Quotes from Skin in the Game: Hidden Asymmetries in Daily Life by Nassim Nicholas Taleb

“Decentralization is based on the simple notion that it is easier to macrobull***t than microbull***t. Decentralization reduces large structural asymmetries.”
“For 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, say, a life coach or inspirational speaker is how to become a life coach or inspirational speaker. So remember that the heroes of history were not classicists and library rats, those people who live vicariously in their texts. They were people of deeds and had to be endowed with the spirit of risk taking”
“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.”
“You can tell if a discipline is BS if the degree depends severely on the prestige of the school granting it. I remember when I applied to MBA programs being told that anything outside the top ten or twenty would be a waste of time. On the other hand a degree in mathematics is much less dependent on the school (conditional on being above a certain level, so the heuristic would apply to the difference between top ten and top two thousand schools). The same applies to research papers. In math and physics, a result posted on the repository site arXiv (with a minimum hurdle) is fine. In low-quality fields like academic finance (where papers are usually some form of complicated storytelling), the “prestige” of the journal is the sole criterion.”
“The only definition of rationality that I’ve found that is practically, empirically, and mathematically rigorous is the following: what is rational is that which allows for survival. Unlike modern theories by psychosophasters, it maps to the classical way of thinking. Anything that hinders one’s survival at an individual, collective, tribal, or general level is, to me, irrational.”
“Things designed by people without skin in the game tend to grow in complication (before their final collapse). There is absolutely no benefit for someone in such a position to propose something simple: when you are rewarded for perception, not results, you need to show sophistication. 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. Further, there are side effects for problems that grow nonlinearly with such branching-out complications. Worse: Non-skin-in-the-game people don’t get simplicity.”
“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 Brexit, GMOs, or Putin, and you become history. This is the opposite of business where me-tooism is penalized.”
“Those who use foul language on social networks (such as Twitter) are sending an expensive signal that they are free—and, ironically, competent. You don’t signal competence if you don’t take risks for it—there are few such low-risk strategies. So cursing today is a status symbol, just as oligarchs in Moscow wear blue jeans at special events to signal their power.”
“making some types of errors is the most rational thing to do, when the errors are of little cost, as they lead to discoveries. For instance, most medical “discoveries”are accidental to something else. An error-free world would have no penicillin, no chemotherapy…almost no drugs, and most probably no humans. This is why I have been against the state dictating to us what we “should”be doing: only evolution knows if the “wrong”thing is really wrong, provided there is skin in the game to allow for selection.”
“Thirty-nine percent of Americans will spend a year in the top 5 percent of the income distribution, 56 percent will find themselves in the top 10 percent, and 73 percent will spend a year in the top 20 percent.”
“Administrators everywhere on the planet, in all businesses and pursuits, and at all times in history, have been the plague.”
“The divergence is evident in that journos worry considerably more about the opinion of other journalists than the judgment of their readers. Compare this to a healthy system, say, that of restaurants. As we saw in Chapter 8, 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.”
“Silver Rule (negative golden rule): Do not do to others what you would not like them to do to you. Note the difference from the Golden Rule, as the silver one prevents busybodies from attempting to run your life.”
“Almost every academic you are going to meet is a complete and utter fraud. Scientists don’t do science any more. They do scientism. Economists don’t do economics. They do economism. They just come up with a whole load of ideas they can all agree upon to keep themselves in a job. Architects are the same. If they were crushed to death under a pile of rubble when one of their buildings fell down, they might try harder to design less crap. They all call themselves experts but they are anything but.”

The Problem with Female and Minority Artists

The problem is not with these artists per se, but rather with a subset of the intelligentsia who are busy with social engineering in the world of art. There is an insistent demand for museum boards, art fairs, award winners and museum contents to reflect the broad demographics of women and minorities in the US and Europe.  While these groups have had great success in music, the visual arts, much like tennis, has favored both bureaucrats and practitioners with disposable income. Whether an impressive degree or simply the time to pursue unremunerative activities, poor people of any ilk are at a considerable disadvantage.  Perhaps more importantly, especially with regard to women, is the lack of ambition to succeed in the Arts, as opposed to crafty lower case art.

