Skin in the game

My highlights and thoughts from the book Skin in the game by Nicholas Nassim Taleb.

Justice, honour and sacrifice – things that are existential for human beings

Divergences that grew with civilization

If you have the rewards, you must also get some of the risks, not let others pay the price of your mistakes.

If you give an opinion, and someone follows it, you are morally obligated to be, yourself, exposed to its consequences.

When a neighbour was sacrificing his child’s one year, I gave him the advice to follow a certain school. He could not have blamed me on any account since my kids were in the same school.

Greek – “pathematamathemata” (“guide your learning through pain,”

If a patient has high cholesterol, a doctor can inject moderate cancer cells to reduce it and claim victory when the patient is dead. But doctors don’t do such things unlike politicians and economists.Doctors usually have some modicum of skin in the game, a vague understanding of complex systems, and more than a couple of millennia of incremental ethics determining their conduct.

One should not mess with a system if the consequences are fraught with uncertainty or a big downsize awaits. Intelligentsia have received wrong education, usually in some other discipline- in 3 idiots, Rancho forbade Ria to marry a guy who first did engineering, then management and is now working in a bank.

The principle of intervention, like that of healers, is first do no harm (primum non nocere); even more, we will argue, those who don’t take risks should never be involved in making decisions.

Privileged individuals are expected to demonstrate greater generosity and nobility towards those who are less privileged. Prince Andrew was tasked by the Royal family to take on more risks than ordinary people by being at the forefront during the 1982 Falklands War with Argentina.

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

Decentralization is based on the simple notion that it is easier to macrobull***t than microbull***t.

We saw that interventionists don’t learn because they are not the victims of their mistakes, and, as we hinted at with pathematamathemata:

You will never fully convince someone that he is wrong; only reality can.

Applies to my radical friends as well. No one can convince them, only reality can.

The curse of modernity is that we are increasingly populated by a class of people who are better at explaining than understanding,

The more people worship the sacrosanct state (or, equivalently, large corporations), the more they hate skin in the game. The more they believe in their ability to forecast, the more they hate skin in the game.

True. If we do not accept the idea of god who created the universe or rather designed it, we do not have a right to design the human evolution as well. Since we do not know the consequences.

Via negativa: the principle that we know what is wrong with more clarity than what is right, and that knowledge grows by subtraction. Also, it is easier to know that something is wrong than to find the fix. Actions that remove are more robust than those that add because addition may have unseen, complicated feedback loops.

The Swiss have been recently (2008) started reclaiming the past bonuses of bankers when loans went wrong.

French, who normally know about a lot of things we don’t know much about, don’t seem to know about the black basalt stone in Louvre Museum only Korean visitors with selfie sticks know about it.

Golden Rule says, “Treat others as you would like them to treat you.” Silver Rule says.“Do not treat others the way you would not like them to treat you.” More robust?

We know with much more clarity what is bad than what is good.

That is why silver rule is better than golden rule.

Yogi Berra to get another such dynamic rule for symmetric relations: “I go to other people’s funerals, so they come to mine.”

Effectively, there is no democracy without such an unconditional symmetry in the rights to express yourself, and the gravest threat is the slippery slope in the attempts to limit speech on grounds that some of it may hurt some people’s feelings.

Behave as if your action can be generalized to the behaviour of everyone in all places, under all conditions.

Modernity likes the abstract over the particular.

Start by being nice to every person you meet. But if someone tries to exercise power over you, exercise power over him.

In an option, one person (the buyer of the option), contractually has the upside (future gains), the other (the seller) has a liability for the downside (future losses), for a pre-agreed price. Just as in an insurance contract, where risk is transferred for a fee.

One, the fool, takes risks he doesn’t understand, mistaking his own past luck for skills, the other, the crook, transfers risks to others.

Some people do not know their own interest—just consider addicts, workaholics, people trapped in a bad relationship, people who support large government, the press, book reviewers, or respectable bureaucrats, all of whom for some mysterious reason act against their own interest.

What matters in life isn’t how frequently one is “right” about outcomes, but how much one makes when one is right. Just like a player or a movie. One great movie is enough to justify an entire career while one tournament is enough to elevate a player into the level s of greats. When a movie is hit, how big the hit is what makes a star. When you score big, how valuable the innings to the match or tournament is what matters and not the number of times. The value of course is decided by factors outside your hands, but you should know the occasion when it arrives.

