Skin in the Game, but Not All the Time

Skin in the Game, but Not All the Time

Skin in the game is an overall necessity, but let us not get carried away in applying it to everything in sight in its every detail, particularly when consequences are contained. There is a difference between the interventionista of Prologue, Part 1 making pronouncements that cause thousands to be killed overseas, and a harmless opinion voiced by a person in a conversation, or a pronouncement by a fortune teller used for therapy rather than decision making. Our message is to focus on those who are professionally slanted, causing harm without being accountable for it, by the very structure of their own occupation.

For the professionally asymmetric person is rare and has been so in history, and even in the present. He causes a lot of problems, but he is rare. For most people you run into in real life—bakers, cobblers, plumbers, taxi drivers, accountants, tax advisors, garbage collectors, dental cleaning assistants, carwash operators (not counting Spanish grammar specialists)—pay a price for their mistakes.

III. MODERNISM

While conforming to ancestral, ancient, and classical notions of justice, this book, relying on the same arguments of asymmetry, goes against a century and a half of modernistic thinking—something we will call here intellectualism. 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.

Intellectualism has a sibling: scientism, a naive interpretation of science as complication rather than science as a process and a skeptical enterprise. Using mathematics when it’s not needed is not science but scientism. Replacing your well-functioning hand with something more technological, say, an artificial one, is not more scientific. Replacing the “natural,” that is age-old, processes that have survived trillions of high-dimensional stressors with something in a “peer-reviewed” journal that may not survive replication or statistical scrutiny is neither science nor good practice. At the time of writing, science has been taken over by vendors using it to sell products (like margarine or genetically modified solutions) and, ironically, the skeptical enterprise is being used to silence skeptics.

Disrespect for the vapidly complicated, verbalistically derived truths has always been present in intellectual history, but you are not likely to see it in your local scientific reporter or college teacher: higher-order questioning requires more intellectual confidence, deeper understanding of statistical significance, and a higher level of rigor and intellectual capacity—or, even better, experience selling rugs or specialized spices in a souk. So this book continues a long tradition of skeptical-inquiry-cum-practical-solutions—the readers of the Incerto might be familiar with the schools of skeptics (covered in The Black Swan), in particular the twenty-two-century-old diatribe by Sextus Empiricus Against the Professors.

The rule is:

Those who talk should do and only those who do should talk

with some dispensation for self-standing activities such as mathematics, rigorous philosophy, poetry, and art, ones that do not make explicit claims of fitting reality. As the great game theorist Ariel Rubinstein holds: do your theories or mathematical representations, don’t tell people in the real world how to apply them. Let those with skin in the game select what they need.