Takeaways from Nassim Taleb's New Book “Skin in the Game” | Hacker News Reader

Takeaways from Nassim Taleb's New Book “Skin in the Game”

nuggetsofthought.com

107 pointseric_cartman74 comments

I enjoyed the Guardian's (satirical) digest so much:

https://amp.theguardian.com/books/2018/feb/25/skin-in-the-ga...

Thanks, I enjoyed it too. Why is "black swan" so popular here on HN though?

could be several reasons. It was a good book, timely. For HN-relevance specifically, maybe http://www.paulgraham.com/swan.html

I would say because software engineers often work in mission critical systems where risk is a factor, and his job as a guy finding flaws in risk models on wall street, gave him insight on that topic.

Like maybe some kinds of bugs are like tail end risk.

> 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.

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.

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

While I did enjoy Fooled by Randomness, it was a needlessly hard to read

The reviews Antifragile and Balck Swan makes me think, they will hard the same problem

While Nassim Taleb is definitely smart and brings up nice idea, those ideas are better presented in shorter articles

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

Mostly his blanket dismissal that anyone who is not from his particular background could have anything meaningful to say about risk/statistics/trading. All academics are ivory tower intellectuals, all politicians are corrupt flunkies, everyone else not ruthlessly optimizing for optionality and/or skin in the game is stupid or incompetent or both.

What really ruined Antifragility for me was his apparent inability to make his point without insulting the intelligence of some central banker and/or professor literally every other paragraph.

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

I think Antifragile is quite useful and a good concept to keep in mind for many things. In fact, it is perhaps more broadly applicable than the Black Swan.

I think Taleb is from Hammurabi's general neighborhood, by birth. I wonder if he already knew some dialect of Assyrian/Babylonian/Aramaic already. They're still used, mostly liturgically.

I think he has a strong Lebanese background.

I laughed at the Pinker bit. Taleb does seem to have a bit of an obsession there.

I like how many ads are in this article

I read it and considered cheap comedy. A sign of "cheap comedy" as I use it is when you have to agree with author's point of view about something to enjoy it.

That’s an excellent way to put it. Whatever the failings of Skin in the Game, I can’t learn about them if the author just parodies it constantly.

I’d say it’s a dialectic failure, but I doubt the authors of these kinds of pieces intend for them to be instructive instead of - as you put it - cheap comedy.

"But flippancy is the best of all. In the first place it is very economical. Only a clever human can make a real Joke about virtue, or indeed about anything else; any of them can be trained to talk as if virtue were funny.

Among flippant people the joke is always assumed to have been made. No one actually makes it; but every serious subject is discussed in a manner which implies that they have already found a ridiculous side to it."

- Screwtape

not sure if i read this comment correctly. I agree with taleb, yet found this piece hilarious. It’s mostly aiming at his character, which is undoubtedly a good target for mockery.

the only time I stopped laughing was when the author mis-characterized the idea of skin in the game (it is NOT having “vested interest in an outcome”. it’s pretty much the exact opposite).

Well that was a waste of 30 seconds of my life. Neither funny nor insightful.

> Time was when leaders would actually lead their countries into battle. Caesar, Hannibal. They were men putting their bodies on the line. Even Hitler. Say, what you like about Adolf – and the man did have his faults – but at least he was prepared to top himself when everything went tits up. That’s having skin in the game. George W Bush and Tony Blair had no skin in the game when they went to war against Iraq and have completely messed up the entire world as a result. If they’d had to fight or send one of their kids to the front line, maybe they would have acted differently.

I have not read Taleb's latest book, I am silly enough to have found some interesting bits in Antifragile so I am certainly missing something. Ignoring the sarcasm, how is this idea ridiculous?

I am certainly worried of today leaders wielding more power than ever without having any concrete idea of the outcome of an actual war. And it will only get worse.

The joke is the implication that the Iraq War was a bigger disaster than WW2 and the Holocaust.

His Jordan Peterson is also pretty solid: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/jan/28/12-rules-for-l...

It might be a digest, but did they really have the stomach for it?

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.

(In hindsight) I have had the good fortune of being banned by Taleb in his twitter account. A friend that laid low sometimes forwards me screenshots of his rantings and ravings and... I’m regularly amazed.

