This latest Taleb book is pure genius. The central premise is an expansion of chapter 23 (p.375) in Antifragile: it is zero sum games that are causing all the planet's problems (I'd add zero sum male games, but that's just me). Like Antifragile, this book will become a must read over and over in your armory of life lessons. As in the Skin in the Game Antifragile chapter, Nassim calls this zero sum "asymmetry of risk" but his practical yet poetic, hard hitting points sentence after sentence really become a new Profiles in Courage.
Unlike his buddy Pinker (see our review of his new book, also a planet-changing part of a duet not unlike Das Kapital vs. Origin of Species), Taleb is a devout Christian, and uses the Orthodox fast as an example of skin in the game, hearkening back to the sufferings and sacrifices of the world's Prophets to bring about evolutionary change. It is a refreshing contrast to Pinker's Atheism to see Social and Economic Justice, though sharply mathematical and scientific, also fearlessly remembering God. And it TAKES that kind of skin in today's academic milieu!
The KEY here, both for personal joy and evolution, and the planet's, is the power of the "minority" to bring about Economic Justice ("symmetry") despite powerful forces arrayed against it. And a minority is not now just a homogenous set (women, African Americans, Native Americans etc.) in Taleb's incredible re-definition, it is ANY smaller group (including heterogenous, hearkening to the white supporter of MLK or the Muslim supporters of persecuted Baha'is in Iran), with the COURAGE to promote symmetry.
I'm personally a more conservative old, white, female mathematician, but I find Taleb's bridging of differences with the concepts of symmetry and zero sum games so ably launched in Antifragile a real potential bridge in the vast divides shaking planetary civilization to its core. I have colleagues who read ANTIFRAGILE a minimum of two to four times a year (and at 500 pages that's no mean feat). I predict Skin in the Game, as a wonderful expansion of chapter 23 there, will become a similar delight. Highly recommended.
Disclosure: although I bought both the hard copy and Kindle version personally, Nassim/publisher also sent an advance review copy, and although the idea was more going in detail over the math in the appendices, I've chosen to give a more general take. To reviewers who have slammed the math, I will be happy to go toe to toe with you on the stats in other forums, as a general review is not the place to get into gamma functions, but the math IS solid and insightful, and corrects a number of inaccuracies in, for example, Marx's theories of social and economic justice, particularly in the means of production.
What I'd add: I'm on the numerical analysis/ computer science side of computational math, and I'd suggest Dr. Nassim expand his approach to include amazing new IT tools and technologies that have the potential to IMPLEMENT Economic Justice an Skin in the game, such as Blockchain technologies.
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| The Black Swan, Second Edition | Fooled by Randomness | Antifragile | The Bed of Procrustes | Incerto, Deluxe Box Set | |
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| The most influential book of the past seventy-five years: a groundbreaking exploration of everything we know about what we don’t know, now with a new section called “On Robustness and Fragility.” | An investigation about luck–or more precisely, about how we perceive and deal with luck in life and business. | Through deep investigation and insight, Antifragile reveals how to thrive in an uncertain world. | With a rare combination of pointed wit and potent wisdom, Taleb plows through human illusions, contrasting the classical values of courage, elegance, and erudition against the modern diseases of nerdiness, philistinism, and phoniness. | The Incerto Series is an investigation of opacity, luck, uncertainty, probability, human error, risk, and decision making when we don’t understand the world. Makes the perfect gift for the perpetually curious. |
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This is the book for Immortals
I bought two copies because "nothing without Skin In the Game".Nietzsche said "Today as always, men fall into two groups: slaves and free men." .I've found Taleb as a free man .
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