You may be beneficially exposed to rain, but not to floods.

What is rational is what allows the collective—entities meant to live for a long time—to survive.

Focus on those who are professionally slanted, causing harm without being accountable for it, by the very structure of their own occupation.

Intellectualism is the belief that one can separate an action from the results of such action, that one can separate theory from practice, and that one can always fix a complex system by hierarchical approaches, that is, in a (ceremonial) top-down manner.

Using mathematics when it’s not needed is not science but scientism.

Architects today build to impress other architects, instead they should build to satisfy the customers.

When I work or create something, is it only for the requirement of the job or to impress my fellow engineers?

Now skin in the game brings simplicity—the disarming simplicity of things properly done.

This is what I learnt in mid-west United States. The equipment the company Roth designed had a mechanical seal that was designed for life. And indeed, it never failed. The equipment jammed or had other issues, but the seals would never fail. So, skin in the game brought simplicity.

Anyone who has submitted a “scholarly” paper to a journal knows that you usually raise the odds of acceptance by making it more complicated than necessary.

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. My friend in air-India does this. He checks the safety of the air craft and flies in it.

If you muster the strength to weight-lift a car to save a child, above your current abilities, the strength gained will stay after things calm down.

So Pheidippides too kept the strength he gained after running a marathon to deliver the message and... ran again.

Skin in the game is about honour.

If you do not take risks for your opinion, you are nothing.

...there is another dimension of honour: engaging in actions going beyond mere skin in the game to put oneself at risk for others, have your skin in other people’s game; sacrifice something significant for the sake of the collective.

the villainous takes the short road, virtue the longer one.

cutting corners is dishonest.

You end up assisting your assistants or being forced to “explain” how to do things, which requires more mental effort than doing the thing itself. My wife does it to our helper. Of course, she can cook the dishes herself better and faster.

A country should not tolerate fair-weather friends. There is something offensive in having a nationality without skin in the game, just to travel and pass borders, without the downside that comes with the passport.

For studying courage in textbooks doesn’t make you any more courageous than eating cow meat makes you bovine. Hmm...how many stories of courage have we been taught? And are we courageous?

Learning is rooted in repetition and convexity, meaning that the reading of a single text twice is more profitable than reading two different things once, provided of course that said text has some depth of content. Something I have always believed be it films or books or even comics.

A conflict of interest between professional reviewers who think they ought to decide how books should be written, and genuine readers who read books because they like to read books.

An image of ethics and professionalism was cultivated, emphasized, and protected.

Selling to other dealers was out of the question as professional traders, typically non-golfers, would smell excess inventory and cause the price to drop. Do big corporates do this deliberately?

“Remember that every day a new customer is born.”  Words of a charismatic salesman

Selling cannot be deemed advice.

Whenever someone says the something is good for you, be alert.

Do you need to inform the buyers that a large consignment is about to arrive their city and the prices are going to fall (you know this already) before selling them the goods at your inflated rates?An ethical trader would do this, but a “legal” one would just stay quiet. Can you do this to “transactional” buyers only while not to “relational” ones?The two were separated by an ethical wall, much like the case with domestic animals that cannot be harmed, while rules on cruelty are lifted when it comes to cockroaches.

The best is to let the buyers know everything that the sellers knew.The ethical is always more robust than the legal. Over time, it is the legal that should converge to the ethical, never the reverse. I have held that myself. If you work hard and finish everything assigned to you it is unlikely that anyone can find a fault with you or make you fall. My wife is a shining example of hard work. No one in her company can drag her down of not trying hard enough or not completing her due share of work. She is robust.

Gharar: Sale of a thing not present yet. A fish not yet caught, or a crop not yet harvested. No person in the transaction should have certainty while the other has uncertainty.

The aim is for both parties in a transaction to have the same uncertainty facing random outcomes, an asymmetry becomes equivalent to theft.

Someone has inside information which gives an edge in the markets, there is no gharar as there remains enough uncertainty for both parties, given that the price is in the future and only God knows the future.

But communicated with the client through a salesperson, and the salesperson would come back with an “improvement,” of $5.10. Something never felt right about the extra ten cents. It was, simply, not a sustainable way of doing business. What if the customer subsequently discovered that my initial offer was $5?

The most effective, shame free policy is maximal transparency, even of intentions!

