I agree his writing style is often similar to the self-aggrandizing IYIs but the examples are excellent.
There was another thread about this book so I'm repeating a little, but to add to what @nooby_mcnoob pointed out on the hypocrisy bit, it's the height of hypocrisy that he wrote that very book on a multi-million dollar advance! The guy is legitimately smart, he wrote a book called Dynamic Hedging where he managed to stay off his soap box the entire time that is excellent. All of his other books also have at least a few very good points in them and some of the early ones are quite good. But he is oh so tedious with the self-aggrandizing bullshit built on put-downs of everyone he considers his inferiors. It started out infrequent enough I could skim over it, but as he's become more popular I think his editors have less power to edit out his baser self and this book finally crossed the line for me where the amount of useful information was overwhelmed by the personality of the asshole writing the book. It will be the last Taleb book I read.
Well, did you buy it? I got it from the library. Let's say I can loan you his next book, would you read it?
I bought it on Kindle. I wouldn't read the next one if you gave it to me for free, opportunity cost is too high.
Yes I bought it and that's a silly question. It depends on whether the topic is interesting to me or not.
I'd add that I was also disappointed that Taleb latched onto only one subset of a much larger issue and didn't seem to understand that he was missing the bigger picture. The real issue is misalignment of incentives. Often, ensuring "skin in the game" is an excellent way to align incentives. Sometimes, it's absolutely awful with big unintended consequences. The best example of this comes from his industry, hedge funds. As the management fee get's driven down most hedge fund managers have the ultimate skin in the game, they don't stand to make anything until they at least beat their hurdle rate. Perfect setup according to Taleb, right? Turns out that it's great until the times it isn't. Like when it's November and you're underwater for the year. Research shows that hedge fund managers in this situation make outsized bets on far riskier investments then they would at any other time. Why? They've got very little to lose. They're already getting nothing. Worst case they'll still get nothing if the high variance bet doesn't turn out. But in order to get anything they have to make high variance bets because there's only 2 months left in the year. And this is made worse by the base human instinct to be risk seeking in losses as Kahneman and Tversky discovered with their prospect theory research (Any Kahneman book blows all of Taleb's books out of the water but I highly recommend Thinking, Fast and Slow if you have to pick one) So in this case, "skin in the game" is probably the worst way to achieve alignment of incentives, and Taleb has not only missed that "skin in the game" actually drives incentive misalignment in some cases, but entirely misses that alignment of incentives was the ultimate goal and "skin in the game" is simply one of many means to obtain that goal and sometimes not only a poor means but an awful one.
That's an example of moral hazard when there isn't any real skin in the game. Perhaps a better example of "skin in the game" in such an instance would be where the fund manager has a good deal of his own money in the fund. Apart from that I generally agree with your assessment of the author.
No, it is not. Most people, including me judge a movie or a book differently if they paid good money for it, or they just watched/read it for free on a rainy afternoon. There are plenty of movies/books I would never buy, but for free, they can be OK.