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Takeaways from Nassim Taleb's New Book “Skin in the Game”
- shaki-dora 9y agoThis reads like a collection of self-help motivational posters sold at a Milwaukee alt-right “how to make money from home” convention.
- IntronExon 9y agoLook at the list of top 100 favorite books on this site. At least half are self-help. Taleb sure knows his audience.
- announcerman 9y agoWhat's the problem with self-help books? Do their authors generally lack skin in the game?
- IntronExon 9y agoIt’s a huge industry which typically makes outlandish and largely unfounded claims... it’s the homeopathy of literature. Like homeopathy it typically targets the desperate and insecure.
- coldsauce 9y agoI think this is a really interesting point. I used to be all over self-help books because I wanted to improve myself, but it seems to me as though so many authors just regurgitate the same points over and over again with tired anecdotes mixed in.
- rtx 9y agoHard Things About Hard Things really helped my career. It could be a placebo.
- IntronExon 9y agoI don’t think that justifies the industry as a whole, but I believe that for the right person at the right time, these books can be of some use. I suspect that the people, such as yourself, who get something out of them would have found what they were looking for anyway however. The commonalities in people who benefit from occasional self help seem to be committed to change, to improvement, and I think that more than anything else is the active ingredient.
- tclancy 9y agoWhenever someone wants to sell you their path to success, you need to ask why.
- mseebach 9y agoIt's shocking that a short listicle on a site named "Nuggets of Thought" would have such a quality to it.
- soVeryTired 9y agoI enjoyed the Guardian's (satirical) digest so much: https://amp.theguardian.com/books/2018/feb/25/skin-in-the-game-by-nassim-nicholas-taleb-digested-read https://amp.theguardian.com/books/2018/feb/25/skin-in-the-ga...
- Treegarden 9y agoThanks, I enjoyed it too. Why is "black swan" so popular here on HN though?
- dalbasal 9y agocould be several reasons. It was a good book, timely. For HN-relevance specifically, maybe http://www.paulgraham.com/swan.html http://www.paulgraham.com/swan.html
- protoplant 9y agoI would say because software engineers often work in mission critical systems where risk is a factor, and his job as a guy finding flaws in risk models on wall street, gave him insight on that topic. Like maybe some kinds of bugs are like tail end risk.
- wand3r 9y ago> Having skin in the game means reading the Code of Hammurabi. And, because I’ve got skin in the game, I didn’t trust other people’s translations. I took time out to learn the ancient Babylonian script myself. Turns out the translations were pretty accurate after all. I actually laughed out loud. The thing about Taleb that gets said often is if he just shut the hell up after The Black Swan he would be hailed as a genius.
- OscarTheGrinch 9y agoI enjoyed Black Swan: "Everyone is doing statistics wrong, except me" and was about to read Anti-fragile... Maybe I will quit while he is ahead.
- marklgr 9y agoAre there new ideas in this book that were not discussed in his previous ones? I can grind my teeth and put up with the insufferable style if there is something valuable to learn, but from what I've seen so far, it seems to be the same themes, with different emphasis.
- ssivark 9y agoI’ve found that watching his hour long talks is a better way to get the ideas than reading his books. Which is a pity, because his books could pack quite a punch if they had an editor who could cut the size down by 2/3. Many authors might have the arrogance but Taleb also has the money — he can afford to not listen to an editor :P That said, while his style can be annoying, I find his ideas to be a breath of fresh air. Haven’t read SITG fully, but it seems like the book is a natural follow-up to Antifragile, analyzing social setups and human institutions from the viewpoint of whom they render fragile/anti fragile.
- sincerely 9y agoMan, what happened to Nassim Taleb? I remember Black Swan (to a degree) and Fooled by Randomness being pretty illuminating reads but I couldn't finish Antifragile and his Twitter activity is...kind of unsettling, to say the least.
- qubex 9y ago(In hindsight) I have had the good fortune of being banned by Taleb in his twitter account. A friend that laid low sometimes forwards me screenshots of his rantings and ravings and... I’m regularly amazed.
- burger_moon 9y agoI have gotten at least one good thing out of occasionally looking over his twitter and that was his retweets of @cuttheknotmath, who posts fun math questions daily. Everything else had me scratching my head wondering why he is usually so highly regarded on here. I am enjoying the Black Swan right now, it's the first book I've read of his, but he really goes off the deep end on twitter.
- qubex 9y agoAnd through his writings (either Fooled by Randomness or The Black Swan) I discovered Paul Wilmott and his very lucid writings on quantitative finance.
- tryitnow 9y agoIronically, he has no real "skin in the game" on almost every topic he talks about, which kind of proves the point of this book. It's sad really. If he didn't have such a narcissistic personality and possessed more modesty he could have been one of the great thinkers of our day. His life is a cautionary tale.
- bbctol 9y agoIt's so remarkable I'd almost think it's some kind of long performance art piece. There's a very surreal moment when you've read a bunch of Taleb's writing on the importance of honor and craft and the problems with detached, thin-skinned pseudo-intellectuals who get involved in fields they don't understand and constantly bullshit to prop up their egos... and then check out his twitter. It's the best lesson of all: no one wants to do the hard part, not even the ones telling you to do the hard part. Even writing a book about how important it is to have skin in the game doesn't cover up not having skin in the game.
- arbuge 9y ago>> No person in a transaction should have certainty about the outcome while the other one has uncertainty. Ironic in view of the top post on HN right now. Doctors and surgeons pretty much always have certainty about their part of the transaction (receiving payment for their services) in medical interventions. The patient's outcome tends to be much more uncertain.