The problem is that due to the relatively low number of women and minorities interested in pursuing the Visual Arts (I am addressing museum material) the rising demand for full demographic representation is a disaster.  Think of the difference in the quality of men’s pro basketball versus women’s pro basketball.  I may be 15 years behind in my perception of women’s basketball but we could as easily compare 1920s men’s basketball to the current pro scene.  While current men’s pro basketball attracts fistfuls of dollars, and brings talent here from China and Yugoslavia, as well as stirring the hearts of wannabe six year olds, 1920s men’s basketball and current women’s basketball had/has a much weaker appeal.  The world’s potentially best basketball player from 1920 may well have been trading pork bellies, lumber and coffee in 1920, and the current potentially best woman player may well spend her days selling real estate in Orange County, CA.  My point is that there simply is not sufficient quality among minorities or females with an interest in a bureaucratic or creative positions in the Arts to justify full demographic representation.  I am reminded of a problem the air force had with filling jet fighter positions with women; in order to please the bureaucrats they promoted second rate female fighter pilots whose abilities were below that required of men.  The result was a high death rate and the loss of expensive jets.

The next greatest fighter pilot or world class artist may be a woman or be from Puerto Rico (or both), but that does not mean that the aggregate of women or minorities who wish to be fighter pilots or world class artists are as good as the aggregate of men or European-Americans who wish for the same.

It is common among female politicians and CEOS to have more balls than their male peers.  Such people do not succeed because of their feminine attributes, but rather because of their ability to ape masculine ones, and often because they copy the worst attributes of their male peers.  Likewise, most of the successful female and minority artists succeed by adhering strictly to the mental concepts of the bureaucrats promoting the idea of female and minority art.  Bringing such mental concepts (and its attendant worship of the mind) to art is antithetical to real art, just as a female CEO cut off from her femininity is antithetical to real business.

The worship of ideas automatically divorces the worshiper from reality.  Just so do we arrive at a world, in this case the art world, where all the leaders are exactly the worst ones for the job.

Transferors of Risk

Nassim NIcholsas Taleb has written a book called Skin in the Game. In it he talks about how today’s bureaucrats, politicians and business leaders do not have skin the game. Like the bailed out banks in 2008, these people share in the upside but not the downside. They are transferors of risk. He argues that those who don’t take risks should never be involved in making decisions. Below is a quote:

“This idea of skin in the game is woven into history; historically, all warlords and warmongers were warriors themselves, and, with a few curious exceptions, societies were run by risk takers, not risk transferors.

Prominent people took risks – considerably more risks than ordinary citizens. The Roman emperor Julian the Apostate, about whom much later, died on the battlefield fighting the never-ending war on the Persian frontier – while emperor. One may only speculate about Julius Caesar, Alexander, and Napoleon, owing to the usual legend-building by historians, but here the proof is stark. There is no better historical evidence of an emperor taking a frontline position in battle than a Persian spear lodged in his chest (Julian omitted to wear protective armor). One of his predecessors, Valerian, was captured on the same frontier, and was said to have been used as a human footstool by the Persian Shapur when mounting his horse. And the last Byzantine emperor, Constantine XI Palaecologus, was last seen when he removed his purple toga, then joined Ioannis Dalmatus and his cousin Theophishis Palaeologus to charge the Turkish troops with their swords above their heads, proudly facing certain death. Yet legend has it that Constantine had been offered a deal in the event of a surrender. Such deals are not for the self-respecting kings.

These are not isolated anecdotes. The statistical reasoned in this author is quite convinced: less than a third of Roman emperors died in their beds – and one can argue that given that only few of these died of really old age, had they lived longer, they would have fallen either to a coup or in battle.”