But…,

Sympathy for all would be tyranny for thee, my good neighbour.

Therefore, my friend Deepak Singh stops early. Rather very early in terms of his sympathies to people. He doesn't want to soften his stance at all. If he does, he will be tough on himself, which he fears. True, having love for all is tough on yourself (like Gautam Buddha, Mahavir Jain or Mahatma Gandhi). Unless you have a fortified life, well, like the Queen, you cannot love everyone. And people, who are not royalty, yet who manage to do that, by converse rule, become Royal.

As club members know, the very purpose of a club is exclusion and size limitation. A typical conservative thought.

So, we exercise our ethical rules, but there is a limit—from scaling—beyond which the rules cease to apply.

Whether it is possible to be both ethical and universalist?

For whenever the “we” becomes too large a club, things degrade, and each one starts fighting for his own interest.

In that sense, an American-style federalism is the ideal system.

“Better fences make better neighbours” -Yaneer Bar Yam, physicist and complexity researcher.

You know instinctively that people get along better as neighbours than roommates.

Recall in college hostel, how many neighbours or people who lived in the same wing, had better relations.

Modernity put it in our heads that there are two units: the individual and the universal. collective—in that sense, skin in the game for you would be just for you, as a unit. My skin lies in a broader set of people, one that includes a family, a community, a tribe, a fraternity. But it cannot possibly be the universal.

Let’s say we have a water resource. If all collectively decide not to overfish, the resource stays and serves the community for long but a single person of the community would benefit from overfishing.  What plagues socialism: people’s individual interests do not quite work well under collectivism.

how tribes operate: you are part of a specific group that is larger than the narrow you, but narrower than humanity in general.

Saying by brothers Geoff and Vince Graham –

I am, at the Fed level, a libertarian;

At the state level, a republican;

At the local level, a democrat;

And at the family and friends level, a socialist

most reliable advocate for a product is its user.

skin in the game comes with conflict of interest. What I hope this book will do is show that the former is more important than the latter. There is no problem if people have a conflict of interest if it is congruous with downside risk for themselves.

The Doctor’s objective is, naturally, to avoid a lawsuit, something that can prove disastrous to his career.

Studying individual ants will almost never give us a clear indication of how the ant colony operates.

A disabled person will not use the regular bathroom, but a non-disabled person will use the bathroom for disabled people.

Reduced exposure to anything will increase allergic reaction to it.

But with some non-religious kashrut rules, so to speak, the share can be expected to converge closer to a 100 percent (or some high number).

Do not think that the spread of automatic shifting cars is necessarily due to a majority preference; it could just be because those who can drive manual shifts can always drive automatic, but the reverse is not true.

Why some fast-food chains, such as McDonald’s, thrive. It’s not because they offer a great product, but because they are not vetoed in a certain socio-economic group

“Once you have 10 percent or more women at a party, you cannot serve only beer.

If one of the persons in the room doesn’t speak German, the entire meeting will be run in…English, the brand of inelegant English used in corporations across the world. That way they can equally offend their Teutonic ancestors and the English language.

Genes follow majority rule; languages minority rule.

Christian or Jewish family engaging in a Marrano-style conversion becomes truly converted, as, a couple of generations later, the descendants forget the arrangement of their ancestors.

So initially a family converts to the dominant religion to gain privileges and then its generations become fully converted as they start to practice the faith earlier. What happens in Singapore? The Chinese practicing Christianity, would they remain Buddhist?

Purely monotheistic religions such as Protestant Christianity, Salafi Islam, or fundamentalist atheism accommodate literalist and mediocre minds that cannot handle ambiguity.

For Islam itself is ending up being taken over (in the Sunni branch) by purists simply because they are more intolerant than the rest.

How do books get banned? A group of activists rise against a book and create a storm which ultimately get the book banned. All it takes is a few (motivated) activists for the banning of some books, or the blacklisting of some people.  The case of Bertrand Russel, the great philosopher, who was dismissed from the New York University job because a mother of a student didn’t approve his dissolute lifestyle.

It is the most intolerant person who imposes virtue on others precisely because of that intolerance. The same can apply to civil rights.

The asymmetry between obeying and breaking rules: a law-abiding (or rule-abiding) fellow always follows the rules, but a felon or someone with looser sets of principles will not always break the rules.

What emerges from the minority rule is more likely to be black-and-white, binary rules.

