shelves: economics , ethics , politics , philosophy , mathematics , nonfiction , psychology. From the back cover of the book jacket: The problem with Taleb is not that he's an asshole. He is an asshole. The problem with Taleb is that he is right. And this book, Skin in the Game is more quirky than either of his previous books--if that is at all possible.
This book is poorly written. It jumps around from From the back cover of the book jacket: The problem with Taleb is not that he's an asshole. It jumps around from one topic to another, almost stream of consciousness. I am sure that Taleb makes new enemies with each book he writes.
If, by the end of the book, you have not been offended by something he has written, then you haven't been paying attention. Taleb is blunt, sometimes obtuse, and often right. But it really irks me that his very strong opinions are not always backed up by reasoning. Like a mathematics professor, he will often "let the reader fill in the lines of his proof.
It is so easy for people to spout utter nonsense, so unless they could potentially suffer consequences of being wrong, you should ignore them. This goes especially for intellectuals in academia. However, "hard" science seem to be immune to this problem, because of the redeeming nature of falsification, while "scientism" -- the excessive belief in science is worthless. The broad sweep of his aphorisms are overwhelming.
Here are some examples that actually are given some logical reasoning: Genes follow majority rule. Languages follow minority rule. Islam is widespread because of its rules of conversion and parentage. We need entrepreneurs. Taleb goes into some detail about how psychologists totally misunderstand "loss aversion", due to the concept of ergodicity.
Taleb introduces so many quirky words and expressions, that he devotes a glossary in the back of the book to explain the terms. And, the end of the book is filled with a technical appendix with some very technical mathematical proofs about probability theory. With so many issues that I have with this book, why do I recommend it with five stars?
Because the book is so thought-provoking. It jabs me everywhere, and gets me to think about a lot of things, basic assumptions about life. Take a risk--read this book. View all 5 comments. Anyway, this book lost a bit of its charm due to aggressive and seemingly random things aggregated together. I'm sure it's another case of 'it's not you, it's me', still, I felt the previous volumes were better grounded and more founded in reality.
Anyway, the eruditic approach to even the most disjointed things: Assassins, politics, Knights Templar There is a lesson here: what we learn from professionals in the real world is that data is not necessarily rigor.
One reason I—as a probability professional—left data out of The Black Swan except for illustrative purposes is that it seems to me that people flood their stories with numbers and graphs in the absence of solid or logical arguments. Further, people mistake empiricism for a flood of data. Just a little bit of significant data is needed when one is right, particularly when it is disconfirmatory empiricism, or counterexamples: only one data point a single extreme deviation is sufficient to show that Black Swans exist.
Traders, when they make profits, have short communications; when they lose they drown you in details, theories, and charts. Probability, statistics, and data science are principally logic fed by observations—and absence of observations. For many environments, the relevant data points are those in the extremes; these are rare by definition, and it suffices to focus on those few but big to get an idea of the story.
But for the general public and those untrained in statistics, such tables appear convincing—another way to substitute the true with the complicated. This allows us to answer the questions: Who is the real expert? Who decides who is and who is not an expert? Where is the meta-expert? Time is the expert. Morgan and recoup a multiple of the difference between his or her current salary and the market rate. Regulators, you may recall, have an incentive to make rules as complex as possible so their expertise can later be hired at a higher price.
So there is an implicit bribe in civil service: you act as a servant to an industry, say, Monsanto, and they take care of you later on. They do not do it out of a sense of honor: simply, it is necessary to keep the system going and encourage the next guy to play by these rules. He helped bankers get bailouts, let them pay themselves from the largest bonus pool in history after the crisis, in that is, using taxpayer money , and then got a multimillion-dollar job at a financial institution as his reward for good behavior.
A quarter is enough to have somewhere to go, particularly when it rains in New York, without being emotionally socialized and losing intellectual independence for fear of missing a party or having to eat alone. So let us take a look at social science. If you say something crazy you will be deemed crazy. Sacrifice is necessary. It may seem absurd to brainwashed contemporaries, but Antifragile documents the outsized historical contributions of the nonprofessional, or, rather, the non-meretricious.