I have gotten at least one good thing out of occasionally looking over his twitter and that was his retweets of @cuttheknotmath, who posts fun math questions daily.

Everything else had me scratching my head wondering why he is usually so highly regarded on here. I am enjoying the Black Swan right now, it's the first book I've read of his, but he really goes off the deep end on twitter.

And through his writings (either Fooled by Randomness or The Black Swan) I discovered Paul Wilmott and his very lucid writings on quantitative finance.

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.

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.

I think you're misunderstanding skin in the game. It's about putting one's skin into the game of interventionist decisions which could have a real impact if incorrect. If I say "Pepperoni pizza is the best and everyone should know it," SITG doesn't apply.

It's the Kanye West Syndrome

Whenever Kanye puts out an album it's one of the best rap albums of the year...he may be arrogant but he backs it up with genuine talent and arguably musical genius.

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.

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).

Nope, don't think I am.

That's also style. SW self-aggrandizes and arrogates credit while he talks about CAs and complexity; NNT bloviates and inflames while discussing statistics.

Your comment says that you don't like his work because he's an Islamophobic, misogynistic, dictatorphile: you loathe certain elements of his style - aspects of the form that his function is wrapped in, so to speak - to the point where you no longer appreciate his ideas. Those ideas haven't changed: they're still about skin in the game, resilience, randomness... All the stuff you liked in Fooled by Randomness.

All of which is fine! I'm not trying to change your mind at all.

Islamophobia and misogyny are stylistic criticisms?

I only know him from Medium and Twitter, haven‘t noticed misoginy so far. Got an example?

How did you manage to take someone's dislike of value, like Islamaphobia or liking dictators, and decide that meant there was only an issue with the authors style? Style is how you present your views, not the views themselves

Because those are personal attributes of the author, not aspects of the work itself. The book isn't a collection of his tweets. What does his admiration for dictators have to do with his explanation of the Lindy Effect?

I realize today we are obliged to write off every aspect of a person's work due to their personal failings, related or otherwise. Personally I don't think that is a good or healthy thing to do; nobody is perfect and we risk throwing out an awful lot of babies in our desire to bathe only in clean water.

Ah I hadnt realized, thought OP meant it was in the book. I agree with your assessment then

It is in the book. See the satirical take by the Guardian posted elsewhere in this thread: Anyway, want to know why Islam is taking over the world? It’s because Muslims have more skin in the game. They are prepared to shout loudest and bully people into becoming Muslim. Christians take note.

Does anyone have a quote directly from the book? I agree with the point that a broken clock can be right twice a day, so someone with opinions I find reprehensible about subject a might have rational arguments concerning opinion b.

However since we are talking about concrete examples instead of theoreticals, I'd need to see some quotes to come to a conclusion at this point with multiple people telling me opposing statements as fact

If it helps, I posted a link to a draft of that chapter above. A big chunk of the text of SitG is on that site. It isn't a long read, and we all know what you can do with a single quote taken out of context, so I'd suggest going there.

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.

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.

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

> he makes the critical distinction between the danger of Salafism/Wahhabism and the benign nature of Shiite Islam.

Pretending that the dangers within Islam are isolated to particular Sunni sects and that there's none of that dangerous religiously grounded violent extremism on the Shi’a side of the divide is, to be sure, a different error than typical “The West is dying” islamophobia, but no less of one.

What is the punishment for homosexuality within Shia Islam? What about apostasy? Caling it benign is what I'd call vending BS.

It really is interesting how 95% of attacks are ad hominem without any substantial counter arguments. He has some strange ideas sometimes, but the central ideas are pretty solid imho.

Suddenly Silicon Valley progressives hate Taleb as they realize he doesn’t share their views. It’s almost comical.

Yeah, obviously Silicon Valley doesn’t deadlift......dot

Taleb is in my "Stephen Wolfram" list too. I'm curious, who else is in yours?

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

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

Taleb sure knows his audience.

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

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.

I think this is a really interesting point. I used to be all over self-help books because I wanted to improve myself, but it seems to me as though so many authors just regurgitate the same points over and over again with tired anecdotes mixed in.

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

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.

Whenever someone wants to sell you their path to success, you need to ask why.

It's shocking that a short listicle on a site named "Nuggets of Thought" would have such a quality to it.

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.

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.

>> 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.

>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.

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)

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.)

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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