The minority rule produces low-variance in outcomes.

…. But had my neighbour been a Sunni Salafi, he would have required the entire room to be eating halal. Perhaps the entire building. Perhaps the entire town. The difference between a Jain monk or a Buddhist and a Salafi. One just observes prohibition to himself while the other wants everyone to follow his rules.

“Should a society that has elected to be tolerant be intolerant about intolerance?” So, the people who were saying India has become intolerant during Modi’s regime, should have exercised tolerance.

The overall stock markets currently represent more than thirty trillion dollars, but a single order in 2008, only fifty billion, that is, less than two-tenths of a percent of the total, triggered a drop of close to 10 percent, causing losses of around three trillion dollars.

An order activated by the Parisian bank Société Générale, which discovered a hidden acquisition by a rogue trader and wanted to reverse the purchase.

What Do You Care What Other People Think? By Richard Feynman

value of the active, intolerant, and courageous minority.

Revolutions are unarguably driven by an obsessive minority. And the entire growth of society, whether economic or moral, comes from a small number of people.

Complete freedom is the last thing you want if you have an organized religion to run.

every organization wants a certain number of people associated with it to be deprived of a certain share of their freedom. How do you own these people?

employees are expensive.

Talent for talent, they cost a lot more. Lovers of pay checks are lazy…but they would never let you down at times like these. So, employees exist because they have significant skin in the game...

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

He is an obedient, housebroken dog.

A company man is someone who feels that he has something huge to lose if he doesn’t behave as a company man—that is, he has skin in the game.

Even their sense of humour failed outside of the corporate culture.

An employee is—by design—more valuable inside a firm than outside of it; that is, more valuable to the employer than the marketplace.

The best slave is someone you overpay and who knows it, terrified of losing his status.

Whatever you do, just don’t be a dog claiming to be a wolf.

Applies to me. I'm proud that I retain my freedom but must be cautious.

Employees abandoned by their employers, as we saw in the IBM story, cannot bounce back.

Have I seen someone who was retrenched at 56 and could never find a job?

Traders who made money, I realized, could get so disruptive that they needed to be kept away from the rest of the employees.

Employees, who are smart, need to be kept away from other ones.

Freedom is always associated with risk taking, whether it leads to it or comes from it. India’s freedom struggle and the subsequent risks that were facing them.

Those who use foul language on social networks (such as Twitter) are sending an expensive signal that they are free—and, ironically, competent. The use of word ironic is appropriate by the author. Free such people maybe, but not all are competent. My friend Deepak Singh?

English “manners” were imposed on the middle class as a way of domesticating them, along with instilling in them the fear of breaking rules and violating social norms. Recall how Raj Kapoor showcased this “freedom” in his early movies – those who don’t go to school, don’t have to study and don’t have to follow rules and therefore ,enjoy lives.

What matters isn’t what a person has or doesn’t have; it is what he or she is afraid of losing. What do I am afraid of losing? My present state and where will stand in future.

The higher you go in that business, the more insecure you get, as losing an argument to a lesser person exposes you more than if you lose to some hotshot. Remember, this is something a higher rank person in corporate would never accept.

It is much easier to do business with the owner of the business than some employee who is likely to lose his job next year; likewise, it is easier to trust the word of an autocrat than a fragile elected official. The word of Kim Jong Un, how ridiculous it may be, packs a punch of inevitability rather than the foreign minister of south Korea, who might have to consult, the cabinet, the president or even the US President before saying a word. Vendors too, believe the purchase person's word rather than of a technical person.

People whose survival depends on qualitative “job assessments” by someone of higher rank in an organization cannot be trusted for critical decisions. I do not depend on such people. No one can really define what I do. Certainly not where I stand now.

One can always spin a story explaining why continuing is better than stopping (the back-fitting story of sour grapes now known as cognitive dissonance).

this is not a decision that can be made by a collection of bureaucrats with a job description. No one cared about the Wahabi/Salafi education as the root of the Islamic terrorism but continued to fight it in an ad hoc manner.

Universal suffrage did not change the story by much: until recently, the pool of elected people in so-called democracies was limited to a club of upper-class people who cared much, much less about the press. But with more social mobility, ironically, more people could access the pool of politicians—and lose their jobs. And progressively, as with corporations, you start gathering people with minimal courage—and selected because they don’t have courage, as with a regular corporation.

