Skin in the Game:
a scorching view of personal ethics and policy from an engineering professor,
with mathematical theorems and proofs
The book Skin in the Game: Hidden Asymmetries in
Daily Life, by Nassim Nicholas Taleb (2018),
follows his earlier 'The Black Swan', which did not refer just to Darren Aronofksy's 2010 film or Tchaikovsky ballets. A 'black
swan' is an improbable catastrophic event that changes everything. The author
is a professor at New York University's school of engineering.
The book argues a theory of morality and virtue that
is not articulated often in policy circles, and is not
very 'popular'. But my three 'Do Ask Do
Tell' books get at something very similar (starting with how I handled military
conscription) and his Chapter 13, 'The Merchandising of Virtue' tracks pretty
well to what I said in Chapter 6 (the non-fiction 'epilogue') of my 2014 DADT
III book. Like me, he includes a glossary of his own terms (like 'agency',
'Lindy effect', 'Ergodicity', 'Principle of Charity'). But he follows with a series of mathematical
proofs about risk that every actuary should read right out of a graduate
school analysis course
Taleb's
basic idea is that, with modern neo-liberalism, people get individual credit
(and often make a lot of money) for activity that transfers risk to others,
especially the black-swan tail risk. Social justice, he argues, involves better
risk sharing and removing the opportunities for small interests to cause
enormous changes to the world through asymmetry. Of course, today we see that
with the Internet (most recently with all the scandals of 'surveillance
capitalism'). But there are so many examples from history (how probable was
Hitler's rise?) Early (p 45-46) he has a table that analyzes asymmetry (skin in
the game, soul in the game).
The book has nineteen short chapters divided into
sections with anecdotal titles. He starts each chapter with an intellectual
riddle, usually from deep in history, or with some parlor problem. The he
builds back into his themes. He will often wind up
stating 'inevitable epigrams'.' One of
his most visible is the 'Silver Rule', which is the contrapositive of the
Golden Rule - don't do to others what you don't want done to you. Does that mean, mind your own business?
His ideas are many.
One is 'minority rule', how societies usually wind up having to
accommodate the needs of minorities by imposing on all. Another is that religious
faith is based on belief (just as Christ demanded) and belief predicts what
kinds of risks people will really take. A startling sequence in the last
chapter defines courage and implies that the longevity of the group is more
important that saving the life of every individual, and sometimes people really
should give up their lives. Taleb hits the 'Black Swan' idea for society's long-term
survival hard, saying that sometimes 'religious superstition' does work out to
protect the group as a whole. (Food laws
in Judaism and Islam, however unscientific, tend to prevent food poisoning.
Imagine 'black swan' type of thinking early in the AIDS epidemic in the 1980s.)
But the most significant part of his argument is that
which deals with talk vs. action. On p 28 there appears this epigram, Those who
talk should do and only those who do should talk. In Chapter 13, on p 189, after discussing
simony, he argues for a system of personal ethics as follows (1) never commit
virtue signaling (2) never collect rents (3) You must start a business
(presumably transactional in nature). Oh, he tears Thomas Piketty's book
apart. He says that and 'intellectual
idiot' who can't change his own oil (so to speak) is an 'idiot' (remember that
line from 'Cold Mountain': 'I can embroider but I can't darn'). And he sees many journalists as watchers
rather than doers, as if he had never heard of conflict reporting (or of
journalists in jail).
Yet he has some support for writers and authors whom
he views as proletariat artisans. He
gets critical of doing superficial stuff just to sell books (self-help?). Yet, I would think you could turn his 'skin
in the game' theory to criticize my own model for writing without trying to
sell.
Presumably, I would think, if you can sell ethically
to people, you have something they want and need, which implies you really care
about people. (This idea breaks down in
some areas, like porn.) I am in a
position to write about issues that other people think are not my business,
since they don't affect me directly (like I shouldn't dare criticize BLM
because I never get profiled as a white cis male person). Skin in the game would seem to mean having
dependents to support, to the point that one (or 'I') can really care about
people who are less competitive and can life them up (like in Josh Groban's
song). Yet at one
point Taleb would turn this thinking around
(common today among moralists on both right and left on 'family values' and
'intersectionality'), saying that one way to stop suicide terrorism is indeed
to punish the families. That sounds a little Trump-like (although in other
places Taleb claims to be a libertarian, rather of
the Charles Murray kind). Most of the
time, Taleb does seem to be concerned about tail-risk
passers who are financially motivated, from CEO's to hedge fund managers (the
'credit default swap' of 2008 deserved discussion, as would subprime mortgages; but old
fashioned insider trading is illegal for Taleb's
reasons).
Many other examples of the 'skin in the game' idea
come to my mind. Back in 2001, the National Writers Union stumbled trying to
offer media perils insurance to novice authors and bloggers, because the
insurance companies found the tail risk (of frivolous litigation) impossible to
underwrite reliably. That idea could come roaring back today. I think China's proposal for a 'social credit
score' for all its citizens (by 2020) reflects a demand that everyone put his
communal skin in the game. A young indie
filmmaker is enthusiastic about putting a visibly disabled person on his
Facebook page as his best friend, something I would not want to do publicly
(the expectation that people would be willing to do that is part of the way
Facebook wants users to put their emotional skin in the game now, rather than just
talk and report to the point of Facebook's prodding users to run their own
charity campaigns under their own names on their pages).
And I think there is a really basic dichotomy when
family (and 'loyalty to blood', as in Jake 2.0) is part of one's own skin, or
whether it is external to the deepest self.
I note also that Taleb takes
issue with the idea of 'conflict of interest' in journalism the way I have
often discussed it (as in my own past employment and possible conflict with
publicized political activity on the 'gays in the military' issue), on p.
63. He says in
general, skin in the game comes with conflict of interest and considers the
skin a higher moral priority. I even wonder if he was aware of my specific
circumstance when writing this.
I could think of another riddle that would even
confound J. D. Salinger's Holden Caulfield:
should old guys wear shorts in public to put their own skin back in the
game?
ISBN 9780425284629
Publication: Random
House: 280 pages, 19 chapters, glossary, mathematical appendix, index, hardcover and e-book