Taste of turtle—Where
Note:1@@@@@@@@@@@LEGALITÀ...asimmetria info subdunber superdunbar...scaling conflitto d interesse....metrica
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You who caught the turtles better eat them,
Note:L ADAGIO IN COMMENTO
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a group of fishermen caught a large number of turtles. After cooking them, they found out at the communal meal that these sea animals were much less edible than they thought:
Note:ORIGINE
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the principle that you need to eat what you feed others.
Note:IL PRINCIPIO DIETRO L ADAGIO...PARABOLA DI MERCURIO CHE FORZA IL PESCATORE AD ASSAGGIARE IL CIBO SOSPETTO CHE OFFRONO
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A CUSTOMER IS BORN EVERY DAY
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The asymmetry is when said advice applies to you but not to him—he
Note:ASIMMETRIA
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what is presented as good for you is not really good for you but certainly good for the other party.
Note:CAPITA SEMPRE NEL MONDO DEGLI AFFARI
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“Do you have an ax?” (meaning an inquiry whether you have a certain interest).
Note:LA DOMANDA DA FARE
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Avoid at all costs those who call you to tout a certain product disguised with advice.
Note:QUELLI DA EVITARE
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Salespeople are experts in the art of psychological manipulation, making the client trade, often against his own interest, all the while being happy about it and loving them and their company.
Note:ASIMMETRIA DEL VENDITORE
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THE PRICE OF CORN IN RHODES
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problem in the course of the transactions: how much should the seller reveal to the buyer?
Note:PROBLEMA
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“Is it ethical to sell something to someone knowing the price will eventually drop?”
Note:ESEMPUO
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Diogenes of Babylon and his student Antipater of Tarsus,
Note:CHI NE HA DIBATTUTO
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Cicero in De Officiis.
Note:FONTE
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Assume a man brought a large shipment of corn from Alexandria to Rhodes, at a time when corn was expensive in Rhodes because of shortage and famine. Suppose that he also knew that many boats had set sail from Alexandria on their way to Rhodes with similar merchandise. Does he have to inform the Rhodians?
Note:IL CASO
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“stuffing”—selling
Note:I GERGO L ATTO DI VENDERE SENZA INFO
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The penalty was ostracism.
Note:SE UN TRADER LO FA A UN TRADER
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But it was sort of permissible to do it to the anonymous market and the faceless nontraders, or those we called “the Swiss,” some random suckers far away.
Note:QUANDO È CONCESSO
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There were people with whom we had a relational rapport, others with whom we had a transactional one.
Note:LA DIFFERENZA
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Diogenes held that the seller ought to disclose as much as civil law requires. As for Antipater, he believed that everything ought to be disclosed—beyond
Note:DIATRIBA PRESSO I CLASSICI...LEGALITÀ CONTRO ETICA
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The ethical is always more robust than the legal. Over time, it is the legal that should converge to the ethical, never the reverse. Hence: Laws come and go; ethics stay.
Note:INTERMEZZO ETICA E LEGALE
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counterintuitively, the more regulations, the easier it was to make money.
Note:LA MIA ESPERIENZA COME TRADER
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EQUALITY IN UNCERTAINTY
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The ancient Mediterranean and, to some extent, the modern world, seem to have converged to Antipater’s position. While we have “buyer beware” (caveat emptor) in the Anglo-Saxon West,
Note:LE POSIZIONI
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Sharia establishes the interdict of gharar, drastic enough to be totally banned in any form of transaction.
Note:UN ESEMPIO....SOLUZIONE SHARIA
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it means both uncertainty and deception—my personal take is that it means something beyond informational asymmetry between agents: inequality of uncertainty.
Note:UN TERMINE PARTICOLARE
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RAV SAFRA AND THE SWISS
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Rav Safra, a third-century Babylonian scholar who was also an active trader, was offering some goods for sale. A buyer came as he was praying in silence, tried to purchase the merchandise at an initial price, and given that the rabbi did not reply, raised the price. But Rav Safra had no intention of selling at a higher price than the initial offer, and felt that he had to honor the initial intention. Now the question: Is Rav Safra obligated to sell at the initial price, or should he take the improved one?
Note:IL PROBLEMA..TOTAL TRANSPARENCY
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what if he sold to one client at the marked-up price, and to another one the exact same item for the initial price, and the two buyers happened to know one another?
Note:METODO INSOSTENIBILE SENZA SAFRA
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It may not be ethically required, but the most effective, shame-free policy is maximal transparency,
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However, the story doesn’t tell us whether the purchaser was a “Swiss,” those outsiders our ethical rules don’t apply to.
Note:PICCOLO PARTICOLARE
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Kant: theory is too theoretical for humans.
Note:ECCEZIONI SEMPRE
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MEMBERS AND NON-MEMBERS
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Things don’t “scale” and generalize, which is why I have trouble with intellectuals talking about abstract notions.
Note:DON'T SCALE
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the world is not a large village.
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When Athenians treat all opinions equally and discuss “democracy,” they only apply it to their citizens, not slaves or metics
Note:STORIA
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Today’s Roma people (aka Gypsies) have tons of strict rules of behavior toward Gypsies, and others toward the unclean non-Gypsies called payos.
