‘Skin in the Game’ ~ Have you read Nassim Nicholas Taleb?

in #philosophy4 years ago

Good day Hive community.

I’m going to experiment with shorter posts and musings of whatever is on my mind and see if that will liberate me from the desire to produce a vast philosophical rants which strain the amount of attention folks are willing to bring to bear. ;)

At long last, I cracked into my first book by Nassim Nicholas Taleb. I’m reading ’Skin in the Game’ first, simply because someone loaned me a copy. I’m already itching to read ‘Antifragile’, though perhaps after this I should read his entire five volume ‘Incerto’ series beginning at the beginning with ‘Fooled by Randomness’.

Regardless, I’m only 17 pages into ‘Skin in the Game’, and I’m already slapping my forehead. Every paragraph is like a mic drop on a civilization gone terribly wrong.

“...risk transfer blows up systems.”

“Skin-in-the-game-style symmetry, until the recent intellectualization of life, has been implicitly considered the principle rule for organized society, even for any form of collective life in which one encounters or deals with others more than once. The rule had to even precede human settlement since it prevails in a sophisticated, very sophisticated, form in the animal kingdom. Or, to rephrase, it had to prevail there or life would have been extinct—risk transfer blows up systems. And the very idea of law, divine or otherwise, resides in fixing imbalances and remedying such asymmetries.” —N.N.Taleb - excerpt from ‘Skin In The Game’

Risk transfer does blow up systems... how can we remain so blind?

Why are the Taleb’s of the world not in charge?

I’ve been meaning to read this man’s work for entirely way too long, and 17 pages in I’m already wishing it was mandatory reading. 

Are you a fan of Taleb? Thoughts?

Peace, and @lovejoy