Causal Opacity and Preferences Revealed

Causal Opacity and Preferences Revealed fn3

Let us now take the epistemological dimension of skin in the game to an even higher level. Skin in the game is about the real world, not appearances. As per Fat Tony’s motto:

You do not want to win an argument. You want to win.

Indeed you need to win whatever you are after: money, territory, the heart of a grammar specialist, or a (pink) convertible car. For focusing just on words puts one on a very dangerous slope, since

We are much better at doing than understanding.

There is a difference between a charlatan and a genuinely skilled member of society, say that between a macrobull***ter political “scientist” and a plumber, or between a journalist and a mafia made man. The doer wins by doing, not convincing. Entire fields (say economics and other social sciences) become themselves charlatanic because of the absence of skin in the game connecting them back to earth (while the participants argue about “science”). Chapter 9 shows how they will develop elaborate rituals, titles, protocols, and formalities to hide this deficit.

You may not know in your mind where you are going, but you know it by doing.

Even economics is based on the notion of “revealed preferences.” What people “think” is not relevant—you want to avoid entering the mushy-soft and self-looping discipline of psychology. People’s “explanations” for what they do are just words, stories they tell themselves, not the business of proper science. What they do, on the other hand, is tangible and measurable and that’s what we should focus on. This axiom, perhaps even principle, is very powerful but is not followed too much by researchers. Revelation of preferences is best understood by the betrothed: a diamond, particularly when it is onerous to the buyer, is vastly more convincing a commitment (and much less reversible) than a verbal promise.

As to forecasting, fuhgetaboud it:

Forecasting (in words) bears no relation to speculation (in deeds).

I personally know rich horrible forecasters and poor “good” forecasters. Because what matters in life isn’t how frequently one is “right” about outcomes, but how much one makes when one is right. Being wrong, when it is not costly, doesn’t count—in a way that’s similar to trial-and-error mechanisms of research.

Exposures in real life, outside of games, are always too complicated to reduce to a well-defined “event” easy to describe in words. Outcomes in real life are not as in a baseball game, reduced to a binary win-or-lose outcome. Many exposures are highly nonlinear: you may be beneficially exposed to rain, but not to floods. The exact argument is flushed out in this author’s technical works. Take for now that forecasting, especially when done with “science,” is often the last refuge of the charlatan, and has been so since the beginning of times.

Further, there is something called the inverse problem in mathematics, which is solved by—and only by—skin in the game. I will simplify for now as follows: it is harder for us to reverse-engineer than engineer; we see the result of evolutionary forces but cannot replicate them owing to their causal opacity. We can only run such processes forward. The very operation of Time (which we capitalize) and its irreversibility requires the filtering from skin in the game.

Skin in the game helps to solve the Black Swan problem and other matters of uncertainty at the level of both the individual and the collective: what has survived has revealed its robustness to Black Swan events and removing skin in the game disrupts such selection mechanisms. Without skin in the game, we fail to get the Intelligence of Time (a manifestation of the Lindy effect, which will get an entire chapter, and by which 1) time removes the fragile and keeps the robust, and 2) the life expectancy of the nonfragile lengthens with time). Ideas have, indirectly, skin in the game, and populations that harbor them do as well.

In that light—that of (causal) opacity and revelation of preferences— the Intelligence of Time under skin in the game even helps define rationality—the only definition of rationality I found that doesn’t fall apart under logical scrutiny. A practice may appear to be irrational to an overeducated and naive (but punctual) observer who works in the French Ministry of Planning, because we humans are not intelligent enough to understand it—but it has worked for a long time. Is it rational? We have no grounds to reject it. But we know what is patently irrational: what threatens the survival of the collective first, the individual second. And, from a statistical standpoint, going against nature (and its statistical significance) is irrational. In spite of the noise funded by pesticide and other technological companies, there is no known rigorous definition of rationality that makes rejection of the “natural” rational; to the contrary. By definition, what works cannot be irrational; about every single person I know who has chronically failed in business shares that mental block, the failure to realize that if something stupid works (and makes money), it cannot be stupid.

A system with skin-in-the-game requirements holds together through the notion of a sacrifice in order to protect the collective or entities higher in the hierarchy that are required to survive. “Survival talks and BS walks.” Or as Fat Tony would put it: “Survival tawks and BS wawks.” In other words:

What is rational is what allows the collective—entities meant to live for a long time—to survive.

Not what is called “rational” in some unrigorous psychology or social science book.fn4 In that sense, contrary to what psychologists and psycholophasters will tell you, some “overestimation” of tail risk is not irrational by any metric, as it is more than required overall for survival. There are some risks we just cannot afford to take. And there are other risks (of the type academics shun) that we cannot afford to not take. This dimension, which bears the name “ergodic,” is belabored in Chapter 19.