Note:ESEMPIO
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This scale transformation from the particular to the general is behind my skepticism about unfettered globalization and large centralized multiethnic states.
Note:GLOBALIZZAZIONE...PALESTINA
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Yaneer Bar-Yam showed quite convincingly that “better fences make better neighbors”—something
Note:CONFINI
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Putting Shiites, Christians, and Sunnis in one pot
Note:L ERRORE IN MEDIO ORIENTE
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Blaming people for being “sectarian”—instead of making the best of such a natural tendency—is one of the stupidities of interventionistas.
Note:L ACCUSA DI TAZZISMO
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from the well-known behavior of crowds in the “anonymity” of big cities compared to groups in small villages.
Note:DUNBAR
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NON MIHI NON TIBI, SED NOBIS (NEITHER MINE NOR YOURS, BUT OURS)
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“tragedy of the commons,”
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what plagues socialism:
Note:TRAGEDIA DEI BENO COMUNI
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it is a critical mistake to think that people can function only under a private property system.
Note:OSTROM
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there exists a certain community size below which people act as collectivists, protecting the commons, as if the entire unit became rational.
Note:SUBDUNBAR
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municipal is different from the national.
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tribes
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ARE YOU ON THE DIAGONAL?
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I am, at the Fed level, libertarian; at the state level, Republican; at the local level, Democrat; and at the family and friends level, a socialist.
Note:DETTO DI VINCE GRAHM
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fatuousness of left vs. right labels,
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Swiss are obsessive about governance—and indeed their political system is neither “left” nor “right,” but governance-based.
Note:ESEMPIO
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things worked well in Switzerland and other Germanic countries, it is not because of accountability so much as scaling, which makes them very prone to accountability: Germany is a federation.
Note:SVIZZERA
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ALL (LITERALLY) IN THE SAME BOAT
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The Acts of the Apostles describes a voyage of St. Paul on a cargo ship from Sidon to Crete to Malta. As they hit a storm: “When they had eaten what they wanted they lightened the ship by throwing the corn overboard into the sea.” Now while they jettisoned particular goods, all owners were to be proportioned
Note:UN CASO EVANGELICI DI RISK SHARING
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For it turned out that they were following a practice that dates to at least 800 B.C.,
Note:LEX RHODIA
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where merchandise is thrown overboard for the purpose of lightening a ship, what has been lost for the benefit of all must be made up by the contribution of all.
Note:CONTENUTO
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TALKING ONE’S BOOK
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Everyone, including the anchor, chipped in. My turn came: “I own no Microsoft stock, I am short no Microsoft stock [i.e., would benefit from its decline], hence I can’t talk about it.”
Note:AL DIBATTITO SU MICROSOFT TALEB NN RISPOSE
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Don’t tell me what you think, tell me what you have in your portfolio.
Note:...RICORDIAMO IL PORTAFOGLIO
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Another is buying a stock so you can advertise the qualities of the company, then selling it, benefiting from the trumpeting—this is called market manipulation,
Note:IL PERICOLO DI SKIN IN TEHA GAME
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We removed the skin in the game of journalists in order to prevent market manipulation,
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the former (market manipulation) and conflicts of interest are more benign than impunity for bad advice.
Note:LA TESI DEL LIBRO
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in the absence of skin in the game, journalists will imitate, to be safe, the opinion of other journalists, thus creating monoculture
Note:LA RAGIONE
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In general, skin in the game comes with conflict of interest.
Note:PURTROPPO
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A SHORT VISIT TO THE DOCTOR’S OFFICE
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The legal system and regulatory measures are likely to put the skin of the doctor in the wrong game.
Note:TESI
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metrics.
Note:PROBLEM
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say a cancer doctor or hospital is judged by the five-year survival rates of patients,
Note:ESEMPIO DI MEYRICA
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There is a tradeoff between laser surgery (a precise surgical procedure) and radiation therapy,
Note:LE CURE POSSIBILI
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laser surgery may have worse five-year outcomes than radiation therapy, but the latter tends to create second tumors in the longer run
Note:PROBLEMA
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A doctor is pushed by the system to transfer risk from himself to you,
Note:FINALE...RADIAZIONE A GO GO
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he has no direct emotional loss should your health experience a degradation.
Note:IL DOTTORE...UNO SCONOSCIUTO...
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His objective is, naturally, to avoid a lawsuit,
Note:IL DOTTORE NN È UN TUO FAMILIARE
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Now, say you happen to visit a cardiologist and turn out to be in the mild risk category,
Note:SEI UNO CHE NN RISCHIA INFARTI
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But the doctor is pressured to treat you
Note:PROCESSI IN VISTA...
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Should you drop dead a few weeks after the visit, a low probability event, the doctor can be sued for negligence,
Note:Cccccccccc
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he may know that statins are harmful, as they will lead to long-term side effects.
Note:CONSEG NEGATIVE MA INVISIBILE
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the long-term medical risks are hidden; they will play out in the long run, whereas the legal risk is immediate.
Note:ASIMMETRIA NEL RISCHIO
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avoid treatment when he or she is mildly ill, but use medicine for the “tail events,” that is, for rarely encountered severe conditions.
Note:CONSIGLIO
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both the doctor and the patient have skin in the game, though not perfectly, but administrators don’t—and
Note:IL PROBLEMA
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NEXT
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