Skin In The Game:  Hidden Asymmetries In Daily Life, by Nassim Nicholas Taleb

I read this book (and this author in general) because this book had been recommended to me on Goodreads.  This sort of book recommendation tells me something about someone, namely that they appreciate very close arguments that depend on rigorous reasoning and that they are not offended by the author’s swaggering attitude and casual crudity.  The book was an enjoyable read, written with flair and an obvious sense of confidence by someone who has a valuable and often neglected point to convey as part of a series of books that have dealt with interrelated concerns about the problems of contemporary life.  The author appears like someone it would be fun to have a dinner conversation with at some cheap but tasty restaurant or cantina, but I’d steer clear of buying a used car from him because of the attention he pays to suckers.  I could see how this author could rub many people the wrong way, quite often deliberately, but as a reader I’m the sort of person who does not mind prickly truth tellers who have genuine insight to present, in whatever rough a manner, and if you are like this then this is a book you will appreciate as well.

This book is made up of what the author considers eight smaller books that total up to around 250 pages (including a technical appendix) at nineteen chapters or so.  The author begins with an introduction that looks at some less obvious aspects of having skin in the game before giving a prologue that looks at Libya (part one) as well as a tour of symmetry regarding ethics, modernism, and having soul in the game, as well as a tour of the author’s own Incerto, of which this is the fifth volume (and the second I have read).  The first book containing one chapter, looks at the question of agency and the need for parties in a transaction to have equality in uncertainty.  After that comes a book/chapter on the victories of stubborn minorities.  What follows are two chapters that examine the aspect of being wolves among dogs by looking at slavery (including employment) as well as having the skin of others in one’s own game, including disincentivizing terrorism.  Four chapters follow on the necessity of risk taking to being alive, including comments on Jesus, Donald Trump, and Pascal’s wager, intellectual idiots, inequality, and Lindy tests.  The next six chapters look deeper into the subject of agency by looking at surgeons who go against type, the preference of others, the importance of deeds before words, the issue of true facts and fake news, virtue signalling, and peacemaking.  Three chapters examine the aspects of skin in the game when it comes to religion and belief, looking at the difference in behavior between athiests and believers (not much) and the requirement of sacrifice in genuine religion before the author concludes with a discussion of risk and rationality in two chapters.

There are quite a lot of useful insights that one can gain from this book.  For one, the author notes that it is clueless intervening outsiders that often enable dysfunctional situations like the Israeli-Palestinian problem to go on.  If it were not for these outside actors, it is quite likely that some kind of modus vivendi would be reached before too long, as it has been in the case of most other frozen conflicts around the world where a situation has not been completely resolved but where no one is going to fight over it continually (see, for example, North and South Korea, Cyprus and Northern Cyprus, Somalia and Somaliland, China and Taiwan, and so on).  The author also notes that many rich people signal that they are suckers by the way that they behave, seeking expensive food items over cheap but good eats (like basic pizzas and Mediterranean food and the like).  The author comments about the problems of virtue signalling even in the ancient world (it appears in the Bible) as well as some wise wisdom from Fat Tony.  By and large this is a book that goes down easy because its technical calculations and close reasoning come with a heavy dose of good sense and witty humor.