Welcome to Litsy!

This one is very interesting and thought provoking but also strangely aggresive.

After reading how if you are an employee you are a dog and a slave, and before the chapter about Jesus Christ might (possibly) offend me even more i bailed on the book. It started out with a good main idea, but the macho posturing and a couple of factual errors in his arguments, together with the crazy idea that if you do not work for yourself you are a slave, convinced me to give up.

" skin in the game keeps human hubris in check"
Nassim is abrasive, oppinionated and sometimes wrong, but always an interesting and thought provoking author

"The ethical is always more robust than the legal. Over time, it is the legal that should converge to the ethical, never the reverse. Hence: Laws come and go; ethics stay."

My students begin presentations on Monday. I‘m going to write this on the board. 😬

"What matters isn't what a person has or doesn't have; it is what he or she is afraid of losing."
- Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Skin in the Game

#nonfiction #philosophy #business #economics #psychology #finance #taleb #quote

“Give me a few lines written by any man and I will find enough to get him hung” goes the saying attributed to Richelieu, Voltaire, Talleyrand (a vicious censor during the French revolution phase of terror), and a few others.

How much you truly “believe” in something can be manifested only through what you are willing to risk for it.

If your private life conflicts with your intellectual opinion, it cancels your intellectual ideas, not your private life.

Verbal threats reveal nothing beyond weakness and unreliability.

The classical art of conversation is to avoid any imbalance.

A civil servant can make rules that are friendly to an industry such as banking—and then go off to J.P. Morgan and recoup a multiple of the difference between his or her current salary and the market rate. (Regulators, you may recall, have an incentive to make rules as complex as possible so their expertise can later be hired at a higher price.)

Someone who has been employed for a while is giving you strong evidence of submission.

The knowledge we get by tinkering, via trial and error, experience, and the workings of time, in other words, contact with the earth, is vastly superior to that obtained through reasoning, something self-serving institutions have been very busy hiding from us.

skin in the game creates diversity, not monoculture. Economic insecurity worsens the condition. Journalists are currently in the most insecure profession you can find: the majority live hand to mouth, and ostracism by their friends would be terminal. Thus they become easily prone to manipulation by lobbyists, as we saw with GMOs, the Syrian wars, etc. You say something unpopular in that profession about GMOs, or Putin, and you become history.

A BS DETECTION HEURISTIC The heuristic here would be to use education in reverse: hire, conditional on an equal set of skills, the person with the least label-oriented education. It means that the person had to succeed in spite of the credentialization of his competitors and overcome more serious hurdles. In addition, people who didn‘t go to Harvard are easier to deal with in real life.

what you learn from the intensity and the focus you had when under the influence of risk stays with you. You may lose the sharpness, but nobody can take away what you‘ve learned. This is the principal reason I am now fighting the conventional educational system, made by dweebs for dweebs. Many kids would learn to love mathematics if they had some investment in it, and, more crucially, they would build an instinct to spot its misapplications.

It is no secret that large corporations prefer people with families; those with downside risk are easier to own, particularly when they are choking under a large mortgage.

When you have skin in the game, dull things like checking the safety of the aircraft because you may be forced to be a passenger in it cease to be boring. If you are an investor in a company, doing ultra-boring things like reading the footnotes of a financial statement (where the real information is to be found) becomes, well, almost not boring.

A saying by the brothers Geoff and Vince Graham summarizes the ludicrousness of scale-free political universalism. I am, at the Fed level, libertarian; at the state level, Republican; at the local level, Democrat; and at the family and friends level, a socialist.

No person in a transaction should have certainty about the outcome while the other one has uncertainty.

studying courage in textbooks doesn‘t make you any more courageous than eating cow meat makes you bovine. By some mysterious mental mechanism, people fail to realize that the principal thing you can learn from a professor is how to be a professor—and the chief thing you can learn from a life coach...is how to become a life coach...So remember that the heroes of history were...people of deeds and had to be endowed with the spirit of risk taking

Bureaucracy is a construction by which a person is conveniently separated from the consequences of his or her actions.

What matters isn‘t what a person has or doesn‘t have; it is what he or she is afraid of losing.

I only managed to make it halfway thru #Antifragile but I liked this one enough to finish. So keep in mind that NNT started out as a finance guy and most of his early books are beloved by MBAs. Here the author demonstrates the presence of a beating heart. And, while he continues to be Uber-masculine, I was able to see (& agree) with his points. Take risks if you are personally vulnerable, but don‘t be a fucking fool!

#disneyhereicome I was having a hard time picking what I was going to read on the plane. Then #bookmark saved me! I love new books!
Anyone else reading this one?