Everything Nassim Nicholas Taleb has said about skin in the game
Taleb holds that no one should keep the upside of a decision while transferring its downside to others — a symmetry he traces from Hammurabi's code to modern bankers and warmongers. Skin in the game doubles as risk management and epistemology: reality filters out cosmetic experts by eliminating those who bear their own risks and fail, so exposure to downside is the only reliable mark of knowledge and ethics.
5 points · 3 appearances · 2013–2020
How the view evolved
Bankers keep upside, taxpayers fund downside → Warmongers pay no price; systems can't learn
In the 2013 Antifragile-era interview (ReasonTV), skin in the game is a finance heuristic -- one of three fixes for systemic fragility, aimed at bankers who collect bonuses while taxpayers cover the blowup. By the Skin in the Game-era Google talk (2018-19), it has widened into a theory of knowledge and ethics: 'let's merge the ethics and epistemology' -- systems only learn by eliminating those who don't bear their own risk, indicting warmongers, pundits, and cosmetic experts, not just banks.
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6 points · 2 appearances · 2013
“Please mishandle. So something that is fragile, if you map it properly mathematically, you'd realize that the fragile is what does not like disorder. It doesn't want mishandling, it doesn't want volatility, it wants peace and predictability. So the opposite of that would be something that love volatility.”
8 points · 7 appearances · 2019–2025 · changed view
“Wealth is the thing that you really want. Wealth is assets that earn while you sleep. Wealth is the factory that with the robots as cranking out things. Wealth is the computer program that's running at night that's serving other customers. Wealth is even money in the bank that is being reinvested into other assets and into other businesses. Even a house can be a form of wealth, because you can rent it out — although that's probably a lower use of productivity — but land and actually doing some commercial enterprise. So my definition of wealth is much more businesses and assets that can earn while you sleep.”
5 points · 5 appearances · 2024–2026 · changed view
“The observation is that don't die is the most played game by everyone all over the world every day. You and I breathe every few seconds, we look both ways before we cross the street, we all play don't die. So it's played more than capitalism, it's played more than any religion. It's the most played game in the world.”
6 points · 4 appearances · 2007–2020 · changed view
“Well, you can say everybody knows that. Well, I think I've been in the top 5% of my age cohort all my life in understanding the power of incentives, and all my life I've underestimated it. And never a year passes but I get some surprise that pushes my limit a little farther.”