Wiser Than Yesterday: Book club

Skin in the Game: Hidden Asymmetries in Daily Life, is a 2018 nonfiction book by Nassim Nicholas Taleb, a former options trader with a background in the mathematics of probability and statistics.Taleb's thesis is that skin in the game -- i.e., having a measurable risk when taking a major decision -- is necessary for fairness, commercial efficiency, and risk management, as well as being necessary to understand the world. The book is the last part of Taleb's multi-volume philosophical essay on uncertainty, titled the Incerto.SummaryAnother classic book from Taleb. He makes a sound argument for alignment of inscentives and why many problems in the world come from people not having skin in the game.Key IdeaIf an actor pockets some rewards from a policy they enact or support without accepting any of the risks, economists consider it to be a problem of "missing incentives". In contrast, to Taleb, the problem is more fundamentally one of asymmetry: one actor gets the rewards, the other is stuck with the risks.[1]Taleb argues that "For social justice, focus on symmetry and risk sharing. You cannot make profits and transfer the risks to others, as bankers and large corporations do... Forcing skin in the game corrects this asymmetry better than thousands of laws and regulations."The centrality of negative incentivesActors - per Taleb - must bear a cost when they fail the public. A fund manager that gets a percentage on wins, but no penalty for losing is incentivized to gamble with his clients funds. Bearing no downside for one's actions means that one has no "Skin In The Game", which is the source of many evils.An evolutionary process is an additional argument for SITG. Those who err and have SITG will not survive, hence evolutionary processes will eliminate (physically or figuratively by going bankrupt etc) those tending to do stupid things. Without SITG, this process cannot work.ExamplesRobert Rubin, a highly-paid director and senior advisor at Citigroup, paid no financial penalty when Citigroup had to be rescued by U.S. taxpayers due to overreach. Taleb calls this sort of a trade, with upside gain but no or limited downside risk, a "Bob Rubin trade."Intellectual Yet IdiotIntellectual Yet Idiot (IYI) is a term coined by Nassim Nicholas Taleb in his essay by the same name that refers to the semi-intelligent well-pedigreed "who are telling us 1) what to do, 2) what to eat, 3) how to speak, 4) how to think... and 5) who to vote for".They represent a very small minority of people but have an overwhelming impact on the vast majority because they affect government policy. IYI are often policy makers, academics, journalists, and media pundits.Some favourite quotesThe knowledge we get by tinkering, via trial and error, experience, and the workings of time, in other words, contact with the earth, is vastly superior to that obtained through reasoning, something self-serving institutions have been very busy hiding from us.Bureaucracy is a construction by which a person is conveniently separated from the consequences of his or her actions.Avoid taking advice from someone who gives advice for a living, unless there is a penalty for their advice.Seeing the psychologist Steven Pinker making pronouncements about things intellectual has a similar effect to encountering a drive-in Burger King while hiking in the middle of a national park.Evidence of submission is displayed by the employee’s going through years depriving himself of his personal freedom for nine hours every day, his ritualistic and punctual arrival at an office, his denying himself his own schedule, and his not having beaten up anyone on the way back home after a bad day. He is an obedient, housebroken dog.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.People who are bred, selected, and compensated to find complicated solutions do not have an incentive to implement simplified ones.If your private life conflicts with your intellectual opinion, it cancels your intellectual ideas, not your private life.Survival comes first, truth, understanding, and science later.

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Body Keeps the score is a book that you keep hearing about especially as mental health and trauma become more and more relevant.Bessel Van Der Kock explains what we experience in the brain, mind and body whilst healing from trauma.Trauma is a fact of life. Veterans and their families deal with the painful aftermath of combat; one in five Americans has been molested; one in four grew up with alcoholics; one in three couples have engaged in physical violence. Even if you haven't experienced trauma yourself it is useful to understand its effects on others and how you interact with society.
- - -Contact the hosts

• Wiser pod website
  

Nico's projects

• Being a VC - Bitkraft.vc
• Future of Gaming podcast - Website - YouTube

Sam's projects

• Youtube - World records and adventures
• Writing - Explosive thinking
• Podcast - Growth mindset podcast

