Tuesday, April 10, 2018

Skin in the game and simplicity...

From Nassim Taleb via Skin in the Game:
Now skin in the game brings simplicity—the disarming simplicity of things properly done. People who see complicated solutions do not have an incentive to implement simplified ones. As we saw, a bureaucratized system will increase in complication from the interventionism of people who sell complicated solutions because that’s what their position and training invite them to do. 
Things designed by people without skin in the game tend to grow in complication (before their final collapse).  
There is absolutely no benefit for someone in such a position to propose something simple: when you are rewarded for perception, not results, you need to show sophistication. Anyone who has submitted a “scholarly” paper to a journal knows that you usually raise the odds of acceptance by making it more complicated than necessary. Further, there are side effects for problems that grow nonlinearly with such branching-out complications. Worse:  
Non-skin-in-the-game people don’t get simplicity.