本文翻译自 What do I mean by Skin in the Game? My Own Version, May 3 2018, Taleb, Medium.
When selecting a surgeon for your next brain procedure, should you pick a surgeon who looks like a butcher or one who looks like a surgeon? The logic of skin in the game implies you need to select the one who (while credentialed) looks the least like what you would expect from a surgeon, or, rather, the Hollywood version of a surgeon.
当你为接下来的脑部手术选择外科医生时，你是应该选择一个看起来像屠夫的外科医生，还是一个看起来像外科医生的人？Skin in the game 的逻辑告诉你，你应该选择一个看起来最不像外科医生的外科医生，或者说，看起来像好莱坞演员的外科医生。
The same logic mysteriously answers many vital questions, such as 1) the difference between rationality and rationalization, 2) that between virtue and virtue signaling, 3) the nature of honor and sacrifice, 4) Religion and signaling (why the pope is functionally atheist) 5) the justification for economic inequality that doesn’t arise from rent seeking, 6) why to never tell people your forecasts (only discuss publicly what you own in your portfolio) and, 7) even, how and from whom to buy your next car.
潜移默化中，同样的逻辑也回答了许多重要的问题，比如 1）理性和合理化的区别；2）道德和美德信号之间的不同；3）荣誉和牺牲的本质；4）宗教和信号（为什么教皇在现实中是无神论者）；5）经济不平等的判定不是来源于寻租；6）永远不要告诉人们你的预测（只公开讨论自己的投资组合），以及 7）甚至，不要公开自己如何和从谁那里购买下一辆车。
What is Skin in the Game? The phrase is often mistaken for one-sided incentives: the promise of a bonus will make someone work harder for you. For the central attribute is symmetry: the balancing of incentives and disincentives, people should also penalized if something for which they are responsible goes wrong and hurts others: he or she who wants a share of the benefits needs to also share some of the risks.
游戏中的皮肤是什么？这个短语常常被误认为是片面的激励：奖金承诺会让某人更努力地为你工作。因为中心属性是对称性：激励和抑制之间的平衡。人们应该得到惩罚，如果他们负责的事情出错并伤害他人：那些想要分享利益的人，也应该共担风险。
My argument is that there is a more essential aspect: filtering and the facilitation of evolution. Skin in the game –as a filter –is the central pillar for the organic functioning of systems, whether humans or natural. Unless consequential decisions are taken by people who pay for the consequences, the world would vulnerable to total systemic collapse. And if you wonder why there is a current riot against a certain class of self-congratulatory “experts”, skin the game will provide a clear answer: the public has viscerally detected that some “educated” but cosmetic experts have no skin in the game and will never learn from their mistakes, whether individually or, more dangerously, collectively.
我的观点是，有一个更重要的方面：过滤和促进进化。游戏中的皮肤——作为一个过滤器——是有机功能系统的中心支柱，无论是人类还是自然系统。除非那些为后果买单的人做出了相应的准备，否则世界将容易遭受全面的系统性崩溃。如果你想知道，为什么当前出现了一场针对某些自嗨"专家"的反对活动，那么皮肤里的游戏会给出一个明确的答案: 公众已经发现一些"受过教育的"但是徒有其表的专家，在游戏里没有皮肤，永远不会从他们的错误中吸取教训，无论是单独的，还是更危险的集体错误。
Have you wondered why, on high-speed highways there are surprisingly few rogue drivers who could, with a simple manoeuver, kill scores of people? Well, they would also kill themselves and most dangerous drivers are already dead (or with suspended license). Driving is done under the skin in the game constraint, which acts as a filter. It’s a risk management tool by society, ingrained in the ecology of risk sharing in both human and biological systems. The captain who goes down with the ship will no longer have a ship. Bad pilots end up in the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean; risk-blind traders become taxi drivers or surfing instructors (if they traded their own money).