Society likes saints and moral heroes to be celibate, so they do not have family pressures that may force them into the dilemma of needing to compromise their sense of ethics to feed their children. Anna Hazaare, the whistle blower, who in 2011, launched a campaign against corruption, demanding stricter laws, was an unmarried, lifelong protagonist.

The Ottomans relied on janissaries, who were extracted as babies from Christian families and never married. Having no family (or no contact with their family), they were entirely devoted to the sultan. As described by Fukuyama.

To make ethical choices you cannot have dilemmas between the (friends, family) and the general. Samurais, had to leave their families as hostages while the served the emperors, precluding them taking any stance against him. Sherlock Holmes had no family, which could become the target of Professor Moriarty.

Neither celibacy not financial freedom makes one unconditionally free. This is because ultimately you would be associated with people, school or institutions and the smear campaigns would target those people if they cannot hurt you directly.

German taxpayers are still responsible for war reparations for crimes committed by their grandparents and great-grandparents.

In a case where a member of one family kills a member of another, a direct relative of the killer will be delivered to the family of the victim.  In the 70’s Bollywood movie Dharam Veer, when the mother of a peasant is killed by a royal arrow, usually used by the prince, the prince's mother, the queen of the land, goes to stay with the dead man's family as compensation.

To counter the self-killing terrorists, private citizens used to hug and corner them into a place where the detonation of bomb is least harmful. A little skin in the game for kamikaze.

You’d even rather have a failed real person than a successful one, as blemishes, scars, and character flaws increase the distance between a human and a ghost. Certainly, I am a one with scars or I simply want to believe that I have scars?

Scars signal skin in the game. Real requires peril.

The human nature of Christ makes the divine possible for all of us.

He(Trump) never had a boss before, no supervisor to convince, impress, or seek approval from: people who have been employed are more careful in their choice of words.

Absence of evidence for evidence of absence.

all public—despises people who make a lot of money on a salary, or, rather, salarymen who make a lot of money.

Swiss, of all people, ran a referendum for a law capping salary of managers to a set multiple of the lowest wage.

Zero-Sum: What Peter gets is extracted from Paul. Someone getting rich is doing so at another people’s expense.

There is something respectable in losing a billion dollars, provided it is your own money.

True equality is equality in probability.

Rather by making the rich rotate—or by forcing people to incur the possibility of creating an opening.

In cricket team too, people entrenched in the team with records will not move.

The no-absorbing-barrier condition means that someone who is rich should never be certain to stay rich.

No downside for some means no upside for the rest. In the corporate too, if most stay at the same position, how the others expect to move up?

Thomas Piketty. Capital in the Twenty-first Century,

For a rich person isolated from vertical socializing with the poor, the poor become something entirely theoretical, a textbook reference.

Do I read that we do not have a contact with the poor anymore? When I was young, we played with a wide stratum of kids- right from kids of house maids, to the kids of drivers, pump operators, electricians, clerks, even so-called untouchable sweepers. We interacted with them, though kept a distance, but largely mixed with them. We had decent shoes if not extravagant, but some of those kids played cricket in slippers and some bare foot. Some had limited clothes which they repeated even when those clothes were coming apart at seams, some knew no English expectedly, some depended on equipment like a cricket bat or gloves brought by richer kids. Despite all this, the fun of playing was never less.

Now poor people are an idea for us, especially for my son, who has never interacted with poor kid. At best he has met a kid who, instead of a European city, goes to South East Asia for holiday and stays in a three-star hotel rather than a five star one. Now that’s poor!

Traders, when they make profits, have short communications; when they lose, they drown you in detail, theories, and charts.

When you buy a thick book with tons of graphs and tables used to prove a point, you should be suspicious. It means something didn’t distill right! But for the public and those untrained in statistics, such tables appear convincing—another way to substitute the true with the complicated.

(Regulators, you may recall, have an incentive to make rules as complex as possible

Do engineers in companies do that to help them later interpret the Design Practices and complex procedures?

Who is the real expert? Who decides who is and who is not an expert? Where is the meta-expert? Time is the expert.

Use laws that are old but food that is fresh.

“If people over here like you, you are doing something wrong.”

You can define a free person precisely as someone whose fate is not centrally or directly dependent on peer assessment.

Academia has a tendency, when unchecked (from lack of skin in the game), to evolve into a ritualistic self-referential publishing game.

