Jasper Asghar's Key Ideas from Skin in the Game
by Nassim Nicholas Taleb

It’s perfectly rational to overestimate some tail risks because you can’t consider them in isolation. 

Driving after 2 glasses of wine once will not be extremely dangerous, but doing so every day is.

When you measure tail risks in the laboratory you only consider one tail risks at a time, and that’s why their conclusions are wrong.
Subjects are being rational in overestimating the risk because, chances are, they are likely already running several tail risks in their lives.

Betting harder with money you won and being more conservative with your own money makes sense because that’s how you survive.

Thaler and other behavioral economists don’t get it because they see the world as a one-shot game instead of a series of repeated trades.

In societies, minorities can come to dictate the rules to the majority.

This usually happens because of asymmetry or because when the majority is either too flexible, too accommodating, or too indifferent.

A case of asymmetry is between smokers and non-smokers.
A smoker can sit in a smoke-free area but a non-smoker cannot sit in a smoker area, so the non-smokers will prevail even if they are the minority.

However, this can become an issue when the minority prevails because it’s more aggressive or more intolerant.

Employees display submission by going through years of personal deprivation.
Givin' up 9 hours of one’s time for years, every day is the equivalent of domestication.
And showing up on time every day is the sign of an obedient, housebroken dog.

The question is whether you want to be a housebroken dog or a free wolf.
However, being a wolf comes with risks. Wolves who seek their own paths have skin in the game.

it’s not the poor who are actually envious of the rich and it’s not the poor who first embrace communist movements.

It’s usually the bourgeois and the intellectuals and the clerical class who first embrace communism. It’s because of jealousy.

You often hear people saying that you are more likely to die by X silly thing -ie.: coconut falling- than by terrorist attacks or Ebola outbreaks but that makes no sense.

People dying because of falling coconuts or people who die by drowning in their bathtub will never double from one year to the other -they are examples of mediocre stand-.

But the effects from events in an extreme stand, say a huge virus outbreak or a series of terrorist attacks, can increase the death toll by several orders of magnitude.