No skin in the game?

Reader question:

Please explain this sentence, particularly “skin in the game”: Racism more often than not becomes a spectacle for those with no skin in the game.

My comments:

Racism is hard to fight against because often, people just look on without intervening because they’re not hurt directly.

Because, I quote, they have “no skin in the game”. In other words, their own body and interests are not directly harmed.

Therefore, they don’t feel as much pain.

They would feel more of the pain if they were directly targeted, of course – if they had any “skin in the game”.

Let’s talk about “skin in the game”.

“Skin” in “skin in the game” is slang for a dollar bill. “The game” refers to any betting game, such as gambling on a horse race.

“Skin in the game”, therefore, refers to one’s wager made on which horse will win the race. If your horse wins the race, you win. If your horse loses, your “skin” is lost.

Ouch!

That hurts. And you don’t want that to happen.

If you have no skin in the game, however, you won’t feel hurt because you don’t actually have anything to lose.

Therein lies the difference.

He who has skin in the game cares more about it. He watches the race differently. He feels his heart racing alongside the galloping horses, faster and faster. His palms are sweating, too, because he wants his horse to win so badly.

You, with no skin in the game, are understandably less anxious. You don’t give much of a damn because any horse’s losing is no skin off your nose, so to speak.

Metaphorically speaking, “skin in the game” can mean any investment in a business venture or some other endeavor. If you have skin in the game, then failure means a direct loss for you.

In our example, racism is deemed hard to combat precisely because a lot of people have no skin in the game. When someone is targeted, others look on as if it’s none of their business.

That’s not the right attitude to take, of course.

That’s not the right attitude to take because society belongs to everybody. Racism against one is racism against all.

If racism, or any lesser form of prejudice is allowed against one person this time, it will be allowed against another person next time. Sure enough, sooner or later, the next victim will be you.

It’s as simple as that.

Well, societal advance is perhaps not as simple as that, but you get the idea.

All right, let’s read a few recent media examples of “skin in the game”:

1. A fortnight ago, a student asked me the following question, “Brian, what if one day, AIs could write better op-eds than you?”

The jaded and deluded self in me was immediately tempted to retort, “What, do you think I am genuinely replicable or imitable? Is my writing so fundamentally basic that it would be possible for a Generative AI to recreate its subtle idiosyncrasies and diction?”

Yet commonsense compelled me to look beyond my instinctive intuition. Indeed, I was drawn to the possibility that I might – indeed – be outdone by an AI. And hence I opted for the easiest solution and the best means of uncovering the truth: experimentation.

A few nights ago, I copied and pasted my English column on EJ Insight last week – on the predictability of politics – and asked ChatGPT to churn out an article that “broadly resembled the text I had sent you, but with the focus of the discussion being on whether AIs could replace columnists.” The end result began as follows:

“If you spoke with a journalist and a tech enthusiast in 2023, there would be a 75% chance that the former would express concern about AI taking over writing jobs, whilst the odds of the latter celebrating the same would be 90%. Roll back the clock by just a decade, and the odds would have been drastically different”…

The op-ed generated came across as somewhat confused and no less confusing, and perhaps a tad too meandering and equivocating for my liking (though one could also argue that this is just my style – touche). Yet it was by and large grammatically correct, occasionally humorous, and rich in its range of vocabularies and syntactical structures. At first glance I would have been convinced this came from my hands (or furiously typing fingers), though a few points gave away the not-so-obvious: that the content was generated through AI.

The first was the absence of a bold and independent stance to the passage supplied. With the probabilities and occurrences of key words – in close succession – being a vital determinative factor in the generative process, it is only understandable that minority viewpoints, such as the assertions, “That all op-ed writers are evil” or “That all AI should be banned given its danger”, are not particularly well favoured. It would be unlikely for “If you spoke with a journalist” to be followed by “a sandwich caught in between two rocks in the Grand Canyon” – at least, as compared with the above manifestation; probability-based methods of generation would hence give rise to content that is bounded by the parameters of ‘reasonableness’.

The net result, however, was that the resultant op-eds tended to be anodyne and nondescript in their arguments and advocacy, consigned to a fate of irrelevance and forgettability. It was almost akin to reading the cookie-cutter op-eds to which one would be regularly exposed in certain countries, where folks are easily running out of ideas they want to articulate in public – in light of careerist considerations.

The second was a bizarre degree of repetition. The so-called “op-ed” had three paragraphs, with two out of the three sharing broadly the same point: “I can safely say, as someone who has dabbled in both journalism and AI, I have witnessed firsthand the growing fascination with AI’s potential to revolutionize the way we consume news and opinions.” It was unfortunate that the primary inference from my previous writings was that I am a “journalist” – the misfortune lies squarely and fairly with the misinterpretation of my occupation, as opposed to anything substantively untoward about journalism.