Wittgenstein held the exact opposite viewpoint: if anything, knowledge is the reverse of an athletic contest. In philosophy, the winner is the one who finishes last, he said.

Anything that smacks of competition destroys knowledge.

The most convincing statements are those in which one stands to lose, ones in which one has maximal skin in the game; the most unconvincing ones are those in which one patently (but unknowingly) tries to enhance one’s status without making a tangible contribution (like, as we saw, in the great majority of academic papers that say nothing and take no risks).

Ideas need to have skin in the game.

Like the good things in life are on the edge. An entertaining dance or song is just one false step or note away.

The good is not as good as the absence of bad,

When our souls are mollified, a bee can sting.

Madness is rare in individuals, but in groups, parties, nations, it is the rule. (This counts as ancient wisdom since Nietzsche).

Truth is lost with too much altercation,

Too high a rate of mutation prevents locking in the benefits of previous changes: evolution (and progress) requires some, but not too frequent, variation. Too frequent changes prevent utilizing the benefits of previous changes.

Brian Hinchcliffe, conveyed to me the following heuristic: Shops that get awards as “The Best” something (best atmosphere, best waiter service, best fermented yoghurt and other non-alcoholic beverages for visiting Sheikhs, etc.) close down before the awards ceremony.

Simply the one who doesn’t look the part, conditional on having made a (sort of) successful career in his profession, had to have much to overcome in terms of perception. And if we are lucky enough to have people who do not look the part, it is thanks to the presence of some skin in the game,

the contact with reality that filters out incompetence, as reality is blind to looks.

conditional on having had some success in spite of not looking the part, it is potent, even crucial, information.

In any type of activity or business divorced from the direct filter of skin in the game, the great majority of people know the jargon, play the part, and are intimate with the cosmetic details, but are clueless about the subject.

What can be phrased and expressed in a clear narrative that convinces suckers will be a sucker trap.

Mediterranean societies are traditionally ones in which the highest-ranking person is the one with the most skin in the game.

True intellect should not appear to be intellectual.

People who are bred, selected, and compensated to find complicated solutions do not have an incentive to implement simplified ones.

There is absolutely no gain for someone in such a position to propose something simple: you are rewarded for perception, not results.

We waste more than a third of our food supply, and the gains from simple improvement in distribution would far outweigh those from modification of supply.

My approach is to suggest simpler solutions. Rather than offering intricate technical answers that people anticipate, I opt for straightforward, authentic solutions to issues. Nevertheless, this approach is not well-received by others.

you make it look like any critic of your method is arguing against saving the children.

Why don’t we give these people rice and vitamins separately? After all, we don’t have genetically modified coffee that has milk with it.

About genetically modified rice which contain vitamins

The minute one is judged by others rather than by reality, things become warped as follows. In corporates too, we are judged by others rather than our work, though in way, people keep on repeating that it is the work they are judging.

The mere fact that an evaluation causes you to be judged not by the end results, but by some intermediary metric that invites you to look sophisticated, brings some distortions.

Reminiscent of gyms. People are impressed with expensive equipment—fancy, complicated, multi-coloured—meant to look as if it belonged on a spaceship.

All you need are shoes to run outside when you can (and perhaps some pants that don’t make you look ridiculous), and a barbell with weights.

If you are really interested in keeping fit, that is all you need. Simplicity again. How many times I have seen this.

Most gains in physical strength come from working the tails of the distribution, close to your limit.

So instead of solving hundreds of math problems, from time to time move up into a complex one. To gain a real boost in brain power.

When people get rich, they shed their skin-in-the-game-driven work ethic.

The other customers seemed, as we say in Mediterranean languages, to have a cork plugged in their behind obstructing proper ventilation, causing the vapors to build on the inside of the gastrointestinal walls, leading to the irritable type of decorum you only notice in the educated semi-upper classes. I noted that, in addition to the plugged corks, all the men wore ties. Dinner consisted of a succession of complicated small things, with microscopic ingredients and contrasting tastes that forced you to concentrate as if you were taking some entrance exam.

Thieves do not enter impecunious homes, and one is more likely to be drinking poison in a golden cup than an ordinary one.

An entire industry meant to swindle you will swindle you: financial consultants, diet advisors, exercise experts, lifestyle engineers, sleeping councillors, breathing specialists, etc.