For their research to be genuine, they should first have a real-world day job, or at least spend ten years as: lens maker, patent clerk, Mafia operator, professional gambler, postman, prison guard, medical doctor, limo driver, militia member, social security agent, trial lawyer, farmer, restaurant chef, high-volume waiter, firefighter my favorite , lighthouse keeper, etc.
It is a filtering, nonsense-expurgating mechanism. I have no sympathy for moaning professional researchers. I for my part spent twenty-three years in a full-time, highly demanding, extremely stressful profession while studying, researching, and writing my first three books at night; it lowered in fact, eliminated my tolerance for career-building research.
View all 8 comments. Apr 23, Satyajeet rated it it was ok Shelves: on-a-break. Cherry-picking meets ignorance of human nature meets naive interpretation of history meets erroneous assumptions.
If you cherry-pick the data, you can make ANY ridiculous hypothesis sound convincing. My problem is with the ideas in this book, not its author, although I do question the intelligence of its author when his prose lapses into Cherry-picking meets ignorance of human nature meets naive interpretation of history meets erroneous assumptions.
My problem is with the ideas in this book, not its author, although I do question the intelligence of its author when his prose lapses into pseudoscientific drivel. Taleb all but begs the reader to take note of his SITG chivalry. Yes, good Sir Knight, your chivalry is noted. Now, there are not two but four combinations of idea-consequence scenarios that can be neatly represented as below. The premise: You present an idea to the world, which is then implemented. In all four scenarios listed below, other people are respectively affected as a result of the implementation, but the ramifications for you are different in each.
An investment advisor who is investing your money with his ideas should have a significant personal stake in the same fund. If the idea fails, he almost drowns in bankruptcy and nobody will ever take his investment advice seriously again. Over time, many similar events will eliminate other bad ideas and the people who parented those ideas. As a result, the system overall is better off, and it is precisely SITG that allowed these self-corrections to happen.
In a non-SITG environment, such people can persist. Sounds great, and symmetries are indeed well suited to some situations. But the problem is that this solution is not at all generalizable and is very restricted in its applicability. He will lie, cheat, deceive, exaggerate, lobby, wield power, or do a million other wicked things just to save his skin. Here are some ways in which SITG, by incapacitating the ability of the skin-owners to tell the difference between good and evil, can harm the system: 1.
He was allowed to have SITG because of bureaucratic loopholes; normally, this is rightly prohibited. However, someone who has the official power but who has nothing to gain or lose as in the case of pure neutrals , either in the present or in the future, is more likely to do good to others rather than serve himself like Icahn did. Financial SITG is the reason why tobacco companies, despite their own research showing that smoking tobacco is strongly correlated with lung cancer, suppressed those findings, lied to the public for decades that there is no evidence, let millions die of preventable cancer, got caught lying, and were sued for billions—all in a misguided attempt to save their invested skin.
And unsurprisingly, owing to SITG, something very similar is happening with oil companies now. All these companies lose a lot of money should things not go in their favor, and make a lot of money otherwise, so they are never honest about their data or their true intentions—a typical trait of those with SITG. Taleb himself stood to make a lot more money in had all the Big Banks been allowed to fail; he had placed bets that they would fail. Only the truly gullible can fail to see why he fruitlessly demanded that the Fed let those banks fail.
NOT having any SITG game lets you think objectively about a situation in a way that having your skin at stake hardly can. The slave-holding states of the American antebellum South wanted to secede from the Union primarily, though not solely I am not nuance-averse , because of the issue of slavery. Slavery was crucial to the cotton business, and the slave-holding states of the South would have taken a huge economic hit if slavery were abolished.
Small wonder, then, that the South wanted to keep slavery alive by seceding from the Union, thus initiating the Civil War. There was nothing inherently evil or stupid about the Southerners; they were driven by an inability to tell the difference between good and evil because their own interests were involved.
