Net-net, in systems, you can’t have upside without downside – Anyone who doesn’t share downside will transfer risks from himself to someone else. – Our perception of roles that people are playing in a system are usually static and short sighted. In reality, the thing (say voters in Bihar) has a history, embedded in other things, interacts with other things and has goals that evolve that itself isn’t aware of. – When a thing is described, the limitations imposed by the need to hold that concept in mind and communicate it to others isn’t generally recognised as limitations. – It’s safer to describe the past than to predict the future, but if you must predict it, you must share its downside – Time is the ultimate test of robustness. Our real world is dynamic, full of interactions and any static slice necessarily misses that – A scientific result takes a slice of the world that’s impossible in reality.

– People with fuck you money should call out famous or powerful people when they are wrong

So one shot, large scale interventions (such as invasion, UBI, CRISPR) are extremely dangerous because we now have people in power who can order large scale tech-driven interventions across a large section of society. No article / paper / logical argument can capture all interactions of such systems and their evolution over a non-trivial amount of time. – Human systems are systems within systems, interacting in complex ways. My sofa, my finger, Taleb’s book Insights (and points I agree with him on) I finished it over the weekend and here are my notes. Nassim Nicholas Taleb, the famous author of Fooled by Randomness and The Black Swan, has come up with a new book titled Skin in the Game.

The black swan skin in the game