Let's Read: Nassim Nicolas Taleb's Skin in the Game (2018)

Today at the airport I picked up Taleb's book Skin in the Game (2018). After reading about 40 pages around it, I got quite irritated by the rhetoric and gave the book away. Then I opened a webpage to see what the book is actually about without all the rhetoric.

In short, Taleb argues for two aspects of a "survival first" philosophy:

• Value: survival is the only sacred value. Big survival (survival of the species) is more sacred than small survival (personal survival). All else are profane and infinitely smaller than survival. From this comes his disdain of cost-benefit analysis and his obsession with ruins, deaths, and "black swan events" (rare but big events whose probability can't be expected before they actually happen).
• Knowledge: trust evolution, not human thoughts. If something have survived for a long time, it is most likely correct. Untested human thoughts (except by rare geniuses) are certainly wrong. From this comes his hate of intellectuals, theories, and short-time lab experiments, and his revere of traditions, and long-time players.