- longerthoughts 9y ago>Avoid taking advice from someone who gives advice for a living So by taking his advice we're ignoring his advice and by ignoring his advice we're taking his advice? Well isn't this a fun little paradox.
- TuringNYC 9y agoOriginally, the distinction was that Nassim Tableb literally had skin in the game via his hedge fund that essentially invested in the Black Swan strategy (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Empirica_Capital https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Empirica_Capital) Now it seems he wants to be a full-time author (I wasn't seeing purchasing a book as purchasing advice as much as reading a literary work from someone I admire.)
- scrumper 9y agoLooks like it's time to add NNT to the Stephen Wolfram list of people whom it's fashionable to criticize reflexively because of their style. I've been reading the draft chapters of this latest book on Medium for a while now. There is real insight here, at least to someone like me who isn't smart enough to have figured the entire world out from first principles yet.
- shaki-dora 9y agoNo, you’re misunderstanding (some) of the criticism. I actually enjoyed Fooled by Randomness mostly because of the meandering style. I loathe his recent work, both on paper and onTwitter, because he’s turned into just another “The West is commiting suicide” islamophobe (plus the usual assortment of misogyny and fawning over dictators like Duterte).
- whitepoplar 9y agoThat's not completely fair. In his latest interview with Gad Saad, he makes the critical distinction between the danger of Salafism/Wahhabism and the relative benign nature of Shiite Islam. He takes offense at "BS vendors" like Sam Harris who lump all of Islam into a fearmongering category.
- shaki-dora 9y agoThe “suicide” line was a direct quote from a recent article of his. It just struck a chord with me because that exact phrase happens to be one of the slogans of my country’s alt-right party. In the article, he mostly talked about the danger of allowing halal food in “our” supermarkets. Since Shiites share their Sunni breathrens’ food preferences, Taleb should maybe take more care to allow his nuanced view of the world to shine through in his shorter works, lest he be misunderstood for an old egomaniac trying to ride the current wave of hatred to one last moment in the spotlight.
- scrumper 9y agoRe: Halal - That part of the book[1] talks about minority rule and the idea of 'renormalization groups' (I suspect not really the same thing as the identically-named concept in mathematics). It covers Kosher food, organic food, non-GMO food, Halal food, Christian intolerance, and politics. So saying it is about the "danger of halal food in our supermarkets" isn't accurate. It is explaining the mechanism by which a small, intolerant minority is able to have its views spread. [1] http://fooledbyrandomness.com/minority.pdf http://fooledbyrandomness.com/minority.pdf
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- guiomie 9y agoI really liked Black Swan, but I started following Nassim on Twitter and he is really annoying. He's got this superiority complex, and I'm not sure I want to subsidize his ego by buying this book.
- kristianc 9y agoThe best thing you can say about Taleb is that he appeals to the kind of guys who put modal email signup boxes on their websites.
- csomar 9y agoThis guy has became annoying. At least to me. > Laws come and go; ethics stay. Ethics? Really? What are ethics? Who set them? Who enforces them? Where do they come from? We should first agree that there is no god. Therefore, there is no such thing as "universal ethics". Everything is relative to the person. More like: Have a set of ethics and stick to them. Everyone is free to have his own ethics but if you are a serious person you should not switch your ethics because of the situation. But then maybe your ethic is to be flexible toward the situation. Then you should change them every time the situation changes. Oh, this is messy better look up to what the law says. > If you hear advice from a grandmother or elders, odds are that it works 90 percent of the time. No. 90% of what my grand-father says and recommend is completely irrelevant to todays' world and harmful due to his lack of knowledge about finance, economics and the modern world.
- contact_fusion 9y agoIt sounds like you have a particular viewpoint - atheistic ethical relativism. I'm sure you can appreciate that the existence of god and the existence of universal ethics are two separate questions. (Example: a universe with a god, just one that is morally ambiguous.) Of course Taleb has condensed several different thoughts into a single aphorism. One might be that laws (civilizations, governments) tend to not last as long as broad ethical traditions. Another is the observation that what is legal is rarely what is right. Yet another is framing what should be a guide to your behavior: do what is most consistent with what you believe is right, not what is legal. Some of what you are saying is related to the grand challenge of ethical philosophy. But your solution, relying on the law, will probably result in some pretty bad consequences, especially when you think about how laws are made - and that laws are sometimes used as a cover for bad behavior. Taleb is saying (among other things) that you should think about your ethical choices on the terms of your own ethics rather than appealing to some other authority (the law) as a guide for your actions. He is being a bit pretentious while making this point but the logic is sound, I think. Personally I agree that Taleb's point about grandmotherly knowledge is a bit silly, but I think the underlying idea is well taken. Absent any fundamental understanding of how the world works, people still had to figure out how to survive in that world. Those that survived probably have made some choices that - perhaps in hindsight - aren't that dumb. That being said, the world is changing faster than ever before, so I think Taleb's analogy is very weak. I also find his point to be in contradiction with other things he has said before: notice that he has assigned some meaningless quantification of uncertainty ("90%") to the quality of this grandmotherly knowledge. Such a number has no basis in reality, and stinks of the type of probabilistic ignorance he rails against.
- bradknowles 9y agoTelling me I’m useless if I don’t start my own business ... well, that’s a pretty good way to get me to ignore everything he might say. There’s lots of things I can do in this world, but I have learned first hand that I am worse than useless at the starting/running a business thing.