Skin in the Game: Hidden Asymmetries in Daily Life (Incerto) Paperback – 7 Jan. 2020

An entertaining read. Full of thoughtful observation and insight. Written in a style that comes with the freedom to say what one thinks.In many ways this is a deeply moral book with important messages for how we live. This realization becomes suddenly clear in the rather poetic epilogue, which I loved. Collective action (the game) generates many meaningful benefits, but, to be symmetrical and ethical, it always requires contribution of players, and contribution implies risk (the skin). Taleb has no time for people in authority who don't get this and consequently promote dangerous ideas which lead to ignorant policy or business decisions. For them he reserves his full scorn (for example, in his view, Monsanto and its dangerous development of GM crops). Through ignorance, they risk catastrophically ruining the systems we depend on for everyone for ever.On the downside, Taleb's style of relentlessly 'speaking truth to power' can feel a bit uncomfortable and negative. However we are compensated by his practical, ethical and logical reasoning - made more clear in an appendix devoted to the maths that underpins the conclusions, and further leavened with fascinating personal stories.By the way, like many books it's one worth starting at the back with the glossary, where you will be able to learn to speak 'Taleb'.

This book is as much about the author as it is about probability, philosophy, ethics and personal responsibility.Nassim Nicholas Taleb is a pugnacious writer. He doesn’t like Steven Pinker, nor Sam Harris and even takes a jab at Dawkins and Piketty. He is pretty much anti-academia despite constantly telling the reader he holds a quarter lecturer position at NYU Tandon School of Engineering.He clearly wants to be seen as a guru as well as an intellectual and iconoclast – and he does succeed to a certain point. He has some strong ideas and paradigms which have definitely made me look at some aspects of the world differently (the Lindy effect, medioicristan and extremistan).As mentioned in other reviews here, the book has been poorly edited. Sentence structure can be poor due to too many commas, sub-clauses and bracketed information or opinion. Also I found the “you can skip this section as it may be too technical for you” comments patronising. I far prefer it when authors credit their readers with understanding and write for them as they would for a fellow professional – much like his nemesis Pinker does.So is it a good book worth reading? Yes, it is. Once beyond Taleb’s braggadocio style and critical finger pointing at peers he presents a large number of ideas in an interesting and accessible way which will keep you thinking long after you put the book down, though as he warns in the book: “You will never fully convince someone that he is wrong; only reality can.”

Ergodicity and Assymetry are the themes of Taleb’s 2018 masterpieces. The book tells you the people (not) to trust and about risk and behaviour. Both typical and atypical.The “poem” at the conclusion of 22 years’ work is built up to climaxically (!). Taleb ends “There is nothing without skin in the game.I here note something that the important author Gillian Tett said in the FT Weekend some time ago “Take notice of what Donald Trump does rather than what he says - and tweets- the latter are becoming ever thinner veiled re the Russians.Taleb doesn’t stray into WW3 territory, rather he keeps it close to hand. Clearly he’s worried by imbalances, inequality and debt management, but above all those distractions he is real and he entertains us in real time and that is what great books (are supposed to) do.

Taleb general theme hasn’t changed. He calls it his Incerto series. And like in Fooled by randomness and The black swan and Antifragility, he grapples with the pitfalls of random events and the tragic short sightedness of general models of rationality to prepare people for dealing with the unexpected side effects of probabilistic systems. Since deep down almost everything we deal with in our lives has an aspect of randomness and risk taking we better pay attention and this book maybe better than any of the ones before is actually useful as a guide in making assessments and using an uncommon sense of proper risk appreciation to make real life decisions sharpen our eyes for trying to see and understand how randomness affects our lives and political and economic systems.While Fooled by randomness and the black swan were focussed on alerting people to seemingly irrational risks that get foolishly overlooked, anti-fragility presented a picture of how to deal with those risks and now Skin in the game explores the practical consequences of that picture.

The book is somewhat a disappointment. I am a fan of Black swan and Antifragile, but Skin in the Game appears immature in comparison to Taleb's best work. The basic idea of the book could be convincing as an essay of 20-30 pages, but 250+ pages gets too repetitive. Taleb's provocative style gets slightly boring along the book, his jokes become as obsessive as his "aphorisms" (a few of them are really good, but mostly they are just around average). Was the copy editor awake (or brave enough) reading the manuscript, there is a bit too much repetition in the structure of the book? Some of the chapters in the book appear as haphazard opinion writings.Nevertheless, the book has many good moments, they just need to be distilled out of the usual Talebian bragging and repetition.