Very few people understand their own choices and end up being manipulated by those who want to sell them something.

if wealth is giving you fewer options instead of more (and more varied) options, you’re doing it wrong. So as of 2018 end, we can be considered wealthy, but have we got more options? And options of what sense, to be able to free ourselves – not at all. To be able to go and live as we may desire to – no, then what? To be able to holiday in the place of our choice – yes, but that is a like an escape, a short exhale, how about a permanent release from shackles?

What is less obvious is that you may also need to hide your erudition and learning.

Can anything better apply to my state? I need to act look less read and less philosophical in front of many people to be able to gain the support of so-called higher levels in organization. 

Book of the Courtier: people need to be equal, at least for the conversation, otherwise it fails.

Elinor Ostrom.

Constructed preferences

Verbal threats reveal nothing beyond weakness and unreliability. Remember, once again, no verbal threats.

Models are error-prone, something I knew well with finance; most risks only appear in analyses after harm is done.

The divergence is evident in that journos worry considerably more about the opinion of other journalists than the judgment of their readers.

Restaurant owners worry about the opinion of their customers, not those of other restaurant owners, which keeps them in check and prevents the business from straying collectively away from its interests.

look at what he said”) rather than blasting his exact position (“look at what he means” or, more broadly, “look at what he stands for”)—for

To be fair, I have never criticized BJP for what they have said. It is always due to what they meant or because of what they stand for.

If you manage to convince yourself that you are right in theory, you don’t really care how your ideas affect others. Your ideas give you a virtuous status that makes you impervious to how they affect others.

Why don’t you go to the registrar’s office and give your privileged spot to the minority student next in line? Clearly the defence given by people under such a situation is that they want others to do so as well—they require a systemic solution to every local perceived problem of injustice. I find that immoral. I know of no ethical system that allows you to let someone drown without helping him because other people are not helping, no system that says, “I will save people from drowning only if others too save other people from drowning.”

If a car salesman tries to sell you a Detroit car while driving a Honda, he is signalling that the wares he is touting may have a problem.

Ecclesiastical:Related to church

Virtue isn’t in just being nice to people others are prone to care about. Virtue is to care about people no one cares about.

Further, the highest form of virtue is unpopular.

Only that unpopular acts signal some risk taking and genuine behaviour. Courage is the only virtue you cannot fake.

Courage (risk taking) is the highest virtue. We need entrepreneurs.

I conjecture that when you leave people alone, they tend to settle for practical reasons.

No peace proceeds from bureaucratic ink. If you want peace, make people trade, as they have done for millennia. They will be eventually forced to work something out.

History is largely peace punctuated by wars, rather than wars punctuated by peace. The problem is that we humans are prone to the availability heuristic, by which the salient is mistaken for the statistical, and the conspicuous and emotional effect of an event makes us think it is occurring more regularly than.

Historians and international affairistas who reach us are more motivated by stories of conflict than by organic collaboration on the ground between a broader set of non-institutional players, merchants, barbers, doctors, money changers, plumbers, prostitutes, and others.

What to read? It would not cure the via negativa problem, but, for a start, instead of studying Roman history in terms of Caesar and Pompey, or Peloponnesian balances of power or diplomatic intrigues in Vienna, consider studying instead the daily life and body of laws and customs. Like the book “Everyday life through the ages.”I accidentally discovered the book A History of Private Life (four volumes in English) by Paul Veyne, Philippe Ariès, and Georges Duby some thirty years ago. Volume 1 (Ancient Rome) has been at a comfortable distance from my bed ever since. Another representative book for the approach is Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie’sMontaillou Village Occitan. And, for our beloved yet troubled Mediterranean, take Fernand Braudel’s magnificent opus: The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II. It is in a way more pleasant to read an account of Venice based on trade rather than abstract geopolitical bull***t. Some books make you smell the spices. Since the discovery of the works of Duby, Braudel, Bloch, Ariès, et al., I have been unable to read conventional history books, say, a book on the Ottoman Empire that focuses on the sultans, without irritation. It feels like historians across the board are engaging in the repulsive “narrative nonfiction” style of The New Yorker. Other books: James Davidson’s Courtesans and Fishcakes, where you see how the Greeks ate bread with the left hand. Or Graham Robb’s The Discovery of France, which informs you that the French spoke little French in 1914. And many more.

Two people can be using the same word, meaning different things, yet continue the conversation, which is fine for coffee, but not when making decisions, particularly policy decisions affecting others.

