What Africans Lack: Skin in the game

[sema]

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Nassim Taleb's concept of skin in the game summarizes the problems of Africans culturally and this cultural deficit transfers to it's gangster leaders and I throw all African leaders under this rubicon.

It is not just that skin in the game is necessary for fairness, commercial efficiency, and risk management: skin in the game is necessary to understand the world.

Skin in the Game is about the distortions of symmetry and reciprocity in life: If you inflict risk on others, and they are harmed, you need to pay some price for it.
If you have the rewards, you must also get some of the risks, not let others pay the price of your mistakes.

Do not mistake skin in the game as just an incentive problem or just having a share of the benefits (as it is commonly understood in finance). No. It is about symmetry, more like having a share of the harm, paying a penalty if something goes wrong.

Skin in the game, applied as a rule, reduces the effects of the following divergences that grew with civilization: those between action and cheap talk (tawk), consequence and intention, practice and theory, honor and reputation, expertise and charlatanism, concrete and abstract, ethical and legal, genuine and cosmetic, merchant and bureaucrat, entrepreneur and chief executive, strength and display.

To learn you need ‘contact with the ground’:
Actually, you cannot separate anything from contact with the ground. And the contact with the real world is done via skin in the game-having an exposure to the real world, and paying a price for its consequences, good or bad.

[sema]

What happens when you don’t pay for your actions:
When people aren’t punished for mistakes or face the downside we end up populating what we call the intelligentsia with people who are delusional simply because they never have to pay for the consequences of their actions, repeating modernist slogans stripped of all depth.

The intelligentsia therefore feels entitled to deal with the poor as a construct; one they created. Thus they become convinced that they know what is best for them.

These types of people are also incapable of distinguishing between multidimensional problems and their single dimensional representations like stripping the multidimensional nature of health health to it’s cholesterol-reading. They can’t get the idea that, 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 don’t learn when you are not the victims of your mistakes. Therefore transferring the risk and the downside of your actions impedes learning. More practically, you will never fully be convinced you are wrong; unless you face consequences of your actions.

So, entire fields become charlatanic because of the absence of skin in the game connecting them back to earth and creating the feedback mechanism that weeds out the wrong.

Sounds like Trump.
Trump is a typical african leader