Skin in the game

If we only somewhat pay attention to the world, we quickly notice that there is a gap between what we know and what we live.

I know this gap well.

I live right inside it most of my daily life.

I’ve built my life around sustainability science and transformation research, and I can articulate exactly what is wrong with the world while my own life can — fortunate as I am — remain largely untouched by the analysis. I know the relational turn is necessary. I write about it. I publish about it. I speak about it at conferences. And it doesn’t have to effect my ways, if I don’t let it. I can nonetheless be a “brilliant” academic.

I know the relational turn is necessary. I write about it. I publish about it. I speak about it at conferences. And it doesn’t have to effect my ways, if I don’t let it.

It’s easy to dismiss this as hypocrisy, personal failing or structural mis-design. It’s all of that.

I have been to many sustainability conferences that look like this: a hundred people are in a room talking about how things need to change. Everyone has their own theory of transformation. Leverage points. Inner dimensions of sustainability. Maps of the metacrisis. Systems diagrams. Feedback loops. Rigorous, mostly genuine, beautiful and thoughtful work.

And then everyone goes home and lives exactly as they did before.

I am one of these people. I give the talks and sit in the audience and nod along to the deep leverage points and the inner-outer connection, and then I go back to my desk and answer emails and order something online because it is easier than walking to the shop. The knowing didn’t land. It circulated. It moved from mind to mouth to slide deck to publication — and at no point did it have to pass through my actual life.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb calls it a lack of skin in the game.

How we human

Taleb says to never trust anyone who doesn’t bear the consequences of their own advice. For example, a bureaucrat who designs economic policy but whose pension is guaranteed regardless of the outcome has no skin in the game. Or a military strategist who sends others to war but never faces combat has no skin in the game. Or in this case, an intellectual who theorizes about how others should live but exempts their own life from the experiment has no skin in the game.

The problem, for Taleb, is not just moral. It’s epistemic. People without skin in the game don’t actually know what they think they know. Their knowledge is theoretical, untested, unlived. It has not been filtered through consequence. It hasn’t cost them anything. And knowledge that hasn’t cost us anything is, in Taleb’s view, not really knowledge at all. It’s opinion.

People without skin in the game don’t actually know what they think they know. Their knowledge is theoretical, untested, unlived.

He makes a distinction I find useful: there is a difference between someone who has read about risk and someone who has borne it. The first person has information. The second person has understanding.

I think this lands differently when we stop applying it to bankers and policymakers — Taleb’s usual targets — and start applying it to us. To people in transformation. To the people who know the most about what’s going wrong and whose lives are, often, the least transformed by that knowledge.

I have spent fifteen years in and around academia. I love the life of the mind. I believe in rigorous thought, in careful inquiry, in the slow work of understanding how things actually are. And I also think the academy has a severe skin-in-the-game problem when it comes to the crises it studies.

We produce knowledge about transformation without being transformed.

As I said, it’s not a moral failing, it’s structural. The academy is designed to separate the knower from the known. That is literally what objectivity means in the tradition we inherited. Stand outside. Observe. Do not let your position contaminate the data. And for certain kinds of questions — how fast is the glacier melting, what is the chemical composition of the atmosphere — that separation might work (even though I begin to question how exactly, but more on that another time).

The metacrisis though is not that kind of question.

If the metacrisis is, as I’ve been arguing, fundamentally a crisis of humaning — a structural distortion in how we perceive, relate, and act — then the researcher is not outside the phenomenon. The researcher is the phenomenon. We are not studying a system failure from a clean vantage point. We are the system failing.

We are not studying a system failure from a clean vantage point. We are the system failing.

And if we are dealing with a crisis of humaning, then the only place transformation can begin is in how we human. Not in how we theorize about humaning or in how we design interventions for other people’s humaning. In our own.

I’m not saying to fix ourselves and the world will follow. That’s individualism and misses the relational, structural, systemic nature of everything I care about.

But we cannot understand a crisis we are not willing to investigate in our own life. We cannot research transformation we are not undergoing. In my own life, I have tried hundreds of theories of change with some sticky patterns that wouldn’t budge. For me, these theories always failed the test. We cannot teach what we have not tried.

Skin in the game is an epistemic requirement, not just an ethical one.

As I have written before, the Latin word experientia didn’t use to distinguish between experience and experiment. They were the same word. The same act.

We tried something. We underwent it. We learned from what happened.

The split — theory here, practice there, knowledge here, life there — is what got us into this mess.

What if the most rigorous thing we could do is put our own lives back on the line?

What changes

When I started living my life as a lab — actually doing it, not just theorizing about it — things shifted. Some of my most confident beliefs turned out to be completely wrong. Some of my most dismissive beliefs turned out to be true. What I thought was wisdom was often just information I’d never tested. What I thought was too simple to matter — how I eat, how I walk through my neighborhood, whether I actually look at the sky — turned out to be some of the most potent sites of inquiry I’ve encountered.

What I thought was too simple to matter — how I eat, how I walk through my neighborhood, whether I actually look at the sky — turned out to be some of the most potent sites of inquiry I’ve encountered.

I wore one dress for a year. Not only because of the high environmental impact of the fashion industry. But also as a philosophical question, to better understand what it means to practice sufficiency (sufficiency is often named as one of the three core strategies to sustainability alongside efficiency and consistency). What happens when I remove one of the most fundamental ways I perform identity? What remains? What shifts in how others see me, how I see myself, how I move through social space?

That experiment broke open questions about selfhood and relational identity that I’d been reading about for a decade without ever really understanding.

While we often consider these experiences anecdotes, they are data. Lived, embodied, consequential data generated from within the system I’m trying to understand. They are what happens when I put skin in the game.

Taleb says if you see fraud and do not say fraud, you are a fraud. I would adapt that: if we study transformation and do not transform, we are not studying transformation. We are studying the idea of transformation.

Sounds almost the same. But is different.

The alternative though — that we can know our way into a different world without living our way into it — is the very logic that produced the metacrisis in the fist place.

The world does not need more theories of change. It needs more people willing to change and to let that change be the theory.