Games in the hide of our names

Skin in the game & Agent Nassim Nicholas Taleb's journey in the new world

[Originally posted at Substack.com in March 2024]

Nassim Nicholas Taleb, in his Skin in the Game: Hidden Asymmetries in Daily Life  mentions that in ‘teh’ west we have trained ourselves to contrast the individual and the collective, so much so, we miss out noticing the grey tiers in between. (BTW “the getting drunk with Russians” bits have not aged well, but I like many people do tend to nod my head when he speaks on economic rational actors in the world’s arenas of action).

In the early 1990s I was living in West Cork, Ireland, and I read a book, I think by Rom Harré, it was possibly a borrowed book, and possibly the author was (also) quoting someone else, but I think I remember something like… —that on this dimension of individual to collective aspirations, ‘the west’ and ‘the east’ are really either side of the middle, if not particularly close, but way closer to each other than to the extremes. The extremes were held, by Maori cultures for individualism, and collectivism by Inuit cultures.

There is a geographic argument in here somewhere.

If we add to the individual/collective axis orthogonally another binary notice or aspiration perhaps, such that we get a chart, or graph or map of individual/collective against belonging/exclusion. This second one may look like the first in some ways, so let’s use a quote Taleb uses in Skin in the Game: Hidden Asymmetries in Daily Life to map it to these two dimensions. He names the originators as Geoff and Vince Graham (without saying who they are) from a position in the parish that is the USA:

A saying by the brothers Geoff and Vince Graham summarizes the ludicrousness of scale-free political universalism.I am, at the Fed level, libertarian;
at the state level, Republican;
at the local level, Democrat;
and at the family and friends level, a socialist.

It's a commonplace I guess.

Basically in the USA collectivism (whatever it’s strength or concentration) is assigned some sort of coefficient with with belonging in an inverse proportion (I am not we – whatever that ‘we’ is, especially a big ‘we’) and this is harmonised or aligned, with where individualism is strongly correlated with exclusion (I am not you – where you=we as well as “you ‘all”). It is not possible to feel included in the biggest tier if you truly are an individual. Whereas in the smallest group one can feel both belonging and grouping that one cannot as an individual withe the biggest tier. All this is to give context to the scale-free nonsens of, say, Kant's universal categorial imperatives.

(Yes, this may be clearer to explain if in English we used even more pronouns, but based, not on the useless category of sex/gender/essentialism, but on varieties of us/me and yous/you and membership belonging-included/excluded.) ( I make no suggestions at this stage).

Now the belonging/exclusion is, in part, an index or shorthand of who you trust. Or put another way, who you argue with righteously. Who do you recognised as a honourable frenemy? Not the people who are barbarians, outcasts, beyond the pale, but peeps who you negotiate with even if you are not happy about it. Not at all symmpatico, but | respect.

This quote from the Grahams describes the arena on which a parish-empire argues its differences based on some structural or historical positions that all agents on the field agree to use. Even if, as Taleb argues, they are misguided (or aspirational in other terms) on how agents work if they have no skin in the game. (Why play this game?).

I call it an empire because it fails to recognise its borders and does not know that elsewhere or elsetime (geography is a teacher) people do things differently. Empires tend not to know where their borders are, there are practical skin in the game reasons for this blindness, ‘how convenient’ reasons, even when unreasonable. (Sovereign citizens in Canada quoting the US constitution in Canadian courts is an example of this over-reach).

It is a parish because it is parochial. As Taleb points out. And I would add a true parchial parish has no sense that there is a wider world. Empires are always like this.

The Grahams’ quote uses identitarian terminologies (always a move to the dark side of the force IMHO) peculiar to the American empire based on membership and aspirational 'worldviews', and does so semi-ironically to describe identitarian tactics available in the system (don't true the sovcit malarky even in Canada, the US constitution is not universal)

Taleb puts it forward to support his view that universalising ethics (Kant) is impossible because of agency, bias and skin in the game, even while putting out the parochial nature of the tactics, and it is all very well as far as it goes. But what Taleb calls scale-free, as if the axis go to infinity and beyond, brings us back to geographic reality of our lives on planet earth. To the petty realpolitk of the world we world, as its infinity is circular, or globed, global, globular. It lies within a bounded infinity. If you go past the north pole you do not end up beyond infinity but heading south again. And it iterates, or feedbacks… — into chaos, and order. As we should our lives along among others doing the same.

If you goes past 'the Feds', you might get to a conspiracy of World Governments (empires and their aspirational views like Русский мир that narcissism and psychopathy generate when in power) but eventually you just get to ‘the world’, that lunatic which is in our heads with a view from tomorrow’s moon. (The world like the self (agency/soul) does not really exist, at least not outside of evolution).

And we are heading south again into the individual agency and the socialist family. Something emperors like to call all theirs (see the North Korean communist-party-family-dynasty as an example of this trope).

Taleb mentions this Grahams’ quote mostly in reference to how things are done ‘elsewhere’, how the dimension of belonging/exclusion shifts to include/exclude the grey tiers between the individual and the world:— the family, the clan, the tribe, the nation, the federation, the empire, the market, the city, the club, the favour bank, the neighbourhood etc. But because of skin in the game or its lack, agency will reveal its bad consequences when not accounted for or actually missing in higher collective efforts. If we are talking AI we would talk about alignment in this regard.

I do not think Taleb inquires much into differences between agents, I’ll put this on the to-do list of my research. If evah.

He does like to describe his relations with human agents in non-college-degreed membership gyms, but mostly because of their practicality and how they naively approach being ‘rational economic agents’ through common sense because they have skin in the game. He ignores the differences we have as individual agents, and how we belong and exclude. Is he interested in this dimension, or does he hope skinful practicality will obliterate differences between agents?

By ‘differences’ I also mean, and include, both the parasitism of psychopathy and how we deal with it, and not just the variation in taste, inclination and preference held/used by agents. In particular the narcissists’ total lack of empathy, as empathy is required to build a world after we reach the practical limit in reaching the north pole of ultimate id or ego, and head south again to meet the agency of the individuals we live with in the world, however big or small or flat it feels. Narcissists have no time for that returning arc, that reality principle.

I agree empires and governments and HOAs are bad at this, agency interests aside, they are especially bad when the world they world in, assumes everyone is a narcissistic psychopath in toto. Sometimes that assumption (Homo economis) is made to simplify things. But it simplifies things in the narcissists’ and psychopaths’ favour is a “how convenient” moment. The assumption may well lead to us (world-)building an arena for them alone, and the world becomes a binarised shit-hole. I don't know if getting drunk with Russians who entirely give up their agency for drink is practical at all.

Russia as a failing empire is a death cult, where reality means being drugged and drunk in a Russian meat-wave, maybe hoping to get a stolen washing machine out of it, while praying to a personal icon of a saint (INTERVENTION!) so that Русский мир becomes real with your sacrifice, wide-eyed as you are at a drone with your name on it.

The Russian empire version, the narcissist version, of the Graham quote is:

I am, at the Fed level, Putin;
at the state level, Putin;
at the local level, Putin;
and at the family and friends level, Putin.

You can swap the word Putin out with Tsar if you like. (Businesses are also Putin BTW.)

Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Skin in the Game: Hidden Asymmetries in Daily Life (First edition. New York: Random House, 2018. ISBN9780425284629)