Slavery did not resolve itself at the hands of those with skin in the cotton game. It was Lincoln and his cohorts, not slaveholders or Southerners, who ratified the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution, the one abolishing slavery. This idea is mathematically beautiful but ultimately stands on the quick soil. In essence, it states that the projected lifespan of non-perishable cultural entities is in direct correlation with its current age. If a book has survived for years in print, it will likely survive another At its foundation, both ideas require people—lots of common, hardworking people—who make collective decisions about accepting or rejecting an idea through small decisions that accrue.
In the Wisdom, the decisions accrue across space; in Lindy, across time. But in both, it is the hoi polloi—and not the academics, the bureaucrats, or some other group of chosen experts—who truly put the ideas to the test. The difference between these propositions is night and day. The difference matters. A lot. In that book, he is careful to distinguish between survival through chance and survival through competence. A stockbroker can have a long career making successful bets, despite being clueless about stocks.
The laws of stochastic probability make room for such anomalies. However, a dentist or a doctor can have a long career if and only if they are competent, and no law of probability will rescue them otherwise. Or so I thought I learned this many unfortunate years later: The case he makes for non-stochastic professions turns out not to be true at all and illuminates a rot in the assumptions that Lindy stands on. The noise caused by the placebo effect can sometimes deafen people to the fraudulence of most alternative medicines which generally treat non-life-threatening conditions.
If any alternative medicine fraud claims to have a cure for cancer, the claim can be put to the test as easily by the public as by scientists. People should, given a decade or more of hearsay, arrive at a verdict about the efficacy of the treatment—if Taleb is to be believed. Every week, an exodus of benighted, gullible, illiterate, and even semi-literate people from all across the country arrive at his doorstep and stand in miles-long queue for hours to get a second appointment with him.
Even his online ratings are consistently high. Vox populi? Vox humbug! Many more such examples abound. Aphorisms survive because of their rhetorical effect, not necessarily because they are agents of truth. Only by woefully cherry-picking them can you present them in a positive light.
Superstitions survive for thousands of years, and horrible myths that are demonstrably untrue are inherited through generations of descendants, completely unfiltered by Lindy. Conversely, many great books of science and math from the antiquity, including five books by Euclid, have been irretrievably lost, unprotected by Lindy. Lindy tolerated it for years; bureaucrats and reformers ended it in just Page after page of this book is filled with vignettes from classical literature, to give it the feel of Lindyness.
It never ceases to amuse me how Taleb combs through historical mythologies to find stories that vaguely metaphorically resemble an agenda he has already made up his mind about. Even the typeface of this book is given a historical context for, geez! Taleb likes to chastise psychologists, but psychologists have also committed the same error that Taleb is committing in abundance here: Drawing a little too much inspiration from ancient vignettes. Freud was inspired by the vignette of Oedipus when he came up with his ridiculous hypothesis of Oedipus complex.
Jung produced an equally ridiculous variant called the Electra complex after the Greek mythological character. Another perverse complex, also inspired by classical Greek stories, goes by Jocasta complex. Cancer genes can survive in a species for millions of years. However, none of this is to say that Lindy is totally useless.
In the philosophy of science, consilience is a method of converging on the truth through multiple, independent sources of evidence that are themselves imperfect and prone to errors. We know that the theory of evolution is true not just because fossils hint at it, but because seven independent sources of evidence converge at the same conclusion.
A theory which is supported only by one form of evidence is a lot weaker than a theory that is vindicated by multiple sources that do not depend on each other. In the event of a disagreement between sources—which is bound to happen given that each source is imperfect—all it means is that further investigation is needed, not that one source is necessarily better than the other, or that the other source must be discarded altogether. In consilience, Lindy can act as ONE of these independent sources, rather than replacing other sources.
Alx fr totally lynched it. If intellectuals can be idiots, Taleb is its most shining example. He is better suited for trolling on Twitter and peddling conspiracy theories about GMOs than for sermonizing on how societies should function. View all 10 comments. Aug 16, Daniel Clausen rated it it was amazing Shelves: books-of , books-of , books-of Update July 22, Read the book a 4th time. When I got annoyed with vulgarity or repetition, I skipped a bit. I usually never had to skip more than a paragraph or two.
