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To have reason cut off from the high-speed, jump-cut assistance of emotion is virtually incapacitating, as many neuroscientists have shown with patients who have suffered brain damage. Those patients can perform all sorts of logical functions; they have normal memory; and yet they are incapable of scheduling an appointment because their pure reason makes it impossible for them to decide. They can’t bookmark feelings. They have no intuition, no gut feelings. They’ve been cut off from their bodies in a sense. The most remarkable discovery of modern neuroscience is that the body controls the brain as much as the brain controls the body.
Deep Survival
Laurence Gonzales
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.
Skin in the Game
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Learning new things requires patience and the ability to listen to other people. The Internet and social media, however, are making us less social and more confrontational. Online, as in life, people are clustering into small echo chambers, preferring only to talk to those with whom they already agree.
The Death of Expertise
Tom Nichols
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