A Big Little Idea Called Ergodicity

Skin in the game helps to solve the Black Swan problem and other matters of uncertainty at the level of both the individual and the collective: what has survived has revealed its robustness to Black Swan events and removing skin in the game disrupts such selection mechanisms.

This sort of a situation where each individual trajectory in the long run does something different from the average over a large ensemble is called non-ergodicity. So, this is a non-ergodic system.

To use the ergodic framework: my death at Russian roulette is not ergodic for me but it is ergodic for the system.

a situation is deemed non-ergodic when observed past probabilities do not apply to future processes. There is a “stop” somewhere, an absorbing barrier that prevents people with skin in the game from emerging from it—and to which the system will invariably tend. Let us call these situations “ruin,” as there is no reversibility away from the conditio