Many a decade ago, the filmmaker Stanley Kubrick very wisely observed the following about

human nature: "Man is capable of the greatest good and the worst evil. But the problem is that
he often can't tell the difference between the two when it suits his purpose."

Paraphrased, the above quote says: If a man has skin in the game, he will do ANYTHING to
save his skin.

This observation astutely summarizes the central fallacy in Nassim Nicholas Taleb's latest book
of unfiltered BS, Skin in the Game. Having skin in the game means to be exposed to both the
downside as well as the upside of a recommendation, a decision, an investment. Pinhead Taleb
thinks this can induce a self-corrective loop into the financial world, or generally speaking, "the
system." If you suggest an economic policy to the government as an economic advisor, and you
are not personally exposed to the fallout from that policy should it fail, then you don't have any
skin in the game. If you are a hedge fund manager who manages other peoples money but have
none of your own money invested in the same fund, then you have no skin in the game. Having
no skin in the game has the dangerous outcome that such poisonous rats will continue to plague
the system forever. Having skin in the game, on the other hand, will eliminate these rats when
their decisions fail. Therefore, Taleb reckons, having skin in the game will introduce a self-
corrective mechanism into the system, and the system will be better off as a result.

Sounds reasonable.

Except, human nature, as Kubrick observed, doesn't yield to your simplistic BS theories that
plainly. The following is a critique of the double-edged sword that is skin in the game, keeping in
mind, of course, that none of this is to say that skin in the game is necessarily bad in all
situations. This is just an outline of when it fails, and fail it does catastrophically. The sheer
complexity of coping mechanisms that the human mind is capable of will ensure that no one
outsmarts it for very long, least of all a BS-peddling charlatan, a self-supposed contrarian genius
who comes along to tell us that weve had it backwards all along. (My, my! Isnt he the godsend
to all our troubles?)

Let's begin with the case of a suicide bomber. A suicide bomber has skin in the game, both
figuratively and literally. And yet, that does not stop him from destroying the system: the world.
He copes with the certainty of his imminent death by creating the fantasy of an afterlife in
paradise. As far as he is concerned, he is upgrading his lifestyle. But reality, in which the rest of
us live, will be grieving at the funerals of the innocent. There is no point in waiting till skin in the
game eliminates all potential suicide bombers from the human gene pool, because these barbaric
savages will not rest till they've killed every infidel in the world. Nobody with even a single
functional brain cell would call this world better off the bomber having his skin in the game
hasnt made the world a better place.

Secondly, skin in the game also goes by another name: conflict of interest. With the exception of
the category of suicide bombers noted above, if a man has skin in the game, he will do anything,
ANYTHING, to save his skin, even if it means harm to others. He won't see it as harming others,
because, referring back to the Kubrick quote, he cannot tell the difference between helping and
harming when his personal interests are involved.

Skin in the game is the reason why when businessmen become bureaucrats, they are expected to
not have any stake in any of the companies that could profit from the policy decisions they
influence in the government. Skin in the game is the reason why you should always be skeptical
of a doctor prescribing any drug that the doctor profits from. Skin in the game is the reason why
profiteers of war are not allowed anywhere near the war room. Finally, and most devastatingly,
skin in the game is also the reason why the Koch brothers spend billions of dollars lobbying for
climate change denial groups and pushing bills that help the oil industry outstay its welcome.
Think about that for a second: Skin in the game is pushing the Koch brothers to destroy the
planet for all future generations! If thats not wicked, what else is?

Thirdly, not having skin in the game allows you to be objective in a way that having skin in the
game doesn't. The slave-holding states of the American antebellum South wanted to secede from
the Union primarily, though not solely, because of the issue of slavery (they used the clever
euphemism "our way of life" as a placeholder for "slavery", as in, "The northerners object to our
way of life," when really the only thing the northerners objected to was the practice of slavery).
The abolitionists of the North had no skin in the cotton business game; only the southern
plantation owners did, and cotton was the prime mover of the southern economy. Slavery was
crucial to the cotton business. Small wonder, then, that southerners wanted to keep slavery alive
and northerners wanted to abolish it. Skin in the game had convinced the antebellum South to
prolong one of the worst practices mankind has ever stained itself with. It took the objectivity of
the likes of Lincoln and the congressmen, and the lives of thousands of heroic men of the Union
army to rid the world of this heinous institution and make it a better place to live in. Skin in the
game had only made it worse. Had Taleb lived during the Civil War, he would have accused
Abraham Lincoln of not having any skin in the cotton game and asked him to thus refrain from
trying to ratify the Thirteenth Amendment to the US Constitution (the one abolishing slavery).
In his own words, which he often likes to use on his detractors, Taleb is a f#@king idiot!

Finally, BS King Taleb likes to cite the example of

Clearly, the nuances of accountability escape the author of this book.

The other equally flawed idea central to this book is what is called the Lindy effect.

I have followed the works of Nassim Taleb and Richard Dawkins for well over a decade now. I
have learned a lot from them, no doubt. But steadily, the more I read, the less I respected both of
them. I now consider them both to be nothing more than opinionated old farts who cannot
analyze any idea in all its dimensions, who fall in love with their ideas too much to see what's
wrong with it, and who shut out criticism and live in a bubble of safe space. Taleb even tweeted
recently about how no one has ever been able to point out anything wrong with any of his ideas.
Sheesh!

His exact tweet was:

"Mr Taleb: I don't always agree with you, but.."

Me: "Can you first tell me what you disagree with, something concrete?"

"I'll get back to you on that"

An insecure snowflake of a man who blocks/bans every dissenting voice on Twitter, who disables the
comments on his blog posts on Media, and lives in his own cyber safe space not unlike the safe space in
American universities, has the audacity to claim that no one has found anything disagreeable with his
ideas.