“Some think that freeing ourselves from having warriors at the top means civilization and progress. It does not. Meanwhile:


Progress is an Illusion

Technology once had actual and real benefits. The roof, the shelf, the wheel and fire were beneficial without substantial negative side effects. For some time new technology has focused on making money and benevolent outcomes are no longer the rule. Below are two examples of the fruitlessness of commercially driven tech.

The replacement of the cash register accomplished one simple transaction: the labor of accounting was transferred from the back office to the clerk and the customer. I was in Starbucks recently, ordering a simple tea for $2.45. The clerk punched at least 12 buttons to effect the transaction. This was with the computer working (not always the case) and with an experienced clerk. While a plus for the company, with a lower paid clerk doing the work rather than a higher paid accountant, it is numbing work and a waste of the customer’s time. It works because everyone has transferred the accounting function to the point of sale, so customers have no choice in the matter and have acclimated to the negative tech.

Attorneys are largely devoted to words on paper. One would think that the advent of “word processing” would have reduced the number of hours attorneys, paralegals and secretaries devote to each document, and a substantial lowering of the cost to the client. Yet such as not occurred. A relaxed and sloppy approach to creating documents has resulted in endless revisions. The time and cost savings haven’t materialized. In addition, despite word processing being the screwdriver of technologies, where one would expect a standard method would make it a one-time learning event, typist have had to contend with a seemingly endless parade of new products (remember Workperfect?) and upgrades. Imagine the screwdriver you bought in 1988 suddenly stops works.

Other technologies look better on the surface, but that is because the negative outcomes are so hidden and complex that they cannot be easily ferreted out. Technology for financial gain plays on people’s penchant for novelty and their fear of being left out. It is a pernicious and likely fatal ploy. As in all things in duality, we activate two polarities with our every action. As long as corporations and customers ignore this, unintended consequences will dominate.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

From his blog:


When selecting a surgeon for your next brain procedure, should you pick a surgeon who looks like a butcher or one who looks like a surgeon? The logic of skin in the game implies you need to select the one who (while credentialed) looks the least like what you would expect from a surgeon, or, rather, the Hollywood version of a surgeon.

The same logic mysteriously answers many vital questions, such as 1) the difference between rationality and rationalization, 2) that between virtue and virtue signaling, 3) the nature of honor and sacrifice, 4) Religion and signaling (why the pope is functionally atheist) 5) the justification for economic inequality that doesn’t arise from rent seeking, 6) why to never tell people your forecasts (only discuss publicly what you own in your portfolio) and, 7) even, how and from whom to buy your next car.


My argument is that there is a more essential aspect: filtering and the facilitation of evolution. Skin in the game –as a filter –is the central pillar for the organic functioning of systems, whether humans or natural. Unless consequential decisions are taken by people who pay for the consequences, the world would vulnerable to total systemic collapse. And if you wonder why there is a current riot against a certain class of self-congratulatory “experts”, skin the game will provide a clear answer: the public has viscerally detected that some “educated” but cosmetic experts have no skin in the game and will never learn from their mistakes, whether individually or, more dangerously, collectively.

Have you wondered why, on high-speed highways there are surprisingly few rogue drivers who could, with a simple manoeuver, kill scores of people? Well, they would also kill themselves and most dangerous drivers are already dead (or with suspended license). Driving is done under the skin in the game constraint, which acts as a filter. It’s a risk management tool by society, ingrained in the ecology of risk sharing in both human and biological systems. The captain who goes down with the ship will no longer have a ship. Bad pilots end up in the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean; risk-blind traders become taxi drivers or surfing instructors (if they traded their own money).


Yet the social science and the bureaucrato-BSers have missed and keeps missing that skin in the game is an essential filter. Why? Because, outside of hard science, scholars who do not have skin in the game fail to get that while in academia there is no difference between academia and the real world, in the real world, there is. They teach evolution in the classrooms but, because they are not doers, they don’t believe that evolution applies to them; they almost unanimously vote in favor of a large state and advocate what I’ve called “Soviet-Harvard top-down intelligent design” in social life.