The book read much more smoothly. I also read this book a page or two at a time at the beach or on a bus. It's a great book to read for a third time this way. Update September 4, I changed my mind.
I decided to rate this book after all. Any book that has passages that are better on the third reading deserves five stars. On my third reading, there were parts of the book I skipped, but most of the book was still remarkable, and I would argue even better on the third reading. Ergo, 5 stars are necessary. And anything less would be dishonest. I will leave the original review as it was written around this time last year, but keep in mind that all my remarks about the book being unrateable have now been overturned.
I can't rate this book. This seems an absurd thing to say, but it's hard to rate a book that often comes off as a pre-pubescent twitter rant. I think the problem is that Taleb's classical and anti-modern sense of honor screeches against my modern ears.
Also, his classical sense of honor often devolves into the aesthetics of blue-collar water cooler bullshit sessions I've been around too many of these , twitter rants, and toxic masculinity. Forghetabout it? It's really hard to once the words are out there. I still believe twitter was a technology that was supposed to be for teens and that in brings out the worst in people.
The actual philosophy of this book is wonderful and deserves at least two readings. I own the paperback in question, so I can just cross out flagrant vulgarity with a black pen. There isn't that much of it just enough to make the book unrateable.
If you've read Antifragile and Black Swan, much of what is written in this book but not all will seem redundant. I think once you've figured out the core of Taleb's philosophy you can start applying it to your own problems with ease. It does help, however, to go back and see how he applies it. I consider Fooled by Randomness to be less essential than Antifragile and Black Swan, but an interesting case study to understand how philosophies evolve. Since apparently, I'm not a real man unless I deadlift, and deadlifting is more important than book lifting at a library, and since I haven't deadlifted since high school football, I guess I should get back to deadlifting.
Sadly, pounds was my max in high school and all I've been doing since then is trying to improve myself with book learning. That, or I can embrace a very hidden asymmetrical truth about modernity. Modernity has unlocked the once hidden power of women -- women thinkers, women writers some who deadlift, many who don't -- thus, roughly doubling the amount of ingenuity and talent at least in places that are modern.
An interesting question, one I think deserves some thought: How do intelligent, working women -- and to be fair entrepreneurs -- read Taleb? I think I'll explore the Goodreads comment sections and find out. View all 12 comments. Feb 21, Magnus Ahmad rated it did not like it. Pop-science in it's lowest form. Book reads like a poorly researched, hastily written college essay. Strings together a few nuggets of common sense wisdom with sizeable amounts of unreferenced BS.
Taleb is a shark, living off a reputation and using his own fanbase like an ATM. View all 7 comments. Mar 04, Ivan rated it it was ok. In this book 4, Taleb is more arrogant and pretentious than ever. You can never let go of the feeling that this book is about him, rather than any other topic. He's become profoundly obnoxious and negative. Despite some good points in the book, reading it feels like carrying a burden. In this new book Taleb goes to extra lengths to attack David Runciman, head of the politics department at Cambridge, and a Guardian book reviewer who had torn apart his previous "Antifragile" book.
Runciman's crit In this book 4, Taleb is more arrogant and pretentious than ever. Runciman's criticisms for book 3 are totally valid here in book 4 as well: that Taleb is profoundly antisocial, self-contradicting, and disorganized; that "Black Swan" and "Fooled by randomness" will remain classics, while "Antifragile" - and I'm sure "Skin in the game" as well - will be forgotten quickly because of their mediocrity. Nov 12, Gordon rated it liked it. That personality reminds the reader of a much, much smarter version of a certain orange-faced head of state given to frequent outbursts on Twitter.