- - -Chapters

• 00:00 - Intro
• 00:30 - Trauma happens a lot
• 02:40 - Generation gap approach to mental health
• 03:55 - Who would like this book
• 07:30 - How the book relates to us
• 09:55 - The most important thing for mental health
• 12:45 - EMDR therapy
• 15:11 - BEnefits of Yoga and rhythmic activities
• 17:20 - What reviews say
• 19:00 - Prescriptions vs physical and mental healing
• 20:35 - Social media problems
• 22:22 - our ratings of Body Keeps the Score
• 23:47 - outro and How to change your mind

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What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence.
We break down our main lessons from the book and open our own minds to a new way of thinking.
About
Could psychedelic drugs change our worldview? One of America's most admired writers takes us on a mind-altering journey to the frontiers of human consciousness
When LSD was first discovered in the 1940s, it seemed to researchers, scientists and doctors as if the world might be on the cusp of psychological revolution. It promised to shed light on the deep mysteries of consciousness, as well as offer relief to addicts and the mentally ill. But in the 1960s, with the vicious backlash against the counter-culture, all further research was banned. In recent years, however, work has quietly begun again on the amazing potential of LSD, psilocybin and DMT.
Could these drugs in fact improve the lives of many people? Diving deep into this extraordinary world and putting himself forward as a guinea-pig, Michael Pollan has written a remarkable history of psychedelics and a compelling portrait of the new generation of scientists fascinated by the implications of these drugs.
How to Change Your Mind is a report from what could very well be the future of human consciousness.

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Art of the Deal: Contemporary Art in a Global Financial MarketBy Noah HorowitzArt today is defined by its relationship to money as never before. Prices of living artists' works have been driven to unprecedented heights, conventional boundaries within the art world have collapsed, and artists now think ever more strategically about how to advance their careers. Artists no longer simply make art, but package, sell, and brand it.Noah Horowitz exposes the inner workings of the contemporary art market, explaining how this unique economy came to be, how it works, and where it's headed. He takes a unique look at the globalization of the art world and the changing face of the business, offering the clearest analysis yet of how investors speculate in the market and how emerging art forms such as video and installation have been drawn into the commercial sphere.TakeawaysArt has the potential to be an important as a stored value. But there are problems with the current market such as:* Hard/expensive to verify authenticity* Expensive to store/handle/transact* Illiquid market* Difficult price discovery* Artist does not profit from secondary salesSubscribe!If you enjoyed the podcast please subscribe and rate it. And of course, share with your friends!You can also listen and join us on ReasonFM (https://reason.fm/podcast/wiser-than-yesterday) or just ask questions.

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Hope in the Dark was written to counter the despair of radicals at a moment when they were focused on their losses and had turned their back to the victories behind them--and the unimaginable changes soon to come. In it, she makes a radical case for hope as a commitment to act in a world whose future remains uncertain and unknowable.Drawing on her decades of activism and a wide reading of environmental, cultural, and political history, Solnit argued that radicals have a long, neglected history of transformative victories, that the positive consequences of our acts are not always immediately seen, directly knowable, or even measurable, and that pessimism and despair rest on an unwarranted confidence about what is going to happen next.Writer, historian, and activist Rebecca Solnit is the author of eighteen or so books on feminism, western and indigenous history, popular power, social change and insurrection, wandering and walking, hope and disaster, including the book 'Men Explain Things to Me'Acclaim"One of the Best Books of the 21st Century." --The Guardian"No writer has better understood the mix of fear and possibility, peril and exuberance that's marked this new millennium." --Bill McKibben"An elegant reminder that activist victories are easily forgotten, and that they often come in extremely unexpected, roundabout ways." --The New YorkerOur reviewDespite amazing acclaim and learning a lot from the book. We feel that it isn't her best work and probably could have been a blog post. We did really enjoy the discussion we had about it and bring some great take homes to the episode.

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