As illustrated by the story of the surgeon, you can tell, from the outside, if a discipline has skills and expertise, from the presence of the pressures of skin in the game and some counterintuitive consequences. But what we call “empty suits”, of the kind you see in think tanks or large corporations –those who want to increasingly run our lives or intervene in Libya — look like actors playing the part, down to their vocabulary and the multiplicative meetings. Talk is cheap and people who talk and don’t do are easily detectable by the public because they are too good at talking.

Plumbers, bakers, engineers, and piano tuners are judged by their clients, doctors by their patients (and malpractice insurers), and small town mayors by their constituents. The works of mathematicians, physicists, and hard scientists are judged according to rigorous and unambiguous principles. These are experts, plus or minus a margin of error. Such selection pressures from skin in the game apply to perhaps 99% of the population. But it is hard to tell if macroeconomists, behavioral economists, psychologists, political “scientists” and commentators, and think-tank policymakers are experts. Bureaucrato-academics tend to be judged by other bureaucrats and academics, not by the selection pressure of reality. This judgment by peers only, not survival, can lead to the pestilence of academic citation rings. The incentive is to be published on the right topic in the right journals, with well sounding arguments, under easily some contrived empiricism, in order to beat the metrics.

Accountants, not other “peer” forecasters, nor referees using metrics should be judging forecasters.

Metrics are always always gamed: a politician can load the system with debt to “improve growth and GDP”, and let his successor deal with the delayed results.

Alas, you can detect the degradation of the aesthetics of buildings when architects are judged by other architects. So the current rebellion against bureaucrats whether in DC or Brussels simply comes from the public detection of a simple principle: the more micro the more visible one’s skills. To use the language of complexity theory, expertise is scale dependent. And, ironically, the more complex the world becomes, the more the role of macro-deciders “empty suits” with disproportionate impact should be reduced: we should decentralize (so actions are taken locally and visibly), not centralize as we have been doing.

In addition, owning one’s risk was an unescapable moral code for past four millennia, until very recent times. War mongers were required to be warriors. Fewer than a third of Roman emperors died in their bed (assuming those weren’t skillfully poisoned). Status came with increased exposure to risk: Alexander, Hannibal, Scipio, and Napoleon were not only first in battle, but derived their authority from a disproportionate exhibition of courage in previous campaigns. Courage is the only virtue that can’t be faked (or gamed like metrics). Lords and knights were individuals who traded their courage for status, as their social contract was an obligation to protect those who granted them their status. This primacy of the risk-taker, whether warrior (or, critically, merchant), prevailed almost all the time in almost every human civilization; exceptions, such as Pharaonic Egypt or Ming China, in which the bureaucrat-scholar moved to the top of the pecking order were followed by collapse.

A Quote About the News

The goal of news isn’t to keep you informed. It’s to entertain and outrage. That’s what the incentive structure underlying the modern media system is built on. If our outlets were actually reporting the events of the world as they are, 90 out of 100 days would be so mundane that you would never want to hear from them again. – Zat Rana

Bio-Spiritual Harvesting

Below is an excerpt from Lisa Renee’s newsletter. The full article can be found here: https://energeticsynthesis.com/resource-tools/news-shift-timelines/3274-bio-spiritual-harvesting



Spiritual Abuse in Organ and Tissue Donation















Universal Human Body








Cosmobiology and Medical Astrology










Physiology Correlated to the Galactic Zodiac












Aquarius – ankles, lower limbs, circulatory system.


body parts


Ophiuchus is the Trine Unifier















With a Loving heart, Lisa

The Sweet Spots of the 2000s

The 1900s were a century of extremes. It was also a masculine decade (1900 = 1). Examples of this include nuclear bombs, LSD, abnormal psychology, world wars, computers and successful manipulations by the cyrptocracy. As with all cycles (presidential, climate, war), an adjacent century such as the 2000s will exhibit opposite characteristics.* First of all, it is a feminine century (2000 = 2). Secondly, it is about the sweet spots hidden in plain sight, far from the extremes that were manifested in the 1900s. I say this not because of a plethora of signals in these first eighteen years of the 2000s, but because I have sensed it for some time and the rule of cycles suggests it to be true. The feminine aspect will likely exhibit itself more profoundly by the year 2022, which is rich in twos.