I don't think Taleb is the tweeting sort but if he were his tweets would be Trumpian, but coherently so, with many more polysyllabic words, and probably without the Random Capitalization so characteristic of our Dear Leader. But I digress. The main idea of this book is that you shouldn't trust the opinions of people without skin in the game, who won't suffer painful consequences, financial or otherwise, if their opinions are wrong. An extension of this idea is that you shouldn't trust people who don't have first-hand, in-the-trenches experience in whatever their chosen profession may be, from cutting hair to running companies to leading armies.
However, Taleb leaves little doubt that the best profession of all is being a Wall St. The author's curiously narrow working experience, of little value to society or to the economy, consists of skimming some profit off the river of money coursing through the financial exchanges, while avoiding taking major losses from the markets' periodic wild gyrations.
At this, Taleb excelled, by his own account, which I have no reason to doubt. But he wasn't even an investor, let alone an entrepreneur, much as he glorifies the entrepreneur. He was a risk-taker, but of the short-term speculator variety. It's by no means a dishonorable profession, and certainly a challenging if lucrative one. But it does tend to shape a certain worldview, especially towards risk.
And what Taleb is all about is managing risk, and understanding it quantitatively. A key concept in his idea of risk is his notion of "ergodicity", a branch of probability theory I have not studied.
As Taleb uses the term, a system is ergodic if the probability of some outcome as a result of independent iterations is the same as the probability of that outcome from one individual running iterations. In the financial world, if you make enough speculative bets where one of the very low probability outcomes is financial disaster, you will eventually encounter financial disaster.
Lone rogue traders have been known to take down entire banks. So why is this idea interesting? As an individual, it tells you not to take repeated life-threatening and solvency-threatening risks if you can instead take smaller risks with expected positive outcomes -- and zero risk of ruin. Applying the idea to problems at the social level, such as GMOs and climate change, Taleb argues that these are the kind of risk scenarios where ruin is a real possibility, where the number of iterations of this risky bet is very high, and where we therefore should not take these risks in the first place.
I didn't need any convincing of this with respect to climate change, but Taleb has definitely given me reason to re-assess what I think of GMOs. I am still not sure what to make of the high risk of our planet outrunning its food supply as population grows inexorably towards its peak somewhere between billion VS. Taleb says the latter risk is too high because it could be terminal; he says nothing about the risk of the former.
A curious feature of the book is that Taleb, who worshipped behavioral economics in his previous book Fooled by Randomness, turns against it in this volume.
He does not explicitly attack the fathers of the field, Tversky and Kahneman who won the Nobel Prize in Economics for his work , but does go on the rampage against some of the other thinkers in the field, such as Cass Sunstein and Richard Thaler.
The gist of Taleb's argument is that individuals' irrational behaviors due to cognitive biases don't amount to sub-optimal system behavior because systems are not simply the sum of the individual components. He illustrates this with the example of the invisible hand of the market, where purely self-interested individual behaviors nonetheless result in a market that efficiently self-regulates through price signals.
I think this is major confusion on his part. Take retirement savings, a problem he mentions. American workers notoriously save too little and put too much of their savings in low interest money market accounts, due in part to certain cognitive biases such as weighting the pleasures of the present spending the money NOW disproportionately heavily relative to the the future having much more money to spend in retirement.
Meanwhile, the market does a very efficient job of pricing in myriad factors to determine the constantly-adjusted price of a typical ETF such as Vanguard's VT fund. Does this mean that the retirement savings behavior of individual American workers is going to add up to a rational, optimal retirement savings system somehow, just because the price of the fund these workers might invest in is efficiently determined?
Meanwhile, the behavioral economists of whom Taleb is so contemptuous have some very pragmatic ideas about how to nudge the behavior of workers today -- such as making voluntary enrollment in company K retirement plans the default rather than something the employee has to proactively select -- so that they will in fact make more rational retirement savings decisions that will serve them well in the future. While there is much that I think Taleb is wrong about -- behavioral economics, the importance of economic inequality, the level of social mobility across classes, the role of government beyond the small scale, the role of a free press, the appropriate number of Latin quotations to put in books about risk and uncertainty And he's right about one central thing: beware of advice from people with no skin in the game, who will suffer no great discomfort if the advice they give you proves disastrous.
