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.
