However, the answer is clear in the case of terrorism. The rule should be: You kill my family with supposed impunity; I will make yours pay some indirect price for it. Indirect responsibility isn’t part of the standard crime-and-punishment methodology of a civilized society, but confronting terrorists (who threaten innocents) isn’t standard either. For we have rarely in history faced a situation in which the perpetrator of a crime has a completely asymmetric payoff and upside from death itself.*3
Hammurabi’s code actually makes such a provision, transferring liability across generations. For, on that same basalt stele surrounded by Korean selfie sticks, is written the following: “If the architect built a house and the house subsequently collapses, killing the firstborn son of the master, the firstborn son of the architect shall be put to death.” The individual as we understand it today did not exist as a standalone unit; the family did.
Gypsies have rules that remained for a long time opaque to outsiders; it was probably not until the movie Vengo (2000) that the general public discovered a dark custom among Gitano tribes. In a case where a member of one family kills a member of another, a direct relative of the killer will be delivered to the family of the victim.
The unusual nuisance with jihadi terrorism is that we are totally defenseless in front of a deluded person willing to kill scores of innocents without any true downside, that is, no skin in the game. In Northern Phoenicia, Alawis are terrorized by Salafis wearing bomb-filled jackets that they can activate in a public place. There is almost no way they can be “caught” without activation. Killing them on sight leads to false positives, but we can’t afford false negatives. As a result, we have instances of private citizens cornering and “hugging” perceived self-bombers in places where detonation would be least harmful. This is a form of counter-suicide bombing.
Explicit communal punishment can be used where other methods of justice have failed, provided they are not based on an emotional reaction, but on a well-outlined method of justice defined prior to the event, so that it becomes a deterrent. One who is sacrificing himself for a perceived upside for a given collective needs a deterrent, so it is a form of injection of skin in the game where there are no other methods. And the skin is visible: that very collective.
The only way we have left to control suicide-terrorists would be precisely to convince them that blowing themselves up is not the worst-case scenario for them, nor the end scenario at all. Making their families and loved ones bear a financial burden—just as Germans still pay for war crimes—would immediately add consequences to their actions. The penalty needs to be properly calibrated to be a true disincentive, without imparting any sense of heroism or martyrdom to the families in question.
But I feel queasy about transferring a crime from one unit, an individual, to another, a collective. What I do not feel bad about is preventing the family of the perpetrators of terrorist acts from benefiting from those acts—many terrorist groups reward the families of suicide bombers, and this can be safely terminated without any ethical dilemma.
NEXT
In the last two chapters we examined the good and the bad of dependence and the constraints on our freedoms coming from skin in the game. Next, let us look at the thrills (of the right type) of risk taking.
*1 In Plato’s Apology, Socrates behaved like a mensch: “I, Sir, have a family, you know, and was not born ‘from oak or from rock’ ”—this is again an expression of Homer—“but from human beings, so that I have a family too, and indeed sons, men of Athens, three of them, one already a teenager and two who are children. But nonetheless I will not beg you to acquit me by bringing any of them here.”
*2 In Fooled by Randomness.
*3 The current narrative is that terrorists think they are going to heaven and will meet virgins that look like their next-door neighbors. Not quite true: many just seek a perceived heroic death, or to impress their friends. The desire to be a hero can be quite blinding.
How to dress while reading Borges and Proust—There are many ways to convince with an ice pick—Councils of bickering bishops—Theosis—Why Trump will win (he actually did win)
I once sat in a dinner party at a large round table across from a courteous fellow called David. The host was a physicist, Edgar C., in his New York club, a literary sort of club, where, except for David, almost everyone was dressed like people who either read Borges and Proust, wanted to be known as readers of Borges and Proust, or just liked to spend time with people who read Borges and Proust (corduroy, ascot, suede shoes, or just business suit). As for David, he was dressed like someone who didn’t know that people who read Borges and Proust needed to dress in a certain way when they congregated. At some point during the dinner, David unexpectedly pulled out an ice pick and made it go through his hand. I had no clue what the fellow did for a living—nor was I aware that Edgar was into magic as a side hobby. It turned out that the David in question was a magician (his name is David Blaine), and that he was very famous.
I knew very little about magicians, assumed it was all about optical illusions—the central inverse problem we mentioned in Prologue 2 that makes it easier to engineer than reverse-engineer. But something struck me at the end of the party. David was standing by the coat check using a handkerchief to sop up drops of blood coming out of his hand.
So the fellow was really making an icepick go through his hand—with all the risks that entailed. He suddenly became another person in my eyes. He was now real. He took risks. He had skin in the game.
I met him again a few months later and, as I tried to shake hands with him, noticed a scar where the icepick had come out of his hand.
