"A system that is over-reliant on prediction (through leverage, like the banking system before the recent crisis), hence fragile to unforeseen “black swan” events, will eventually break into pieces."
This here is crucial. Investment in capitalism resolves around predicting future profits and committing yourself to those predictions via debt and leverage. However, the heavier your commitments or the further the future swings from your predictions, the more of today's production you've wastefully dumped into a hole.
Taleb's works usually revolve around how people making those investment decisions offload the risk onto others instead of eating the entire cost themselves, and as a result don't have an incentive to moderate their risk taking.
That is precisely the point of limited liability companies. We have decided, as a society, that we like the benefits of these over the risks. We could certainly have a discussion around scoping the limits to liability but the fundamental fact is society wants the benefits of risky projects.
I think Mervyn King's take in "The end of Alchemy" is a better approach from a practical perspective than Taleb's though. Essentially that we just need to stop kidding ourselves that we can predict the tails, and to build greater buffers into all our assumptions from the beginning. He calls this "Radical Uncertainty" which I think is better as a practical foundation than attempts to model black swan events. Definitely worth considering both, though.
> Essentially that we just need to stop kidding ourselves that we can predict the tails, and to build greater buffers into all our assumptions from the beginning. He calls this "Radical Uncertainty" which I think is better as a practical foundation than attempts to model black swan events.
I haven't read The End of Alchemy, but Taleb also doesn't even think modelling black swan events is possible or even useful. Any attempts that claims can predict black swan events is assumed as harmful. And he would also propose the same to build greater buffers into assumptions or even assume that it will fail in time. Antifragile is the book that explores this more on how fragile are predictions and it's far more useful to know where is the risk exposure and compensate for that instead of calculating the risk and trying to avoid it.
I’m about 3/4 the way through Taleb’s ‘Antifragile’ after having already read ‘The Black Swan’ coincidentally only a few months before Covid hit. Must read material for understanding the world we are living in / entering right now in my opinion.
I read both of them twice. I found the concept in the Black Swan more distilled and polished. I started with the Black Swan for the 3th last week. I still come to new insights because what Taleb writes cuts also today straight through reality. Its like an extra set of razors, a timeless tool.
Agreed - Antifragile wasn't as organized or edited well. I've read all of his Incerto series, and I prefer his older books Black Swan and Fooled by Randomness.
Thirded. Black Swan and Fooled cover a lot of material. I don't think there were any huge additions in thought or context in Bed of Procrustes, though there some clever aphorisms.
Taleb's message has been consistent. His offhand remark about pandemics overlooked how many of those old family owned businesses would be wiped out by one though. Leveraged and globalized companies are still doing fine. His prediction on gold backed currency still has some runway left, as the de-dollarization of the global economy is well underway, and last I checked some 5-7 years ago, China had accumulated enough physical gold to launch a gold backed international settlement and reserve currency with only about 30x leverage.
The thing about leveraged companies is that they look fine until they collapse; they might still have revenue coming in and be able to sell bonds, but once their shareholders' equity hits zero, they are done. This kind of bankruptcy is likely to peak at the end of the crisis, not at the beginning or the middle, and we haven't reached the end yet.
The opposite is actually happening with the IMF pumping "free" money to 3-rd world countries. The CNY has lost ground to the USD in the last year and even during the pandemic.
Specifically on major data points, FT writes “if foreigners want to hold American liquid assets in vast amounts, the US must run a huge external deficit, unless its private sector wishes to load itself up with riskier foreign assets on a comparable scale“ which doesn’t seem very sustainable in longer term. (We’re operating in the current system effectively since 1971.)
(The piece further mentions the possibility of the current system “destroying the open world economy” which does indeed seem a bit gloomy.)
> overlooked how many of those old family owned businesses would be wiped out by one though
Taleb’s point has consistently been that one must focus on the impact rather than the event (the nonlinearity of that map is often the source of fat tails).
It doesn’t matter if a lot of small family-owned businesses fail. In the short term (months-years) it will be painful, but can be weathered easily with some government support and start thriving on the 2-3 year time scale. Small entities are naturally nimble.
The failure of numerous large and highly-leveraged businesses has a very different kind of impact because of the ripple effects that might cause serious systemic damage.
(warning: focus on the tech-sector) My reading of his argument was that the companies that will survive over the long term are more like the bootstrapped, cash-flow positive and efficient tech companies with a good long-term culture. While Softbank-money driven companies will likely have disappeared by then.
I used to like Taleb (maybe due to my disillusionment after 2008), but it's becoming more and more clear to me that he doesn't really contribute that much to the intellectual landscape; he's very much in the same vein as someone like Jordan Peterson. His Twitter machismo and pseudo-trolling is also pretty telling -- if I were a millionaire, I'd probably be fishing off the coast of Malta, not picking internet fights on Twitter.
I read his entire Incerto, and it was an absolute slog. Endless chapters just about how he's smarter than other Wall Street guys. Antifragile is probably the best book in the series, but the concept itself could be relegated to an essay -- not a whole book. As far as the article itself is concerned, it's typical doomerism. His entire post-Wall Street career revolves around doom and gloom (his main claim to fame being "black swan" events), so of course it makes sense that, from a Talebian perspective, the world will end by 2035.
> if I were a millionaire, I'd probably be fishing off the coast of Malta
Becoming a millionaire isn't like winning the lottery. For those who achieve it through passion & work, they are self-selectively not the people who will wake up one morning and "go fishing".
Yeah it is. Maybe you get some more tickets through passion and work but that's the full extent of it. You can be brilliant, passionate and set new levels of hard work and not have your number come up. Most vastly wealthy inherited.
