Skin in the Game

by Nassim Nicholas Taleb

  Only the nonperishable can be Lindy. When it comes to ideas, books, technologies, procedures, institutions, and political systems under Lindy, there is no intrinsic aging and perishability. A physical copy of War and Peace can age (particularly when the publisher cuts corners to save twenty cents on paper for a fifty-dollar book); the book itself as an idea doesn’t.

  Note that thanks to Lindy, no expert is the final expert anymore and we do not need meta-experts judging the expertise of experts one rank below them. We solve the “turtles all the way down” problem.*1 Fragility is the expert, hence time and survival.

  THE LINDY OF LINDY

  The idea of the Lindy effect is itself Lindy-proof. The pre-Socratic thinker Periander of Corinth wrote, more than twenty-five hundred years ago: Use laws that are old but food that is fresh.

  Likewise, Alfonso X of Spain, nicknamed El Sabio, “the wise,” had as a maxim: Burn old logs. Drink old wine. Read old books. Keep old friends.

  The insightful and luckily nonacademic historian Tom Holland once commented: “The thing I most admire about the Romans was the utter contempt they were capable of showing the cult of youth.” He also wrote: “The Romans judged their political system by asking not whether it made sense but whether it worked,” which is why, while dedicating this book, I called Ron Paul a Roman among Greeks.

  DO WE NEED A JUDGE?

  As I mentioned earlier in Prologue 3, I have held for most of my (sort of) academic career no more than a quarter position. A quarter is enough to have somewhere to go, particularly when it rains in New York, without being emotionally socialized and losing intellectual independence for fear of missing a party or having to eat alone. But one (now “resigned”) department head one day came to me and emitted the warning: “Just as, when a businessman and author you are judged by other businessmen and authors, here as an academic you are judged by other academics. Life is about peer assessment.”

  It took me a while to overcome my disgust—I am still not fully familiar with the way non-risk-takers work; they actually don’t realize that others are not like them, and can’t get what makes real people tick. No, businessmen as risk takers are not subjected to the judgment of other businessmen, only to that of their personal accountant. They just need to avoid having a documented record of (some) ethical violations. Furthermore, not only did you not want peer approval, you wanted disapproval (except for ethical matters): an old fellow pit trader once shared his wisdom: “If people over here like you, you are doing something wrong.”

  Further,

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

  And as an essayist, I am not judged by other writers, book editors, and book reviewers, but by readers. Readers? Maybe, but wait a minute…not today’s readers. Only those of tomorrow, and the day after tomorrow. So, my only real judge being time, it is the stability and robustness of the readership (that is, future readers) that counts. The fashion-oriented steady reader of the most recently reviewed book in The New York Times is of no interest to me. And as a risk taker, only time counts—for I could fool my accountant with steady earnings with a lot of hidden risk, but time will eventually reveal them.

  Being reviewed or assessed by others matters if and only if one is subjected to the judgment of future—not just present—others.

  And recall that, a free person does not need to win arguments—just win.*2

  TEA WITH THE QUEEN

  Peers devolve honors, memberships in academies, Nobels, invitations to Davos and similar venues, tea (and cucumber sandwiches) with the Queen, requests by rich name-droppers to attend cocktail parties where you see only people who are famous. Believe me, there are rich people whose lives revolve around these things. They usually claim to be trying to save the world, the bears, the children, the mountains, the deserts—all the ingredients of the broadcasting of virtue.

  But clearly they can’t influence Lindy—in fact, it is the reverse. If you spend your time trying to impress others in the New York club 21, there may be something wrong with you.

  Contemporary peers are valuable collaborators, not final judges.*3

  INSTITUTIONS

  In fact, there is something worse than peer-assessment: the bureaucratization of the activity creates a class of new judges: university administrators, who have no clue what someone is doing except via external signals, yet become the actual arbiters.

  These arbiters fail to realize that “prestigious” publication, determined by peer-reviewers in a circular manner, are not Lindy-compatible—they only mean that a certain set of (currently) powerful people are happy with your work.

  Hard science might be robust to the pathologies—even then. So let us take a look at social science. Given that the sole judges of a contributor are his “peers,” there is a citation ring in place that can lead to all manner of rotting. Macroeconomics, for instance, can be nonsense since it is easier to macrobull***t than microbull***t—nobody can tell if a theory really works.

  If you say something crazy you will be deemed crazy. But if you create a collection of, say, twenty people who set up an academy and say crazy things accepted by the collective, you now have “peer-reviewing” and can start a department in a university.

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

  Now, while academia has turned into an athletic contest, 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.

  Further,

  Anything that smacks of competition destroys knowledge.

  In some areas, such as gender studies or psychology, the ritualistic publishing game gradually maps less and less to real research, by the very nature of the agency problem, to reach a Mafia-like divergence of interest: researchers have their own agenda, at variance with what their clients, that is, society and the students, are paying them for. The opacity of the subject to outsiders helps them control the gates. Knowing “economics” doesn’t mean knowing anything about economics in the sense of the real activity, but rather the theories, most of which are bull***t, produced by economists. And courses in universities, for which hard-working parents need to save over decades, easily degenerate into fashion. You work hard and save for your children to be taught a post-colonial study-oriented critique of quantum mechanics.