The same line cropped up again in the last paragraph. One would be forgiven for thinking that the AI is running out of – and has run out of – new ideas. Now in the event of an op-ed, especially one that is written last-minute, it would be deeply implausible and impractical for the same assertion to be repeated over and over again. Such rhetorical ploys often backfire, and do not add to the perceived credibility of the author. If anything, it counts against them – and that is why those who lean so heavily upon Generative AI would benefit from scrutinizing more carefully the texts before their eyes.

The third and final reason concerns the question of stakes. The best columnists – whether they be Martin Wolf, Kishore Mahbubani, or Fiona Hill, if you will – tend to be thinkers who have strong and well-formulated views on matters, given their personal involvement and interests in possessing a well-developed and -buttressed outlook.

AI has no skin in the game. Generative AI… machine-learning-backed (via reinforcement learning, even) AI has no skin in the game. As it stands, the privilege of having “skin in the game” is reserved only for humans or other sentient creatures, who all have something to lose, and something to gain, with both loss-gain functions bound inevitably by the fragile nature of our existence. We could easily have not survived – and that is why we cherish life so much.

- Can AIs Write op-eds? By Brian YS Wong, EJInsight.com, September 03, 2024.

2. You’d think Los Angeles native Gigi Hadid would have no skin in the game for the 2025 Super Bowl, a matchup between the Kansas City Chiefs and the Philadelphia Eagles. Oh, how wrong you would be. Not only does her mother, Yolanda Hadid, have a farm in Pennsylvania where she and sister Bella ride horses (and where they spent quarantine), she’s also dating Philly boy Bradley Cooper. Which means a trip to the Super Bowl to cheer on the Birds is not out of the question.

On January 19, the couple was spotted in Philly at the NFL playoff game between the Eagles and the Los Angeles Rams. In a fan-shot video posted to TikTok, you can see Cooper cheering loudly and wearing an Eagles varsity jacket. Beside him, Hadid was wearing the team colors, though she didn’t look super into the game.

Then there’s the Taylor Swift of it all. We know she’s going to the Super Bowl to cheer on Travis Kelce, but she’s known bestie Hadid even longer. Plus, Cooper and Hadid are friends with the superstar couple, hanging out at The Eras Tour, where Cooper was excited to meet Travis’s mom, Donna Kelce, whose other son Jason played for the Eagles. And in addition to all of this, Taylor Swift is actually also from Pennsylvania. Her dad, Scott Swift, is famously an Eagles fan, despite the Travis of it all.

Maybe Hadid and Cooper can hang out with Jason and Kylie Kelce, who will be cheering on Travis…but also the Eagles. They love Travis, but they’re never not gonna be Team Philly, with Kylie getting “go uncle Travis” shirts for her daughters. Real talk: Should Kylie Kelce be an international diplomat?

- Will Gigi Hadid Attend the Super Bowl? Glamour.com, February 6, 2025.

3. They ransacked federal agencies and axed jobs together, but US President Donald Trump’s expanding tariffs are apparently too much for even right-hand man Elon Musk.

So much so that Musk privately appealed to Trump to reverse the market-tanking measures in an “attempted intervention,” The Washington Post reported on Monday, citing people familiar with the matter.

But Musk’s alleged entreaty apparently didn’t work because Trump continued to saber-rattle on the trade war front, threatening to tack on 50% tariffs for Chinese goods.

Musk has expressed misgivings about the sweeping tariffs on his X platform but aimed his criticism at the likes of Trump adviser Peter Navarro, who is behind the strategy.

The Post dubbed Musk’s disagreement with the president as their “highest-profile disagreement” since Trump named him the leader of the so-called Department of Government Efficiency.

On Monday, Musk struck a somewhat conciliatory tone on the social platform he owns. He shared a post from a US trade rep that supported the “historic” tariffs and listed “unfair” trade practices of exporters. “Good points,” Musk wrote.

The multibillionaire definitely has some skin in the game as well. Musk has lost around $130 billion this year, and some of that is due to the tariff backlash.

- Trump Was Asked To Call Off Tariffs By Perhaps His Most-Trusted Adviser, HuffingtonPost.co.uk, April 8, 2025.

本文仅代表作者本人观点，与本网立场无关。欢迎大家讨论学术问题，尊重他人，禁止人身攻击和发布一切违反国家现行法律法规的内容。

About the author:

Zhang Xin is Trainer at chinadaily.com.cn. He has been with China Daily since 1988, when he graduated from Beijing Foreign Studies University. Write him at: zhangxin@chinadaily.com.cn, or raise a question for potential use in a future column.

（作者：张欣）