你有没有想过，为什么在高速公路上，几乎没有什么流氓司机能用简单的操纵杀死几十个人？好吧，他们自己也会死，以及大多数危险的驾驶员已经死亡（或被吊销驾照）。在游戏约束中，驱动是在皮肤下进行的，它起到过滤器的作用。这是一个社会的风险管理工具，植根于人类和生物系统风险共担的生态环境。和船一起沉没的船长，将不再有一艘船。糟糕的飞行员最终会沉入大西洋的海底; 无视风险的交易员，会变成出租车司机或者冲浪教练（如果他们用自己的钱交易）。
Systems don’t learn because people learn individually –that’s the myth of modernity. Systems learn at the collective level by the mechanism of selection: by eliminating those elements that reduce the fitness of the whole, provided these have skin in the game. Food in New York improves from bankruptcy to bankruptcy, rather than the chefs individual learning curves –compare the food quality in mortal restaurants to that in an immortal governmental cafeteria. And in the absence of the filtering of skin in the game, the mechanisms of evolution fail: if someone else dies in your stead, the built up of asymmetric risks and misfitness will cause the system to eventually blow-up.
系统不会因为人们独立学习而自我学习进化，这就是现代神话。系统通过选择机制，在集体层面上学习：方法是消除那些降低整体适应性的因素，只要这些元素在游戏中有皮肤。纽约的餐饮店起起落落，但这不是厨师个人的人生曲线——比较普通人餐厅的食品质量和不朽的政府食堂。如果游戏中没有对皮肤进行过滤，进化的机制就会失败：如果有人代替你死了，不对称的风险和不健康的积累，将导致系统最终爆炸。
Yet the social science and the bureaucrato-BSers have missed and keeps missing that skin in the game is an essential filter. Why? Because, outside of hard science, scholars who do not have skin in the game fail to get that while in academia there is no difference between academia and the real world, in the real world, there is. They teach evolution in the classrooms but, because they are not doers, they don’t believe that evolution applies to them; they almost unanimously vote in favor of a large state and advocate what I’ve called “Soviet-Harvard top-down intelligent design” in social life.
然而，社会科学和官僚机构已经错过并且在游戏中一直缺少皮肤，一个基本的过滤器。为什么？因为，除了硬科学，没有皮肤的学者在游戏中没能达到这一点——获得过滤器。而在学术界，他们认为和现实世界之间没有区别，但在现实世界中，过滤器确实存在。他们在教室里教授进化论，但是，他们不相信进化论适用于他们，因为他们不是实干家；他们几乎一致投票支持一个大国，并在社会生活中，倡导我所说的“苏联-哈佛式的自上而下的智能设计”。
As illustrated by the story of the surgeon, you can tell, from the outside, if a discipline has skills and expertise, from the presence of the pressures of skin in the game and some counterintuitive consequences. But what we call “empty suits”, of the kind you see in think tanks or large corporations –those who want to increasingly run our lives or intervene in Libya — look like actors playing the part, down to their vocabulary and the multiplicative meetings. Talk is cheap and people who talk and don’t do are easily detectable by the public because they are too good at talking.
从外科医生的故事可以看出，如果一个学科从外部获得技能和专业技能，那他们是从游戏中皮肤的压力和一些违反直觉的后果中，获得技能和专业知识。但是我们所说的“空壳”，就是你在智囊团或大公司看到的那种——那些希望越来越多地管理我们的生活或干预利比亚的人——看起来就像是演员在扮演角色，从他们的词汇量和会议次数可以得出。谈话很便宜，那些说话和不说话的人都很容易被公众发现，因为他们都太擅长说话了。
Plumbers, bakers, engineers, and piano tuners are judged by their clients, doctors by their patients (and malpractice insurers), and small town mayors by their constituents. The works of mathematicians, physicists, and hard scientists are judged according to rigorous and unambiguous principles. These are experts, plus or minus a margin of error. Such selection pressures from skin in the game apply to perhaps 99% of the population. But it is hard to tell if macroeconomists, behavioral economists, psychologists, political “scientists” and commentators, and think-tank policymakers are experts. Bureaucrato-academics tend to be judged by other bureaucrats and academics, not by the selection pressure of reality. This judgment by peers only, not survival, can lead to the pestilence of academic citation rings. The incentive is to be published on the right topic in the right journals, with well sounding arguments, under easily some contrived empiricism, in order to beat the metrics.
