This is a book about what it means to have courage and the implications for acting without it. Risk is a zero-sum game—someone will be exposed to it, whether that’s you or another person. You should take on the risk and be exposed to the same risk that you expose to others. This symmetry is what defines courage.

This book makes sense to me. Its premise is simple: “Don’t treat others the way you would not like to be treated” — the so-called Silver Rule. What’s shocking is how easy it is to stray from the maxim because of the courage required to stay true. This is a book that I keep coming back to again and again for its depth as well as it’s quips and heuristics (via negativa being incredibly useful). It’s well worth a read and re-read

Quotes

If you inflict risk on others, and they are harmed, you need to pay some price for it.

If you give an opinion, and someone follows it, you are morally obligated to be, yourself, exposed to its consequences.

pathemata mathemata (“guide your learning through pain,”…)

The 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

empirically, complex systems do not have obvious one-dimensional cause-and-effect mechanisms, and that under opacity, you do not mess with such a system.

You will never fully convince someone that he is wrong; only reality can.

The curse of modernity is that we are increasingly populated by a class of people who are better at explaining than understanding, or better at explaining than doing.

Systems learn by removing parts

Via Negativa — we know what is wrong with more clarity than what is right, and that knowledge grows by subtraction. Also, it is easier to know that something is wrong than to find the fix. Actions that remove are more robust than those that add because addition may have unseen, complicated feedback loops.

Do not treat others the way you would not like them to treat you…mind your own business and not decide what is “good” for others.

By applying symmetry to relations between individual and collective, we get virtue, classical virtue, what is now called “virtue ethics.”

This is similar to Adlerian Psychology. One derives value from being of use to the collective and the collective is useful insofar as it values the individual.

we are local and practical animals, sensitive to scale. The small is not the large; the tangible is not the abstract; the emotional is not the logical.

The doer wins by doing, not convincing.

By definition, what works cannot be irrational…if something stupid works (and makes money), it cannot be stupid

Those who talk should do and only those who do should talk

Sextus Empiricus

Specialization, as I will keep insisting, comes with side effects, one of which is separating labor from the fruits of labor.

Now skin in the game brings simplicity—the disarming simplicity of things properly done. People who see complicated solutions do not have an incentive to implement simplified ones.

By regulating you are robbing people of freedom. Some of us believe that freedom is one’s first most essential good. This includes the freedom to make mistakes (those that harm only you); it is sacred to the point that it must never be traded against economic or other benefits.

If you do not take risks for your opinion, you are nothing.

Honor implies that there are some actions you would categorically never do…it is not just a via negativa stance, honor means that there are things you would do unconditionally, regardless of the consequences.

The skills at making things diverge from those at selling things.

if you can’t put your soul into something, give it up and leave that stuff to someone else.

reading of a single text twice is more profitable than reading two different things once, provided of course that said text has some depth of content.

You can give advice, or you can sell (by advertising the quality of the product), and the two need to be kept separate.

No person in a transaction should have certainty about the outcome while the other one has uncertainty.

that people get along better as neighbors than roommates.

skin in the game comes with conflict of interest. What I hope this book will do is show that the former is more important than the latter. There is no problem if people have a conflict of interest if it is congruous with downside risk for themselves.

Poison is drunk in golden cups ( Venenum in auro bibitur ).

if wealth is giving you fewer options instead of more (and more varied) options, you’re doing it wrong.

one does not need complex models as a justification to avoid a certain action. If we don’t understand something and it has a systemic effect, just avoid it.

Virtue is not something you advertise.

If you want peace, make people trade, as they have done for millennia.

skin in the game means that you do not pay attention to what people say, only to what they do, and to how much of their necks they are putting on the line. Let survival work its wonders.