Introduction
True knowledge is born from experience, not from theory. It's the story of wounds healing after mistakes that didn't destroy us. Nassim Taleb calls this mechanism pathemata mathemata – learning through painful experience. Systems learn by eliminating what doesn't work. However, without skin in the game, meaning personal responsibility for consequences, knowledge becomes mere decoration. Rationality in our world isn't about maximizing profit, but about avoiding personal ruin. This is the key to survival.
Symmetry in History: A Universal Code for Survival
For centuries, civilizations have intuitively encoded the principle of symmetry in their laws and ethics to protect themselves from ruin. In ancient Rhodian law, loss at sea was a shared burden, not a private catastrophe. Islamic economics prohibits contracts burdened by egregious ambiguity (gharar), which create toxic information asymmetry. Judaism, in the Talmud, emphasizes absolute honesty in transactions, where intent is as binding as the spoken word. Confucianism, in turn, formulates the principle of reciprocity (shù): "What you do not wish for yourself, do not do to others." All these traditions understood that asymmetry destroys trust and erodes community from within.
Lack of Responsibility: The Erosion of Knowledge and Systems
When personal responsibility is absent, systems become fragile. This is evident in media, where clickability is rewarded over truth. In academia, where the publication ritual replaces practical testing. And in politics, where decision-makers rarely bear the costs of their mistakes. This leads to the pathology known as the "Bob Rubin problem": the privatization of gains and the socialization of losses. Information asymmetry, as George Akerlof demonstrated with the example of the used car market, can destroy entire economic sectors. Similarly, global supply chains show how a single local disruption can trigger a global crisis when risk is unevenly distributed.
Rationality: Avoiding Ruin, Not Optimization
Rationality in complex systems is not mathematical optimization, but the art of survival. Thinkers like Karl Popper, Daniel Kahneman, and Herbert Simon have shown that knowledge grows through the elimination of errors (falsification), and human decisions are bounded. Reliable knowledge emerges through via negativa – by removing what is false. Its durability is assessed by the Lindy Effect: the longer something has survived, the longer it is likely to continue to survive. Effective systems, as Elinor Ostrom demonstrated, rely on local, decentralized responsibility, where those who create the rules also bear their consequences.
Conclusion
Knowledge, rationality, symmetry, and responsibility form the four pillars of human order. Knowledge without responsibility is an empty decoration. Rationality without symmetry becomes a tool for exploitation. Pathologies emerge when these principles are violated, leading to asymmetry where some privatize gains while others bear losses. A wise civilization is not one that eliminates errors, but one that builds systems where everyone has something to lose and learns from their own mistakes.
📄 Full analysis available in PDF