  But there is a ray of hope. Actually, recent events indicate how the system will fold: alumni (who happen to have worked in the real world) are starting to cut funds to spurious and farcical disciplines (though not to the farcical approaches within traditional disciplines). After all, it so happens that someone needs to pay the salaries of macroeconomists and post-colonial gender “experts.” And university education needs to compete with professional training workshops: once upon a time, studying post-colonial theories could help one get a job other than serving French fries. No longer.

  AGAINST ONE’S INTEREST

  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). But it doesn’t have to be that way. Showing off is reasonable; it is human. As long as the substance exceeds the showoff, you are fine. Stay human, take as much as you can, under the condition that you give more than you take.

  One should give more weight to research that, while being rigorous, contradicts other peers, particularly if it entails costs and reputational harm for its author.

  Further,

  Someone with a high public presen
ce who is controversial and takes risks for his opinion is less likely to be a bull***t vendor.*4

  SOUL IN THE GAME, AGAIN

  The deprostitutionalization of research will eventually be done as follows. Force people who want to do “research” to do it on their own time, that is, to derive their income from other sources. Sacrifice is necessary. It may seem absurd to brainwashed contemporaries, but Antifragile documents the outsized historical contributions of the nonprofessional, or, rather, the non-meretricious. For their research to be genuine, they should first have a real-world day job, or at least spend ten years as: lens maker, patent clerk, Mafia operator, professional gambler, postman, prison guard, medical doctor, limo driver, militia member, social security agent, trial lawyer, farmer, restaurant chef, high-volume waiter, firefighter (my favorite), lighthouse keeper, etc., while they are building their original ideas.

  It is a filtering, nonsense-expurgating mechanism. I have no sympathy for moaning professional researchers. I for my part spent twenty-three years in a full-time, highly demanding, extremely stressful profession while studying, researching, and writing my first three books at night; it lowered (in fact, eliminated) my tolerance for career-building research.

  (There is this illusion that just as businessmen are motivated and rewarded by profits, scientists should be motivated and rewarded by honors and recognition. That’s not how it works. Remember, science is a minority rule: a few will run it, others are just back-office clerks.)

  SCIENCE IS LINDY-PRONE

  We said earlier that without skin in game, survival mechanisms are severely disrupted. This also applies to ideas.

  Karl Popper’s idea of science is an enterprise that produces claims that can be contradicted by eventual observations, not a series of verifiable ones: science is fundamentally disconfirmatory, not confirmatory. This mechanism of falsification is entirely Lindy-compatible; it actually requires the operation of the Lindy effect (in combination with the minority rule). Although Popper saw the statics, he didn’t study the dynamics, nor did he look at the risk dimension of things. The reason science works isn’t because there is a proper “scientific method” derived by some nerds in isolation, or some “standard” that passes a test similar to the eye exam of the Department of Motor Vehicles; rather it is because scientific ideas are Lindy-prone, that is, subjected to their own natural fragility. Ideas need to have skin in the game. You know an idea will fail if it is not useful, and can be therefore vulnerable to the falsification of time (and not that of naive falsificationism, that is, according to some government-printed black-and-white guideline). The longer an idea has been around without being falsified, the longer its future life expectancy. For if you read Paul Feyerabend’s account of the history of scientific discoveries, you can clearly see that anything goes in the process—but not with the test of time. That appears to be nonnegotiable.

  Note that I am here modifying Popper’s idea; we can replace “true” (rather, not false) with “useful,” even “not harmful,” even “protective to its users.” So I will diverge from Popper in the following. For things to survive, they necessarily need to fare well in the risk dimension, that is, be good at not dying. By the Lindy effect, if an idea has skin in the game, it is not in the truth game, but in the harm game. An idea survives if it is a good risk manager, that is, not only doesn’t harm its holders, but favors their survival—this also applies to superstitions that have crossed centuries because they led to some protective actions. More technically, an idea needs to be convex (antifragile), or at least bring about a beneficial reduction of fragility somewhere.

  EMPIRICAL OR THEORETIC?

  Academics divide research into theoretical and empirical areas. Empiricism consists in looking at data on a computer in search for what they call “statistically significant,” or doing experiments in the laboratory under some purposefully narrow conditions. Doing things in the real world, in some professions (such as medicine), bears the name clinical, which is not deemed to be scientific. Many disciplines lack this third dimension, the clinical one.

  For in fact, by the Lindy effect, robustness to time, that is, doing things under risk-taking conditions, is checked by survival. Things work 1) if those who have been doing the doing took some type of risk, and 2) their work manages to cross generations.

  Which brings me to the grandmother.

