Skin in the Game by Nassim Taleb, r. Sep. 2018

p. 14 So learning isn’t quite what teach inmates inside the high-security prisons called schools. In biology, learning is something that, through the filter of intergenerational selection, gets imprinted at the cellular level – skin in the game, I insist, is more filter than deterrence. Evolution can only happen if risk of extinction is present. Further,
There is no Evolution without skin in the game.
This last point is quite obvious, but I keep seeing academics with no skin in the game defend evolution while at the same time rejecting skin in the game and risk sharing. They refuse the notion of design by a creator who knows everything, while, at the same time, want to impose human design as if they knew all the consequences. In general, the more people worship the sacrosanct state (or, equivalently, large corporations), the more they hate skin in the game. The more they believe in their ability to forecast, the more they hate skin in the game. The more they wear suits and ties, the more they hate skin in the game.

p.19 We rapidly go through the rules to the right of Hammurabi. Leviticus is a sweetening of Hammurabi’s rule. The Golden Rule wants you to Treat others the way you would like them to treat you. The more robust Silver Rule says Do not treat others the way you not like them to treat you. More robust? How? Why is the Silver Rule more robust?
First, it tells you to mind your own business and not decide what is “good” for others. We know with much more clarity what is bad than what is good. The Silver Rule can be seen as the Negative Golden Rule, and as I am shown by my Calabrese (and Calabrese-speaking) barber every three weeks, via negativa (acting by removing) is more powerful and less error-prone than via positiva (acting by addition).

p. 38 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.

p. 58 Things don't “scale” and generalize, which is why I have trouble with intellectuals talking about abstract notions. A country is not a large city, a city is not a large family, and, sorry, the world is not a large village.

p. 60 But we don’t have to go very far to get the importance of scaling. You know instinctively that people get along better as neighbors than roommates.

p. 61 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.

If that saying doesn’t convince you of the fatuousness of left vs. right labels, nothing will.

p. 65 Now can one make medicine less asymmetric? Not directly; the solution, as I have argued in Antifragile and more technically elsewhere, is for the patient to avoid treatment when he or she is mildly ill, but use medicine for the “tail events,” that is, for rarely encountered severe conditions. The problem is that the mildly ill represent a much larger pool of people than the severely ill – and are people who are expected to live longer and consume drugs for longer – hence pharmaceutical companies have an incentive to focus on them. (Dead people, I am told, stop taking drugs.)

p. 82 And it was not because pagans had na intellectual deficit: in fact, my heuristic is that the more pagan, the more brilliant one’s mind, and the higher one’s ability to handle nuances and ambiguity. Purely monotheistic religions such as Protestant Christianity, Salafi Islam, or fundamentalist atheism accommodate literalist and mediocre minds that cannot handle ambiguity.

p. 83 Let us conjecture that the formation of moral values in society doesn’t come from evolution of the consensus. No, it is the most intolerant person who imposes virtue on others precisely because of that intolerance. The same can apply to civil rights.

p. 86  So, we need to be more than intolerant with some intolerant minorities. Simply, they violate the Silver Rule. It is not permissible to use “American values” or “Western principles” in treating intolerant Salafism (which denies other peoples’ right to have their own religion). The West is currently in the processo of committing suicide.

p. 105 What matters isn’t what a person has or doesn’t have; it is what he or she is afraid of losing.

p. 129 In this chapter, I will propose that what people resent – or should resent – is the person at the top who has no skin in the game, that is, because he doesn’t bear his allotted risk, he is immune to the possibility of falling from his pedestal, exiting his income or wealth bracket, and waiting in line outside the soup kitchen. Again, on that account, the detractor of Donald Trump, when he was still a candidate, not only misunderstood the value of scars as risk signaling, but they also failed to realize that, by advertising his episode of bankrupcy and his personal losses of close to a billion dollars, he removed the resentment (the second type of inequality) people may have had toward him. There is something respectable in losing a billion dollars, provided it is your own money.

p. 131 Consider that about 10 percent of Americans will spend at least a year in the top 1 percent, and more than half of all Americans will spend a year in the top 10 percent. This is visibly not the same for the more static – but nominally more equal – Europe. For instance, only 10 percent of the wealthiest five hundred American people or dynasties were so thirty year ago; more than 60 percent on the French list are heirs and a third of the richest Europeans were the richest centuries ago. In Florence, it was just revealed that things are even worse: the same handful of families have kept the wealth for five centuries.

p. 142 In probability, volatility and time are the same. The idea of fragility helped put some rigor around the notion that the only effective judge of things is time – by things we mean ideas, people, intellectual productions, car models, scientific theories, books, etc. You can’t fool Lindy: books of the type written by the current hotshot Op-Ed writer at The New York Times may get some hype at publication time, manufactured or spontaneous, but their five-year survival rate is generally less than that of pancreatic cancer.