JESUS WAS A RISK TAKER
This allowed me to finally figure out this business of the Trinity. The Christian religion, throughout Chalcedon, Nicea, and other ecumenical councils and various synods of argumentative bishops, kept insisting on the dual nature of Jesus Christ. It would be theologically simpler if God were god and Jesus were man, just like another prophet, the way Islam views him, or the way Judaism views Abraham. But no, he had to be both man and god; the duality is so central it kept coming back though all manner of refinement: whether the duality allowed sharing the same substance (Orthodoxy), the same will (Monothelites), the same nature (Monophysites). The trinity is what caused other monotheists to see traces of polytheism in Christianity, and caused many Christians who fell into the hands of the Islamic State to be beheaded.
So it appears that the church founders really wanted Christ to have skin in the game; he did actually suffer on the cross, sacrifice himself, and experience death. He was a risk taker. More crucially to our story, he sacrificed himself for the sake of others. A god stripped of humanity cannot have skin in the game in such a manner, cannot really suffer (or, if he does, such a redefinition of a god injected with a human nature would back up our argument). A god who didn’t really suffer on the cross would be like a magician who performed an illusion, not someone who actually bled after sliding an icepick between his carpal bones.
The Orthodox Church goes further, making the human side flow upward rather than downward. The fourth-century bishop Athanasius of Alexandria wrote: “Jesus Christ was incarnate so we could be made God” (emphasis mine). It is the very human character of Jesus that can allow us mortals to access God and merge with him, become part of him, in order to partake of the divine. That fusion is called theosis. The human nature of Christ makes the divine possible for all of us.*1
PASCAL’S WAGER
This argument (that real life is risk taking) reveals the theological weakness of Pascal’s wager, which stipulates that believing in the creator has a positive payoff in case he truly exists, and no downside in case he doesn’t. Hence the wager would be to believe in God as a free option. But there are no free options. If you follow the idea to its logical end, you can see that it proposes religion without skin in the game, making it a purely academic a
nd sterile activity. But what applies to Jesus should also apply to other believers. We will see that, traditionally, there is no religion without some skin in the game.
THE MATRIX
Philosophers, unlike the equally argumentative but vastly more sophisticated (and more colorfully dressed) bishops, don’t get the point with their experience machine thought experiment. The procedure is as follows. Simply, you sit in an apparatus and a technician plugs a few cables into your brain, after which you undergo an “experience.” You feel exactly as if an event took place, except that it all happened in virtual reality; it was all mental. Alas, such an experience will never be in the same category as the real—only an academic philosopher who never took risk can believe such nonsense. Why?
Because, to repeat, life is sacrifice and risk taking, and nothing that doesn’t entail some moderate amount of the former, under the constraint of satisfying the latter, is close to what we can call life. If you do not undertake a risk of real harm, reparable or even potentially irreparable, from an adventure, it is not an adventure.
Our argument—that the real requires peril—can lead to niceties about the mind-body problem, but don’t tell your local philosopher.
Now, one may argue: once inside the machine, you may believe that you have skin in the game, and experience the pains and consequences as if you were living the actual harm. But this is once inside, not outside, and there is no risk of irreversible harm, things that linger and make time flow in one direction not the other. The reason a dream is not reality is that when you suddenly wake up from falling from a Chinese skyscraper, life continues, and there is no absorbing barrier, the mathematical name for that irreversible state that we will discuss at length in Chapter 19, along with ergodicity, the most powerful concept I know.
Next, let us consider the signaling benefits of overt flaws.
THE DONALD
I have a tendency to watch television with the sound off. When I saw Donald Trump in the Republican primary standing next to other candidates, I became certain he was going to win that stage of the process, no matter what he said or did. Actually, it was because he had visible deficiencies. Why? Because he was real, and the public—composed of people who usually take risks, not the lifeless non-risk-taking analysts we will present in the next chapter—would vote anytime for someone who actually bled after putting an icepick in his hand rather than someone who did not. Arguments that Trump was a failed entrepreneur, even if true, actually prop up this argument: you’d even rather have a failed real person than a successful one, as blemishes, scars, and character flaws increase the distance between a human and a ghost.*2
Scars signal skin in the game.
And
People can detect the difference between front- and back-office operators.
NEXT
Before we end, take some Fat Tony wisdom: always do more than you talk. And precede talk with action. For it will always remain that action without talk supersedes talk without action.
Otherwise you will resemble the person we expose in the next chapter (which hopefully will offend many “intellectuals”), the insidious disease of modern times: back-office people (that is, support staff) acting as front-office ones (business generators).
*1 “The Son of God shares our nature so we can share His; as He has us in Him, so we have Him in us.”—Chrysostom
*2 I note that even the fact that Trump expressed himself in an unconventional manner was a signal that he never had a boss before, no supervisor to convince, impress, or seek approval from: people who have been employed are more careful in their choice of words.