I wanted to like this and I certainly did at the beginning. All of his insults are complex, original and amusing but he insults so many people so frequently that the process itself becomes tedious. I do enjoy his historical anecdotes, but again there are a large volume of them, and not always obviously with a point, other than a demonstration of his research or recall abilities. It is the fact that he criticises many individuals in passing with a specific but cryptic reference to something they I wanted to like this and I certainly did at the beginning.
It is the fact that he criticises many individuals in passing with a specific but cryptic reference to something they have said or written, but then offers no detail or explanation as to what they said or wrote or why they were wrong that annoys me the most. In the end, whilst interesting and amusing there was little of use to take from this book - and that is ignoring how pompous and arrogant he sounds all the time as well.
Mar 01, Jeffrey rated it it was amazing Shelves: non-fiction. Five stars only because six weren't available. View 1 comment. Mar 01, Gints Dreimanis rated it it was amazing. Hey, another one who doesn't give a fuck. NNT is a bit of a diva, and it is obvious that he has some beef with a lot of people. He certainly sounds right. But is he? I don't know. The book revolves around the notion that people not having skin in the game will fuck us up, somehow.
Turns out that the idea of skin in the game can be applied to a wide variety of fields and professions. Especially the ones Taleb doesn't like, like academics, policy makers, journalists.
Oh, and rationality as you kno Hey, another one who doesn't give a fuck. Oh, and rationality as you know it sucks because it is made by academics, and other interesting insights. NNT is like your funky weekend drug dealer, comes with something interesting that he stole from the big guns, then goes away mumbling hateful speech about the government. I love the guy, now sue me.
May 23, Leif Denti rated it it was ok. Taleb has lost it. This book is a good example of someone doing a "Lord Kelvin", that is, making strong claims about things that are not within your field of expertise. Taleb is a statistician, but of course that doesn't hinder him from having very strong opinions on other matters such as other researchers' fields, politics, banking, journalism, to mention just a few.
That's a shame because I loved his first two books. However since Antifragility, quality has been on a downward slop Taleb has lost it. However since Antifragility, quality has been on a downward slope. In this book, Taleb doesn't even bother to back up his claims. Take this claim: old people is right 90 percent of the time but a psychologist is right only 10 percent of the time.
Thats interesting for sure but where is the data? Why should I believe this? He also claims that - because of the Lindy effect - the only theory that is worthwhile is theory that has "survived" the test of time. Like what the ancients wrote about: honor, love, cognitive dissonance.
Of course he conveniently leaves out all the counter examples. Oppression, tyranny and dictatorship has survived the test of time. Are those things better ways of organizing a society than democracy? Machiavelli is a classic, and Aristotle maintained that society should be ruled by a thinking class of philosophers of course, who did you think?
Is that good theory? It's sloppy thinking and I'm disappointed. In fact, Taleb writes off whole professions with the stroke of his pen. The all-knowing, omnipotent thinker that he seem to think he is. Instead of actual corroboration of the many many, many claims, we get to read some ancient story about the Assyrians, or a very technical statistical term that seem to obscure Talebs claims instead of illuminating them.
It's funny actually with the terminology in this book. I read a lot of science books and I rarely come across a book that uses so many obscure terms and concepts.
For a guy who dislikes scientists and scientism , he sure likes to sound like one. In summary, the book is severely incoherent - ancient stories are mixed with Talebs observations about modern life, his dismissal of his thought up enemies, and disjointed anectodes from his life.
Somehow I get the feeling that the book is actually about Taleb himself. Be warned: this book is a ranty, largely unstructured, flow-of-consciousness type stuff. It has an equal probability or either delighting the reader or driving them mad.
I personally enjoy the erudite style of Taleb's argumentation and find his references and vignettes of the 'times gone by' intellectually stimulating.