p. 152 Madness of crowds: Nietzsche: Madness is rare in individuals, but in groups, parties, nations, it is the rule. (This counts as ancient wisdom since Nietzsche was a classicista; I’ve seen many such references in Plato.)

p. 152 The Paradox of progress, and the paradox of choice: There is a familiar story of a New Yorker 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 a vacation in Greece; something that seemed ludicrous to the fisherman, who was already there doing the king of things bankers do when they go on vacation in Greece.

p. 168 It hit me that the rich were natural targets; as the eponymous Thyestes shouts in Seneca’s tragedy, thieves do not enter impecunious homes, and one is more likely to be drinking poison in a golden cup than an ordinary one. Poison is drunk in golden cups (Venenum in auro bibitur).
It is easy to scam people by getting them into complications – the poor are spared that type of scamming. This is the same complication we saw in Chapter 9 that makes academics sell the most possibly complicated solution when a simple one can do. Further, the rich start using “experts” and “consultants.” An entire industry meant to swindle you swindle you: financial consultants, diet advisors, exercise experts, lifestyle engineers, sleeping councilors, breathing specialists, etc.
Hamburgers, to many of us, are vastly tastier than filet mignon because of the higher fat content, but people have been convinced that the latter is better because it is more expensive to produce.

p. 184 It is much more immoral to claim virtue without fully living with its direct consequences.
This will be the main topic of this chapter: exploiting virtue for image, personal gain, careers, social status, these kinds of things – and by personal gain I mean anything that does not share the downside of a negative action.

p. 185 Kids with rich parents talk about “class privilege" at privileged colleges such as Amherst – but in one instance, one of them could not answer Dinesh D’Souza’s simple and logical suggestion: Why don’t you go to the registrar’s office and give your privileged spot to the minority student next in line? Clearly the defense given by people under such a situation is that they want others to do so as well – they require a systemic solution to every local perceived problem of injustice. I find that immoral. I know of no ethical system that allows you to let someone drown without helping him because other people are not helping, no system that says, “I will save people from drowning if others too save other people from drowning.” Which brings us to the principle: If your private life conflicts with your intellectual opinion, it cancels your intellectual ideas, not your private life.

p. 199 My lifetime motto is that mathematicians think in (well, precisely defined and mapped) objects and relations, jurists and legal thinkers in constructs, logicians in maximally abstract operators, and ... fools in words. Two people can be using the same word, meaning different things, yet continue the conversation, which is fine for coffee, but not when making decisions, particularly policy decisions affecting others. But it is easy to trip them, as Socrates did, simply by asking them what they think they mean by what they said – hence philosophy was born as rigor is discourse and disentanglement of mixed-up notions, in precise opposition to the sophist’s promotion of rhetoric.

p. 200 For most Jews today, religion has become ethnocultural, without the law – and for many, a nation. Same for Armenians, Syrians, Chaldeans, Copts, and Maronites. For Orthodox and Catholic Christians, religion is largely aesthetics, pomp, and rituals. For Protestants, religion is belief without aesthetics, pomp, or law. Further East, for Buddhists, Shintoists, and Hindus, religion is a practical and spiritual philosophy, with a code of ethics (and for some, a cosmogony). So when Hindus talk about the Hindu “religion,” it doesn’t mean the same thing to a Pakistani, and would certainly mean something different to a Persian.

p. 231 All risks are not equal. We often hear that “Ebola is causing fewer deaths than people drowning in their bathtubs,” or something of the sort, based on “evidence.” This is another class of problems that your grandmother can get, but the semi-educated cannot. Never compare a multiplicative, systemic, and fat-tailed risk to a non-multiplicative, idiosyncratic, and thin-tailed one.

p. 233 Rationality is avoidance of systemic ruin.

p. 256 Compare someone with lumpy payoffs, say an entrepreneur who makes $4.5 million every twenty years, to an economics professor who earns the same total over the period ($225K in taxpayer-funded income). The entrepreneur over the very same income ends up paying 75 percent in taxes, plus wealth tax on the rest, while the rent-seeking tenured academic who doesn’t contribute to wealth formation pays say 30 percent.

P. 256 Satisficing: It is erroneous to think that the axioms necessarily lead one to “maximize” income without any constraint (academic economists have used naive mathematics in their optimization programs and thinking). It is perfectly compatible to “satisfice” their wealth, that is, shoot for a satisfactory income, plus maximize their fitness to the task, or the emotional pride they may have in seeing the fruits of their labor. Or not explicitly “maximize” anything, just do things because that is what makes us human.

