John Kay’s Obliquity (essay version). Preface begins discussing a very interesting topic: “Our customers didn’t really use these models for their decision making… they used them internally or externally to justify decisions that they had already made. They were playing what I now call Franklin’s Gambit, after the American polymath Benjamin Franklin. He wrote: ‘so convenient a thing is it to be a reasonable creature, since it enables one to find or make a reason for everything one had a mind to do’.”
But the rest of the book doesn’t really talk about this. You’ll have to read this excellent article in FT about this topic: “Beware of Franklin’s Gambit in making decisions” (paywall? gist).
Taleb’s development of skin in the game, to the logical extreme of clawbacks for downstream harm, is attractive for many reasons, but note how it removes the intellectual equivalent of limited liability that a corporation has (where, even if your corporation fails because of mismanagement, your creditors cannot claim your personal assets and leave you penniless).
Currently who develop ideas are completely protected from the results of those ideas—people like Karl Marx (whose children apparently starved while he was working on Das Kapital) or Ayn Rand. It seems a bad idea to try and subsequently punish people for inventing incorrect or destructive ideas—it’s just impossible.
But all is not lost. We can leave thinkers and makers with limited liability, yet reap many rewards by adopting a simple heuristic: ideas from people without skin-in-the-game are just not worth considering. The risk that a writer took in simply writing tract—philosophical or social or business—is limited to opportunity cost (they risked a livelihood by not working). So again, as a heuristic, just ignore the outputs of authors and proponents without skin-in-the-game.
This isn’t any kind of silver bullet. The heuristic can be easily defeated by finding people who do want to put their skin in the success of some idea—do-gooders will fight globalization, Greenpeace will fight GMOs, and soldiers will die obeying Stalin.
So while skin-in-the-game provides a useful heuristic to protect one from a small set of viral ideas that might invade our minds and bewitch us, life remains complicated.
Goodreads accidentally reminded me of this very nice review by Jan-Maat of Sahlins’ Stone Age Economics.
The first essay in the book "The Original Affluent Society" is something anybody should have a go at reading. A director could even make a nice documentary film about its subject which is the lives of surviving stone-age hunter gatherers in Africa and Australia. The key finding is that even restricted to fairly desert areas they barely have to work to feed and support themselves. An average of a few hours of work a day are sufficient to meet all their needs. The pace of work is slow. People take naps. People sleep a lot. In short Eden was a reality for our most distant ancestors. Our world by contrast has starvation, poverty and infinite needs that can leave us knowing a dissatisfaction alien to the old stone-age. Something to think about.
Downloaded—sounds beautiful!
From Marshall Sahlins’ Stone Age Economics
“We cultivate our gardens, waiting to see if the gods will shower rain or, like those of certain New Guinea tribes, just urinate upon us.”
The traditional wisdom is always refractory. One is forced to oppose it polemically, to phrase the necessary revisions dialectically.