I do not think that it is useful to discuss the "cost of acting under uncertainty" when you can discuss the "cost of existence". The former is just a special case of the latter - the existence of conscious actions. When understood in this way, the foetus has a cost of existence, the analogy holds and as it grows older we have more and more cases of its protection against the outside world through its location, tribe, mother, etc (all later forms of gestation period) as we pass through the traditional coming-of-age story arc.
Skin-in-the-game hurts fragility but helps resilience (individual or systemic) become antifragility. At growth stages, resilience is the exception to fragility. At maturity, fragility is the exception to resilience.
The concrete cases that validate this level of abstraction are: (a) entrepreneurs building profitable companies in which many need angel investing in order to survive their operational costs [1]; similarly (b) early-stage deals are extremely fragile to transactional costs, so placing a skin-in-the-game cost on one deal while not on another is extremely likely to cause the other deal to be preferable.
I agree with both yourself and Taleb that in cases in which an actor has the potential to be harmful to others they should be responsible for their actions and have skin-in-the-game. However my point is that no entity is just born like this, they have to slowly place their skin-in-the-game. Lawmakers have the tendency to add regulatory costs to a system that through the process that I've just described stop new entrants from joining and create the perfect opportunity for monopolies to form (which eventually learn to manipulate the presentation of their up-sides and down-sides while avoiding the regulatory down-sides anyway.)
[1] Entrepreneurs are ultra-fragile and therefore the whole startup system that emerges around them helps to offset the operational risks at early stages. Helping individuals to bear risk is how systemic antifragility is grown.
Everything has a cost of existence.
I do not think that it is useful to discuss the "cost of acting under uncertainty" when you can discuss the "cost of existence". The former is just a special case of the latter - the existence of conscious actions. When understood in this way, the foetus has a cost of existence, the analogy holds and as it grows older we have more and more cases of its protection against the outside world through its location, tribe, mother, etc (all later forms of gestation period) as we pass through the traditional coming-of-age story arc.
Skin-in-the-game hurts fragility but helps resilience (individual or systemic) become antifragility. At growth stages, resilience is the exception to fragility. At maturity, fragility is the exception to resilience.
The concrete cases that validate this level of abstraction are: (a) entrepreneurs building profitable companies in which many need angel investing in order to survive their operational costs [1]; similarly (b) early-stage deals are extremely fragile to transactional costs, so placing a skin-in-the-game cost on one deal while not on another is extremely likely to cause the other deal to be preferable.
I agree with both yourself and Taleb that in cases in which an actor has the potential to be harmful to others they should be responsible for their actions and have skin-in-the-game. However my point is that no entity is just born like this, they have to slowly place their skin-in-the-game. Lawmakers have the tendency to add regulatory costs to a system that through the process that I've just described stop new entrants from joining and create the perfect opportunity for monopolies to form (which eventually learn to manipulate the presentation of their up-sides and down-sides while avoiding the regulatory down-sides anyway.)
[1] Entrepreneurs are ultra-fragile and therefore the whole startup system that emerges around them helps to offset the operational risks at early stages. Helping individuals to bear risk is how systemic antifragility is grown.