Tribe by Sebastian Junger, r. Jun. 2017

p. xvi Robert Frost famously wrote that home is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in. The word "tribe" might be the people you feel compelled to share the last of your food with.

p. 65 To some degree the sexes are interchangeable - meaning they can be easily substituted for one another - but gender roles aren't. Both are necessary for the healthy functioning of society, and those roles will always be filled regardless of whether both sexes are available to do it.

p. 109 There are many costs to modern society, starting with its toll on the global ecosystem and working one's way down to its toll on the human psyche, but the most dangerous loss may be to community. If the human race is under threat in some way that we don't yet understand, it will probably be at the community level that we either solve the problem or fail to. If the future of the planet depends on, say, rationing water, communities of neighbors will be able to enforce new rules far more effectively than even local government. It's howe we evolved to exist, and it obviously works.

p. 112 In this sense, littering is an exceedingly petty version of claiming a billion-dollar bank bailout or fraudulently claiming disability payments. When you throw trash on the ground, you apparently don't see yourself as truly belonging to the world that you're walking around in. And when you fraudulently claim money from the government, you are ultimately stealing from your friends, family, and neighbors - or somebody else's friends, family, and neighbors. That diminishes you morally far more than it diminishes your country financially. My friend Ellis was once asked by a troubled young boy whether there was any compelling reason for him not to pull the legs off a spider. Ellis said that there was. "Well, spiders don't feel any pain," the boy retorted. "It's not the spider I'm worried about," Ellis said.

p. 127 The eternal argument over so-called entitlement programs - and, more broadly, over liberal and conservative though - will never be resolved because each side represents an ancient and absolutely essential component of our evolutionary past.

The Righteous Mind by Jonathan Haidt, r. Jun. 2016

p. 267 (Putnam and Campbell) "By many different measures, religiously observant Americans are better neighbors and better citizens than secular Americans - they are more generous with their time and money, especially in helping the needy, and they are more active in community life."

p. 267 Putnam and Campbell reject the New Atheist emphasis on belief and reach a conclusion straight out of Durkheim: "It is religious belongingness that matters for neighborliness, not religious believing."

p. 292 For example, on a small island or in a small town, you typically don't need to lock your bicycle, but in a big city in the same country, if you only lock the frame, your wheels may get stolen. Being small, isolated, or morally homogeneous are examples of environmental conditions that increase the moral capital of a community. That doesn't mean that small islands and small towns are better places to live overall - the diversity and crowding of big cities makes them more creative and interesting places for many people - but that's the trade-off. (Whether you'd trade away some moral capital to gain some diversity and creativity will depend in part on your brain's settings on traits such as openness to experience and threat sensitivity, and this is part of the reason why cities are usually so much more liberal than the countryside.)

p. 294 Nonetheless, if you are trying to change an organization or a society and you do not consider the effects of your changes on moral capital, you're asking for trouble. This, I believe, is the fundamental blind spot of the left. It explains why liberal reforms so often backfire, and why communist revolutions usually end up in despotism. It is the reason I believe that liberalism - which has done so much to bring about freedom and equal opportunity - is not sufficient as a governing philosophy. It tends to overreach, change too many things too quickly, and reduce the stock of moral capital inadvertently. Conversely, while conservatives do a better job of preserving moral capital, they often fail to notice certain classes of victims, fail to limit predations of certain powerful interests, and fail to see the need to change or update institutions as times change.

p. 294 (Bertrand Russell) "It is clear that each party to this dispute - as to all that persist through long periods of time - is partly right and partly wrong. Social cohesion is a necessity, and mankind has never yet succeeded in enforcing cohesion by merely rational arguments. Every community is exposed to two opposite dangers: ossification through too much discipline and reverence for tradition, on the one hand; on the other hand, dissolution, or subjection to foreign conquest, through the growth of an individualism and personal independence that makes cooperation impossible.

p. 305 I find it ironic that liberals generally embrace Darwin and reject "intelligent design" as the explanation for design and adaptation in the natural world, but they don't embrace Adam Smith as the explanation for design and adaptation in the economic world. They sometimes prefer the "intelligent design" of socialist economies, which often ends in disaster from a utilitarian point of view.

p. 317 If you bring one thing home from this last part of the trip, may I suggest that it be the image of a small bump on the back of our heads - the hive switch, just under the skin, waiting to be turned on. We've been told for fifty years now that human beings are fundamentally selfish. We're assaulted by reality TV programs showing people at their worst. Some people actually believe that a woman should shout "fire" if she's being raped, on the grounds that everyone is so selfish that they won't even come out to investigate unless they fear for their own lives. It's not true. We may spend most of our waking hours advancing our own interests, but we all have the capacity to transcend self-interest and become simply a part of a whole. It's not just a capacity; it's the portal to many of life's most cherished experiences.