水管工、面包师、工程师和钢琴调音师由他们的客户评价，医生由他们的病人(以及医疗事故保险公司)评价，小镇的市长由它里面的方方面评价。数学家、物理学家和勤奋的科学家的工作，都是根据严格和毫不含糊的原则来判断。他们都是专家，误差幅度有大有小。这种来自皮肤的选择压力，也许适用于 99% 的人群。但很难说，宏观经济学家、行为经济学家、心理学家、政治"科学家"和评论家以及智囊团政策制定者是否是专家。官僚主义学者往往受到其他官僚和学者的评判，而不是现实的选择压力。这种只由同侪作出的判断，而不是生存，可能导致学术引用环的瘟疫。这种激励将会在正确的期刊上发表在正确的主题上，并在一些简单的经验主义下发表，以击败这些指标。
Accountants (that is, bankruptcy or its absence), not other “peer” forecasters, nor referees using metrics should be judging forecasters.
是会计师（破产者或失踪人员），而不是其他“同行”预测者，也不是使用度量标准的裁判员，应该成为评判预测的人。
Metrics are always always gamed: a politician can load the system with debt to “improve growth and GDP”, and let his successor deal with the delayed results.
衡量标准总是被玩弄于股掌之中：政治家可以让系统负债来“发展和提高 GDP”，并让他的继任者处理延迟的后果。
Alas, you can detect the degradation of the aesthetics of buildings when architects are judged by other architects. So the current rebellion against bureaucrats whether in DC or Brussels simply comes from the public detection of a simple principle: the more micro the more visible one’s skills. To use the language of complexity theory, expertise is scale dependent. And, ironically, the more complex the world becomes, the more the role of macro-deciders “empty suits” with disproportionate impact should be reduced: we should decentralize (so actions are taken locally and visibly), not centralize as we have been doing.
唉，当建筑师被其他建筑师评价时，你可以发现建筑美学的退化。因此，目前对华盛顿或布鲁塞尔的官僚主义的反抗，仅仅是因为公众发现了一个简单的原则：一个人的技能越微观化，他的技能就越明显。要使用复杂性理论的语言，专业知识将依赖于规模。而且，具有讽刺意味的是，世界变得越复杂，宏观决策者“空壳”的作用就越应该减少：我们应该下放权力（行动应该当时当地地发生），而不是像我们一直以来的集中。
In addition, owning one’s risk was an unescapable moral code for past four millennia, until very recent times. War mongers were required to be warriors. Fewer than a third of Roman emperors died in their bed (assuming those weren’t skillfully poisoned). Status came with increased exposure to risk: Alexander, Hannibal, Scipio, and Napoleon were not only first in battle, but derived their authority from a disproportionate exhibition of courage in previous campaigns. Courage is the only virtue that can’t be faked (or gamed like metrics). Lords and knights were individuals who traded their courage for status, as their social contract was an obligation to protect those who granted them their status. This primacy of the risk-taker, whether warrior (or, critically, merchant), prevailed almost all the time in almost every human civilization; exceptions, such as Pharaonic Egypt or Ming China, in which the bureaucrat-scholar moved to the top of the pecking order were followed by collapse.
此外，在过去的四千年中，拥有自己的风险是一种无法避免的道德准则，直到最近才开始改变。战争贩子被要求成为战士。不到三分之一的罗马皇帝死在他们的床上（假设他们没有被巧妙地下毒）。地位伴随着风险的增加而来：亚历山大，汉尼拔，西庇阿和拿破仑，不仅是第一个参加战斗的人，而且他们的权威来自于在之前的战役中，展示的不成比例的勇气。勇气是唯一不能被伪造的美德（或者像衡量标准一样被玩弄）。贵族和骑士是那些以勇气换取地位的人，因为他们的社会契约要求，保护那些给予自己地位的人是他们的义务。这种风险承担者的首要地位，无论是战士（或者，批判地说，也包括商人），几乎始终在每一个人类文明中占据主导地位；例外情况，比如法老时代的埃及或明代中国，官僚主义的学者走到了权力的顶端，随之而来的便是崩溃。
Reference
https://medium.com/incerto/what-do-i-mean-by-skin-in-the-game-my-own-version-cc858dc73260
题图来源：mattchinworth / dribbble
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