People who don’t have skin in the game—Lipid phobias—Teach a professor how to deadlift
What we saw worldwide from 2014 to 2018, from India to the U.K. to the U.S., was a rebellion against the inner circle of no-skin-in-the-game policymaking “clerks” and journalists-insiders, that class of paternalistic semi-intellectual experts with some Ivy League, Oxford-Cambridge or similar label-driven education who are telling the rest of us 1) what to do, 2) what to eat, 3) how to speak, 4) how to think, and…5) whom to vote for.
WHERE TO FIND A COCONUT
But the problem is the one-eyed following the blind: these self-described members of the “intelligentsia” can’t find a coconut on Coconut Island, meaning they aren’t intelligent enough to define intelligence, hence fall into circularities—their main skill is a capacity to pass exams written by people like them, or to write papers read by people like them. Some of us—not Fat Tony—have been blind to their serial incompetence. With psychology studies replicating less than 40 percent of the time, dietary advice reversing after thirty years of dietary fat phobia, macroeconomics and financial economics (while trapped in an intricate Gargantuan patch of words) scientifically worse than astrology (this is what the reader of the Incerto has known since Fooled by Randomness), the reappointment of Bernanke (in 2010) who was less than clueless about financial risk as the Federal Reserve boss, and pharmaceutical trials replicating at best only a third of the time, people are perfectly entitled to rely on their own ancestral instincts and to listen to their grandmothers (or to Montaigne and such filtered classical knowledge), who have a better track record than these policymaking goons.
SCIENCE AND SCIENTISM
Indeed, one can see that these academico-bureaucrats who feel entitled to run our lives aren’t even rigorous, whether in medical statistics or policymaking. They can’t tell science from scientism—in fact in their eyes scientism looks more scientific than real science. For instance, it is trivial to show the following: much of what the Cass Sunstein and Richard Thaler types—those who want to “nudge” us into some behavior—much of what they would classify as “rational” or “irrational” (or some such categories indicating deviation from a desired or prescribed protocol) comes from their misunderstanding of probability theory and cosmetic use of first-order models. They are also prone to mistake the ensemble for the linear aggregation of its components—that is, they think that our understanding of single individuals allows us to understand crowds and markets, or that our understanding of ants allows us to understand ant colonies.
The Intellectual Yet Idiot (IYI) is a product of modernity, hence has been proliferating since at least the mid-twentieth century, to reach a local supremum today, to the point that we have experienced a takeover by people without skin in the game. In most countries, the government’s role is between five and ten times what it was a century ago (expressed in percentage of gross domestic product). The IYI seems ubiquitous in our lives but is still a small minority and is rarely seen outside specialized outlets, think tanks, the media, and university social science departments—most people have proper jobs and there are not many openings for the IYI, which explains how they can be so influential in spite of their low numbers.
The IYI pathologizes others for doing things he doesn’t understand without ever realizing it is his understanding that may be limited. He thinks people should act according to their best interests and he knows their interests, particularly if they are “rednecks” or from the English non-crisp-vowel class who voted for Brexit. When plebeians do something that makes sense to themselves, but not to him, the IYI uses the term “uneducated.” What we generally call participation in the political process, he calls by two distinct designations: “democracy” when it fits the IYI, and “populism” when plebeians dare to vote in a way that contradicts IYI preferences. While rich people believe in one tax dollar one vote, more humanistic ones in one man one vote, Monsanto in one lobbyist one vote, the IYI believes in one Ivy League degree one vote, with some equivalence for foreign elite schools and PhDs, as these are needed in the club.
They are what Nietzsche called Bildungsphilisters—educated philistines. Beware the slightly erudite who thinks he is an erudite, as well as the barber who decides to perform brain surgery.
The IYI also
fails to naturally detect sophistry.
INTELLECTUAL YET PHILISTINE
The IYI subscribes to The New Yorker, a journal designed so philistines can learn to fake a conversation about evolution, neurosomething, cognitive biases, and quantum mechanics. He never curses on social media. He speaks of “equality of races” and “economic equality,” but never goes out drinking with a minority cab driver (again, no real skin in the game, as, I will repeat until I am hoarse, the concept is fundamentally foreign to the IYI). The modern IYI has attended more than one TED talk in person or watched more than two TED talks on YouTube. Not only did he vote for Hillary Monsanto-Malmaison because she seemed electable or some such circular reasoning, but he holds that anyone who didn’t do so is mentally ill.
The IYI mistakes the Near East (ancient Eastern Mediterranean) for the Middle East.
The IYI has a copy of the first hardback edition of The Black Swan on his shelf, but mistakes absence of evidence for evidence of absence. He believes that GMOs are “science,” that their “technology” is in the same risk class as conventional breeding.
Typically, the IYI get first-order logic right, but not second-order (or higher) effects, making him totally incompetent in complex domains.
Skin in the Game Page 13