Also, the black-and-white bluntness of his position makes the book feel refreshing. You may not agree with Taleb's side, but you are never left in doubt wh 3. You may not agree with Taleb's side, but you are never left in doubt which side that is. If you have never read Taleb before I urge you to start with the Black Swan.
This new book is an awful place to get to know the author. You need to warm up to him first And if you hated Antifragile. Well, grab something else to read : Skin in the Game is unlikely to be your thing either. View 2 comments. Mar 25, Ajay rated it it was amazing. Some really good insights in a very small book - 1.
Cost benefit analysis is not possible when there is a probability of Ruin. The west is in the process of committing ideological suicide on minority rule. Its easier to Macrobullshit than it is to Microbullshit. What matters is not what a person has, but w Some really good insights in a very small book - 1. What matters is not what a person has, but what he or she is afraid of losing. Don't tell me what you think, tell me whats in your portfolio. By the end I was so tired of hearing a man child complaining about literally everything in the world.
He complains about teachers, politicians, academics, doctors. Mar 20, Ill D rated it it was amazing. Taleb's the hero. Apr 16, Martin Brochhaus rated it did not like it Shelves: rubbish , philosophy , never-finished. There seems to be somewhat of a personal cult around him, so whatever, I'm going in unbiased.
Nothing in this book makes any sense. First of all, the chapters are called "Books" and the sub-chapters are called "Chapters".
These so called "Books" range from pages each, so maybe they should rather be called what they are: Loosely coupled essays. Secondly, the massively long and incredibly badly written introduction seems to serve four pointless purposes: 1. Advertise the author's other works 2. Wet your appetite with fancy promises as to what great insights you will gain from this book, for example "How is it that we have more slaves today than we did during Roman times" 3.
Lots and lots of virtue signalling, the author assures us that he has always lived the life of a saint, having lots of skin in the game. An entire sub-chapter telling us in advance, that this book cannot be judged by a reviewer unless he rereads it many times, because this book was specifically designed for rereading - so I guess you can stop reading my review here, because I didn't reread this book and I never will, because it is trash.
I was hoping that after the horrible prologue the author would show a little more discipline and try to produce something with less shock-value and insults and a little more coherence, but after I forced my way through "Book 2 - A First Look At Agency", it was clear that my hopes would not be met. The book continues to be a lose string of consciousness without any clear structure, without any data or sources backing up any claims, without any clear goal of what we are trying to establish here.
The chapter names, for example, are just colourful phrases and at the end of each chapter I had to go back to the chapter title, asking myself "what the fuck was this chapter supposed to be about? However, some limitations exist when owners and senior management executives are asked to invest their own money in a security. Many banks and other financial institutions bar employees from having any "skin" where client capital is managed. The restriction addresses the issue of front running , which is when an executive enters a trade—with inside or non-public information—just before an event or announcement to gain an economic advantage.
There are also restrictions on commingled funds , which is the pooling of resources or the mixing of both private funds and corporate resources into the company's stock or bonds. There are some instances when the executives must remain objective in their decision-making and are barred from investing in the company's they manage.
The Securities and Exchange Commission SEC requires that funds annually disclose how much money each portfolio manager has invested in the fund. Using this public information, proponents argue that finding fund managers who put their money where their mouths are can be a reliable way to identify fund managers who could be expected to beat the market over the long run.
Proponents of skin in the game argue that capital commitment is the single most important way to align the interests of investors and managers. The SEC also requires companies to report on insider ownership or trades of a company's securities. The reports are required because trades by executives, directors, and officers can impact the price of the company's stock. There are various types of forms that the executives must file with the SEC.
Investors can access and use these insider ownership reports to make a more informed decision as to whether to invest or not invest in the company. If investors want to see a CEO that has skin in the game with their company, there are few better examples than Elon Musk. Musk owned more than million shares of Tesla per his latest schedule 13G filing for Dec. Securities and Exchange Commission. Securities and Exchange and Commission. Sustainable Investing. Investing Essentials.
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Table of Contents Expand. What Is Skin in the Game? Understanding Skin in the Game. Limitations of Skin in the Game.
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