What do I mean by sweet spots? My favorite physical example is the Trojan points. These are the locations between Earth and Moon that have the unique and valuable characteristic that anything placed at these points, whether a walnut or a factory, will remain at that location indefinitely.  In other words, no energy is required to keep the object from falling into either the Earth or the Moon or any other direction. This is a valuable characteristic; it is the non-Terra version of holding the high ground. As of yet, no one and no nation has laid claim to these points, but in this century they will. It is a sweet spot, hiding in plain sight. I do not doubt that cheap, uncentralized energy will be uncovered in this century, and likely a host of other valuable and surprisingly easy opportunities. “Why didn’t I think of that?” will be on everyone’s lips.

The message of these opportunities comes from outside this universe, and in most instances only a minority of people have the antennae necessary to pick them up. Many are already capturing these thoughts and many sweet spots are already under investigation.

One symptom of the sweet spots, and perhaps even a valuable lynchpin, is the dethroning of the mind. As long as the mind has primacy, the “how” of everything will be center-stage. How to avoid taxes, how to win the presidency and how to make a million dollars all rest on the cleverness of the mind. The Human mind, however, pales in power next to Human intentions and emotions. The mind is capable of much, but it is both a quagmire and a ghetto; once trapped there a great many options disappear, including the sweet spots I am talking about.

The HBO show Curb Your Enthusiasm has plugged into a sweet spot. Lauded comedy tv show writer and now actor, Larry David, has completely abandoned written dialogue for his popular show. The raw emotions and interesting tendency for real people to talk on top of each other appear on this comedy show where the writer gives direction but leaves the actual dialogue in the mouths of the actors. Writing a scene where two people speak at once is difficult in itself, and even more difficult to execute in a satisfactory manner. By offering an intention for the scene and being open to the interpretations of the actors, David has moved television into a sweet spot that in time others will pursue.

At its core the dethroning of the mind involves two opposite poles of a polarity. The most relevant is this intention/openness polarity. Duality demands that for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. When we create with full polarities in mind we tap higher order energies. Whether it’s the creative response of an actor to freedom from the written word, or simply the arrival of serendipity and synchronicity, this approach naturally gravitates to the sweet spots of any situation.

With the full throttle control of any “how” we assert our cleverness. In abdicating the how of any situation in favor of intentional openness we assert our wisdom. The 1900s were about extremes because that is where cleverness takes us. The 2000s are about sweet spots hiding in plain sight because that is where wisdom leads. The latter is a matter of dancing with nature and the universe with a sense of play. The former is all about control and is akin to raping nature and the universe. The two different outcomes (think Monsanto)  are exactly what you would expect.

*I am particularly intrigued by the cycle of Bush to Obama to Trump. The Bush/Obama polarity is classic good cop/bad cop. Bush illegally searches our car and then whacks us in the head with a telephone directory. Obama shows up with a smile and a Coke (and a lie on his lips). The Obama/Trump polarity is entirely different. Here we have the very good fake, Obama (think how much better he looks and sounds versus the very bad fake Hillary), followed by the very real, but bad real, Trump. Once again I associate Obama with a can of Coke; it’s a fake food, but oh how we love it. Trump, on the other hand, is real, but he’s the real of halitosis and neurosis. These two polarities, Bush/Obama and Obama/Trump, make we wonder about future plans for Obama. If you wear glasses you know well the experience of the optician having you look through different lenses. He is continually asking you, A or B? C or D? as he narrows down to a proper prescription for our eyes. It’s notable that Obama is favored in each of the polarities. No one wants to be facing a cop in an interrogation room, and no one likes a fake person, but given the options offered most will choose Obama the “good” cop and fake. Everyone knows that Coke is bad for them, but how many still indulge in this comfort food? Just so does social engineering proceed in its clever fashion.