Din means law in Hebrew and religion in Arabic. Different people interpret religion differently, for some it is a way of life, for some a way of governance, and for some, it is code of ethics or cosmology.

For Orthodox and Catholic Christians, religion is largely aesthetics, pomp, and rituals. For Protestants, religion is belief without aesthetics, pomp, or law.

European union bureaucrats think Salafism, say, as just a religion—with its houses of “worship”—when in fact it is just an intolerant political system, which promotes (or allows) violence and rejects the institutions of the West—those very institutions that allow them to operate.

Salafism is very similar to atheistic Soviet Communism in its heyday: both have all-embracing control over all human activity and thought, which makes discussions about whether religion or atheistic regimes are more murderous lacking in pertinence, precision, and realism.

Just as paganism cannot be pigeon-holed, the same applies to libertarianism. It does not fit the structure of a political “party”—only that of a decentralized political movement.

Political parties are hierarchical, they are designed in a way to substitute someone’s own decision making with a well-defined protocol. This doesn’t work with libertarians.

Recall our brief discussion of the theological necessity of making Christ man—he had to sacrifice himself. Time to develop the argument here.

Self-flagellation is also present in Christianity, as commemoration of the suffering of the Christ—while prevalent in the Middle Ages, it is now gone except in some places in Asia and Latin America.

The gods did not accept cheap talk.

Love without sacrifice is theft (Procrustes). This applies to any form of love, particularly the love of God.

At no point during the emergency period(when the Pope was shot) did the drivers of the ambulance consider taking John Paul the Second to a chapel for a prayer, or some equivalent form of intercession with the Lord, to give the sacred first right of refusal for the treatment. And not one of his successors seemed to have considered giving precedence to dealing with the Lord with the hope of some miraculous intervention in place of the trappings of modern medicine.

real function of swimming pools is to allow the middle class to sit around in bathing suits without looking ridiculous.

In science, belief is literal belief; it is right or wrong, never metaphorical.

Greek and Roman architects misrepresented the columns of their temples, by tilting them inward, in order to give us the impression that the columns are straight. As Vitruvius explains, the aim is to “counteract the visual reception by a change of proportions.” A distortion is meant to bring about an enhancement for your aesthetic experience.

Survival comes first, truth, understanding, and science later.

I did not seek survival in Exxon, rather I looked for success from the beginning, which possibly led to my downfall.

 (First, live; then philosophize).

my survival is not as important as the survival of things that do not have a limited life expectancy, such as mankind or planet earth. Hence the more “systemic” things are, the more important survival becomes.

Beliefs are…cheap talk. There may be some type of a translation mechanism too hard for us to understand, with distortions at the level of the thought process that are actually necessary for things to work.

making some types of errors is the most rational thing to do, when the errors are of little cost, as they lead to discoveries.

There is a difference between beliefs that are decorative and different sorts of beliefs, those that map to action.

The classical sophrosyne means precaution, self-control, and temperance all in one.

Anything that hinders one’s survival at an individual, collective, tribal, or general level is, to me, irrational.

We shall find more evidence for this statement. Is T20 rational because it survives, or ODIs which survived for 35 years but are now threatened? T20 is getting boring especially international versions. Even the world cup is no longer meaningful.

The fact to consider is not that beliefs have survived a long time—the Catholic church as an administration is close to twenty-four centuries old (it is largely the continuation of the Roman Republic). The point is that people who have religion—a certain religion—have survived.

Survive here may be misleading. Some people, groups or communities try too hard to survive as well.

Not everything that happens happens for a reason, but everything that survives survives for a reason.

Ole Peters,  Claude Shannon and Ed Thorp, and the physicist J. L. Kelly of the Kelly Criterion got it right.

it looks like you need a lot of intelligence to figure probabilistic things out when you don’t have skin in the game.

If you incur a tiny probability of ruin as a “one-off” risk, survive it, then do it again (another “one-off” deal), you will eventually go bust with a probability of one hundred percent.

I have a finite shelf life, humanity should have an infinite duration.

Courage is when you sacrifice your own well-being for the sake of the survival of a layer higher than yours.

“The difference between successful people and really successful people is that really successful people say no to almost everything,”

Warren Buffet

Volatile things are not necessarily risky, and the reverse is also true.

Small injuries will be beneficial, never larger ones,