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.
在为你的下一次脑部手术选择外科医生时，你应该选择看起来像屠夫的外科医生还是看起来像外科医生的外科医生？游戏中的皮肤逻辑意味着你需要选择一个（虽然有资格）看起来最不像你期望的外科医生的人，或者更确切地说，好莱坞版的外科医生。
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.
同样的逻辑神秘地回答了许多重要问题，例如 1）理性与合理化之间的区别、2）美德与美德信号之间的区别、3）荣誉与牺牲的本质、4）宗教与信号（为什么教皇实际上是无神论者）5）非寻租导致的经济不平等的合理性、6）为什么永远不要告诉人们你的预测（只公开讨论你的投资组合中有什么），7）甚至，如何以及从谁那里购买你的下一辆汽车。
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.
什么是“Skin in the Game”？这句话经常被误认为是单方面的激励：承诺奖金会让某人为你更加努力地工作。因为它的核心属性是对称性：激励和抑制之间的平衡，如果人们负责的事情出了问题并伤害了他人，他们也应该受到惩罚：想要分享利益的人也需要分担一些风险。
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，还有一个更重要的方面：过滤和促进进化。参与其中——作为一种过滤器——是系统有机运作的核心支柱，无论是人类还是自然系统。除非由为后果买单的人做出重大决定，否则世界将面临系统性全面崩溃的危险。如果你想知道为什么现在会发生针对某一类自鸣得意的“专家”的骚乱，参与其中会给你一个明确的答案：公众本能地发现，一些“受过教育”但装模作样的专家没有参与其中，永远不会从他们的错误中吸取教训，无论是个人错误，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).
为什么高速公路上流氓司机撞死人的概率如此之低，毕竟这些粗暴的司机只需简单操作就能撞死数十人。背后的原因是，（这些司机）把自己成功干掉了，而且大多数危险司机已经死亡（或驾照被吊销）。因此我们在高速公路上难以看到撞死人的危险司机的样本（因此我们认为此为低概率事件）。
驾驶是在游戏约束的表象下和规则进行的，游戏约束充当着过滤器的作用。它是社会的风险管理工具，根植于人类和生物系统的风险共担生态。与船一起沉没的船长将不再拥有船。糟糕的飞行员最终沉入大西洋海底；无视风险的交易员成为出租车司机或冲浪教练（如果他们交易的是自己的钱）。
意即：无法风险共担的个体将付出代价（消失），因此这些样本从社会之机制中被自然筛选，剔除掉了
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.
整个系统并不会因为由于其中某些个体的成长而进化——这是现代学术界所灌输的神话（个体的进步和卓越将带动整体系统的优化）。系统通过选择机制在集体层面上学习：通过消除那些降低整体适应度的因素，前提是这些因素与整体有利益关系。纽约的食物从破产到破产不断改善，而不是厨师的个人学习曲线——将凡人餐馆的食物质量与永恒的政府自助餐厅的食物质量进行比较。如果没有利益关系的过滤，进化机制就会失效：如果别人代替你死去，或是为你支付代价，不对称风险和不适应的积累将导致系统最终崩溃。
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，社会科学和官僚主义的胡说八道者一直忽视了，参与其中是一个必不可少的过滤器。为什么？因为，除了硬科学之外，没有参与其中的学者无法理解，虽然学术界和现实世界没有区别，但在现实世界中，学术界和现实世界是有区别的。他们在课堂上教授进化论，但由于他们不是实干家，他们不相信进化论适用于他们；他们几乎一致投票支持大国，并提倡我所说的社会生活中的“苏联-哈佛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.
正如外科医生的故事所表明的那样，从外部看，你可以从风险压力和一些违反直觉的后果中看出一个学科是否具备技能和专业知识。但我们所说的“空壳”，就像你在智库或大公司中看到的那些人——那些想要越来越多地控制我们的生活或干预利比亚的人——看起来就像在扮演角色的演员，从他们的词汇量和乘法会议开始。说话很容易，那些只说不做的很容易被公众发现，因为他们太擅长说话了。
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判，医生由他们的病人（和医疗事故保险公司）评判，小镇市长由他们的选民评判。数学家、物理学家和硬科学家的作品则根据严格而明确的原则进行评判。他们是专家，误差幅度可以加减。这种来自切身利益的选择压力可能适用于大约 99% 的人口。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”和评论员以及智囊团政策制定者是否是专家。官僚学者往往由其他官僚和学者评判，而不是由现实的选择压力评判。这种只由同行而不是由生存来评判的评判可能会导致学术引用圈的泛滥。激励措施是在正确的期刊上发表关于正确主题的文章，并提出合理的论据，然后很容易地在一些人为的经验主义下，以操弄，迎合（这些学术）指标。
Accountants (that is, bankruptcy or its absence), not other “peer” forecasters, nor referees using metrics should be judging forecasters. 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.
会计师（即破产或破产缺席者）、其他“同行”预测者或使用指标的裁判都不应该评判预测者。指标总是被操纵：政客可以借债来“提高增长和 GDP”，然后让继任者处理延迟的结果。
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.
当建筑师被其他建筑师评判时，你可以察觉到建筑美学的退化。因此，无论是在华盛顿还是布鲁塞尔，当前对官僚的反抗都只是来自公众对一个简单的原则的发现：一个人的技能越微观，就越明显。用复杂性理论的语言来说，专业知识取决于规模。具有讽刺意味的是，世界变得越复杂，具有不成比例影响的宏观决策者“穿西装的装逼佬”的所发挥作用就越应该减少：我们应该分散（这样行动就可以在当地和可见的范围内采取），而不是像我们一直在做的那样集中化。
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，承担风险是过去四千年来不可避免的道德准则，直到最近才改变。战争贩子必须成为战士。不到三分之一的罗马皇帝死在床上（假设他们没有被巧妙地毒死）。地位随着风险的增加而增加：亚历山大、汉尼拔、西庇阿和拿破仑不仅是战斗中的佼佼者，而且他们的权威来自于在之前的战役中表现出的非凡勇气。勇气是唯一不能伪造的美德（或像指标一样被玩弄）。领主和骑士是用勇气换取地位的人，因为他们的社会契约是保护那些授予他们地位的人的义务。冒险者的首要地位，无论是战士（还是关键的商人），几乎在所有人类文明中都占主导地位；例外情况是，如法老时代的埃及或明朝，当官僚学者登上了食物链的顶端，朝代随后便崩溃了。
