Author: Nassim Nicholas Taleb is a Lebanese American philosopher, essayist, scholar, statistician and former derivatives trader, whose work mainly concerns problems of randomness, probability, and uncertainty.
Book: Skin in the Game is the fifth and last book of the Incerto Series, an investigation of opacity, luck, uncertainty, probability, human error, risk, and decision making when we don´t understand the world, expressed in the form of a personal essay with autobiographical sections, stories, parables, and philosophical, historical, and scientific discussions. This last volume is focused on the assessment of asymmetries in human interactions, aimed at helping us understand where and how gaps in uncertainty, risk, knowledge, and fairness emerge, and how to close them. The book is divided into 8 sections with 19 chapters covering several overlapping concepts that range from asymmetries of information in market transitions, to rationality, religion and belief.
Opinion: When I read this book 4 years ago I thought it was good. After re-reading it some weeks ago I think it is excellent. As it happens with the rest of the Incerto series, Taleb´s books get better the second time. Also, as it happens with the rest of the books of the incerto series, I think that they should be read slowly without the aim of learning anything in concrete. Apart from the ideas of the book, which are brilliant (see in the comment section some of them), I love the writing style of Taleb - full of ironies, jokes, and semi-insults. However, I am aware that some people will be offended by this or won´t like it (e.g., TEDx viewers or Soviet-Harvard MBAs). Besides I think that the book and the Taleb receive too much hate, mainly from people that like any of his "public enemies'' (e.g., Krugman, Pinker, Bitcoiners, Anti-Vaxxers...), as well as from people who can't afford to read about more than one topic at a time (sometimes they claim that the book does not follow a logical order, or that the ideas were already known).
Some ideas from the book:
1. It is hard to disentangle ethics from knowledge and competence in the real world
2. If you hold an opinion and someone follows it, you are morally obligated to be exposed to its (negative) consequences
3. One debases a principle by endlessly justifying it
4. Bureaucracy is a construction by which a person is separated from the consequences of his actions
5. Until the recent "intellectualization" of life, skin in the game style symmetry has been considered a way for an organized society
6. An entire field (social sciences) has become charlatanistic because of absence of skin in the game
7. Intellectualism is the belief that one can separate the actions from the results, theory from practice, and that one can fix a complex system, with a top-down hierarchical approach
8. Gharar: Both parties in a transaction must have some kind of uncertainty regarding the outcome
9. Is it possible to be ethical and universalist? In theory yes but not in practice
10. The formation of moral values in society does not come from the evolution of the consensus. It is the most intolerant person that imposes virtue on others
11. You cannot understand the mind by understanding neurons, you cannot understand society by understanding humans, you cannot understand anthills by understanding ants. Interactions are not linear.
12. Cato´s injunction: He preferred to be asked why he didn't have any statue, rather than be asked why he had one
13. Class envy does not start with a truck driver in Alabama, but with an IVY League intellectual yet idiot (IYI) who envies "less smart" people that earn more money
14. True intellect should not appear like true intellect
15. Religious beliefs are heuristics designed to solve complex problems
16. You can define a free person as someone whose fate does not depend on peer assessment
17. Life is sacrifice and risk taking, nothing that doesn't entail some of that can be called a life
18. The ethics of disagreement: Criticize people for what they mean, not for what they say
19. If your private life conflicts with your intellectual opinion, it cancels your intellectual ideas, not your private life
20. Virtue lies in being nice to those who are neglected by others, the less obvious cases, those people that the grand charity tends to miss
21. How to help the world? (i) Never engage in virtue signaling, (ii) Never engage in rent seeking, (iii) Create a business
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