Games in the hide of our names
Games in the hide of our names
Skin in the game & Agent Nassim Nicholas Taleb's journey in the new world
Nassim Nicholas Taleb, in his Skin in the Game: Hidden Asymmetries in Daily Life (First edition. New York: Random House, 2018. ISBN9780425284629) 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 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 (a borrowed book) and possibly the author was (also) quoting someone, but I think I remember something said 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, then closer to each other than the extremes, and that the extremes were held, for individualism by Maori cultures, and collectivism by Inuit cultures.
There is a geographic argument in there somewhere. Which is neat, as it remind us that in the real world, the poles of geographic axes rarely approach infinity. Even if in your parish or neighbourhood the world appears flat, because it allows us to simplify our daily lives into short cuts and rules of thumb (scale-free free so long as we do not look up.) Even so because of this small-worldism, the infinite appears as an option, and is usually taken up as what the rest of the world looks like. Whether neighbourhood, parish or empire.
If we put aside the geographic axis and use another polar dimension, but still keep the map flat, so to speak, without going into 3D and its attendant risks of hyper-dimensional space sickness…
So instead of geographic north/south (always a teacher) I introduce the poles of belonging/exclusion, which may at first sight look much like collective/individual, so let’s use a quote Taleb uses to map these two dimensions. He names the originators as Geoff and Vince Graham (without saying who they are) from a position in the parish of 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.
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”).
(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.)
Now the belonging/exclusion is 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 negotiated with even if you are not happy about it.
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.
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 aspiration worldviews, and does semi-ironically to describe identitarian tactics available in the system (and is strategy-free while you live on that neighbourhood-scaled flat map, or even if you try to in Canada…).
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.
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 the 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 neighbourhood etc. But because of skin in the game or its lack, agency will reveal its bad consequences when not accounted for 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 likes 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? I think so but where is it?
By ‘differences’ I mean both the parasitism of psychopathy and how we deal with it, and not just the variation in taste 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 practicality of the north pole 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.
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. But really that assumption is made to simplify things. That 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.
A death cult, where reality is 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 saint (INTERVENTION!) so that Русский мир becomes real with your sacrifice.
The Russian empire 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, a Putin.
You can swap the word Putin out with Tsar if you like. Or Netanyahu, and the word for world is ghetto.