  THE GRANDMOTHER VS. THE RESEARCHERS

  If you hear advice from a grandmother or elders, odds are that it works 90 percent of the time. On the other hand, in part because of scientism and academic prostitution, in part because the world is hard, if you read anything by psychologists and behavioral scientists, odds are that it works at less than 10 percent, unless it is has also been covered by the grandmother and the classics, in which case why would you need a psychologist?*5 Consider that a recent effort to replicate the hundred psychology papers in “prestigious” journals of 2008 found that, out of a hundred, only thirty-nine replicated. Of these thirty-nine, I believe that fewer than ten are actually robust and transfer outside the narrowness of the experiment. Similar defects have been found in medicine and neuroscience; more on those later. (I will discuss the point further in Chapters 18 and (mostly) 19, as well as why the warnings of your grandmother or interdicts aren’t “irrational”; most of what is called “irrational” comes from misunderstanding of probability.)

  It is critical that it is not just that the books of the ancients are still around and have been filtered by Lindy, but that those populations who read them have survived as well.

  While our knowledge of physics was not available to the ancients, human nature was. So everything that holds in social science and psychology has to be Lindy-proof, that is, have an antecedent in the classics; otherwise it will not replicate or not generalize beyond the experiment. By classics we can define the Latin (and late Hellenistic) moral literature (moral sciences meant something else than they do today): Cicero, Seneca, Marcus Aurelius, Epictetus, Lucian, or the poets: Juvenal, Horace, or the later French so-called “moralists” (La Rochefoucauld, Vauvenargues, La Bruyère, Chamfort). Bossuet is a class on his own. One can use Montaigne and Erasmus as a portal to the ancients: Montaigne was the popularizer of his day; Erasmus was the thorough compiler.

  A BRIEF TOUR OF YOUR GRANDPARENTS’ WISDOM

  Let us now close by sampling a few ideas that exist in both ancient lore and are sort of reconfirmed by modern psychology. These are sampled organically, meaning they are not the result of research but of what spontaneously comes to mind (remember this book is called Skin in the Game), then verified in the texts.

  Cognitive dissonance (a psychological theory by Leon Festinger about sour grapes, by which people, in order to avoid inconsistent beliefs, rationalize that, say, the grapes they can’t reach got to be sour). It is seen first in Aesop, of course, repackaged by La Fontaine. But its roots look even more ancient, with the Assyrian Ahiqar of Nineveh.

  Loss aversion (a psychological theory by which a loss is more painful than a gain is pleasant): in Livy’s Annals (XXX, 21) Men feel the good less intensely than the bad.*6 Nearly all the letters of Seneca have some element of loss aversion.

  Negative advice (via negativa): We know the wrong better than what’s right; recall the superiority of the Silver over the Golden Rule. The good is not as good as the absence of bad,*7 Ennius, repeated by Cicero.

  Skin in the game (literally): We start with the Yiddish proverb: You can’t chew with somebody else’s teeth. “Your fingernail can best scratch your itch,”*8 picked up by Scaliger circa 1614 in Proverborum Arabicorum.

  Antifragility: There are tens of ancient sayings. Let us just mention Cicero. When our souls are mollified, a bee can sting. See also Machiavelli and Rousseau for its application to political systems.

  Time discounting: “A bird in the hand is better than ten on the tree.”*9 (Levantine proverb)

  Madness of crowds: Ni
etzsche: Madness is rare in individuals, but in groups, parties, nations, it is the rule. (This counts as ancient wisdom since Nietzsche was a classicist; I’ve seen many such references in Plato.)

  Less is more: Truth is lost with too much altercation,*10 in Publilius Syrus. But of course the expression “less is more” is in an 1855 poem by Robert Browning.

  Overconfidence: “I lost money because of my excessive confidence,”*11 Erasmus inspired by Theognis of Megara (Confident, I lost everything; defiant, I saved everything) and Epicharmus of Kos (Remain sober and remember to watch out).

  The Paradox of progress, and the paradox of choice: There is a familiar story of a New York banker vacationing in Greece, who, from talking to a fisherman and scrutinizing the fisherman’s business, comes up with a scheme to help the fisherman make it a big business. The fisherman asked him what the benefits were; the banker answered that he could make a pile of money in New York and come back to vacation in Greece; something that seemed ludicrous to the fisherman, who was already there doing the kind of things bankers do when they go on vacation in Greece.

  The story was well known in antiquity, under a more elegant form, as retold by Montaigne (my translation): When King Pyrrhus tried to cross into Italy, Cynéas, his wise adviser, tried to make him feel the vanity of such action. “To what end are you going into such enterprise?” he asked. Pyrrhus answered, “To make myself the master of Italy.” Cynéas: “And so?” Pyrrhus: “To get to Gaul, then Spain.” Cynéas: “Then?” Pyrrhus: “To conquer Africa, then…come rest at ease.” Cynéas: “But you are already there; why take more risks?” Montaigne then cites the well-known passage in Lucretius’ De Rerum Natura (V, 1431) on how human nature knows no upper bound, as if to punish itself.