Don't kid yourself. Risk is risk. The only inevitability is death. (Remember when that used to be "Death and Taxes." We should go back to when taxes were in that list).
My point wasn't about luck. It was about the route to wealth.
A lottery requires no specific sort of character. Making a million, often, does.
The sort of determined character that isn't going to wake up one morning and "stop doing what made them rich". Because it was never about being rich, it was always about what they were doing.
It's why Jerry Seinfeld, a billionaire, continues to do stand up. He's on stage for netflix, not "fishing".
Bob Hope played golf because he didn't need the applause. Randy Newman says he does need it. So what? What's Jordan doing? What's Ringo Starr up to?
It sucks that there's not much "justice" in getting hugely rich but the fact remains. All kinds of folks get there. All kinds don't. Some work hard. Some just fail upwards. Don't fall for the cherry picked BS of "which of you sublime charter traits ensured your success" It's crap and it smells bad too.
"Get up early. Strike oil." Doesn't matter what style of person you are.
I don't think they're sublime. But they're pretty reliably present traits: autistical, narcissitic, risk-taking, etc.
Don't fall for the leftwing resentiment of hating the rich either.
The reality is that there's huge amounts of social mobility across all wealth brackets, and enmass, those moving in/out of the top 5% do have quite reliable characteristics.
Eg., of the "top 1%" almost everyone in that class is only it in for, on average, 9mo in their entire lifetime. The risk-taking needed to get you there, equally, knocks you out.
The reality of a functioning economy is that a certain kind of "competence" (even if its psychopathic) is selected for. Regardless of the handful of celebrities and strike-it-rich anecdotes you can analyse in tabloid fashion.
The comment i was replying to expressed surprise that a rich person would be doing anything other than wasting time on a holiday: thus they express their (relative) poverty. Very few rich people would find it remarkable they weren't wasting time: that is precisely what they have never done.
That is /exactly/ what I'm disputing. To the point where you can't even generalise about so-called "self-made" rich people.
But beyond that, I'm not left-wing. At all. There's nothing left-wing about being a bit contemptuous of the successful who believe their monetary success is proof of themselves as superior humans. And there are at least some successful people who agree with that. Takes all kinds. Some fail upwards.
I agree. But you're still slightly misreading/moralising my point.
I'm not saying anyone deserves anything. I'm not saying anyone is superior.
I'm saying that commonly, amongst people who become millionaires, you find a certain set of characteristics.
In particular, you often find an obsessive interest in something which is greater than their desire to vacation or to spend frivolously: typically their business.
Poorer people misunderstand wealth. To them it is essentially just a series of inexplicable lotteries, "falling up" as you say.
But in functioning societies most people who become wealth don't just "fall up" -- there is a pattern to their personality (including risk tasking, say) which facilitates this movement.
>I'm saying that commonly, amongst people who become millionaires, you find a certain set of characteristics.
I continue to disagree strongly with this. There are /all/ kinds.
We're now talking past each other. Some are successful for reasons one can attribute to their nature. Some just fail upwards. Really they do. It's actually hard to miss examples of this when you look a little critically. I'm not sure how you've come to the conclusion such people don't exist... Luck is always a huuuge factor, even among the best of us. Anyway, best.
His technical papers are fun to read and based on solid mathematics. He's collecting that work into a book which is about as poorly edited as you would expect but the math is solid. There is no sense in which Taleb is as vapid as JBP.
I've read a couple, but I'm not a statistician, so I can't comment with any authority on his papers. For what it's worth, JBP has written more papers and is cited way more widely than Taleb. (But I'm not a psychologist either.)
JBP is absolutely off wrt Post-Modernism. He keeps quoting Hicks' books on Postmodernism which must be dismissed as fraud[1]. (Hicks himself presents his book on white supremacist Stefan Molyeux's podcast[2]).
my problem with JBP is that he presents his ideas as facts but they are nothing more than pseudo science and cherry picking to fit his narrative (e.g. he hasn't really understood the Jungian archetypes and keeps waffling on about it with great confidence). He seems to fit very well into Alan Sokal's definition of the "intellectual imposter". (the irony here is that Sokal himself hasn't understood postmodernism lol)
I feel like the thing about Jordan Peterson is the advice he offers seems pretty obvious if it's stuff you've been exposed to.
The thing people miss is there are a lot of people out there who haven't been exposed to such ideas.
I do think he got too big too fast and wasn't really ready to be a cultural icon like he became.
I think him and NN Taleb are on similar footing when it comes to the quality of their thought though. Both are interesting, but the well isn't very deep and you'll have to move on to something new before long.
> The thing people miss is there are a lot of people out there who haven't been exposed to such ideas.
Every single idea he has is conservative orthodoxy of one kind or another. Nobody living in the Western world has been spared exposure to the ideas he is so in love with. He is just good at failing to explaining them while being as un-concise as possible.
Over the past decades in the western world those conservative orthodoxies have been challenged and a new set of norms have emerged and are perceived as the new orthodoxies. Peterson's followers follow him because of his "guts" to speak up, but he's doesn't seem to be proposing new norms but rather showing how the conservative worldview can still offer a cure for the current pain points.
His followers follow him because he reinforces existing points of view. Nothing wrong with that, just saying that having such following doesn't imply original ideas.
I recommend the "what is true?" making sense podcast episode (https://samharris.org/podcasts/what-is-true/). It helped me better understand Peterson outside of the spotlight generated by him touching the controversial topics if our society. My opinion on him after that interview is even less flattering: he seemed interested in bending terminology and logic itself for the benefit of crafting a worldview he deems innate to humans, instead of researching our nature though inquiry. The feeling I got was that of an erudite anti-scientist.
Why not? Lots of people (not just conservatives!) like having their existing beliefs confirmed. Peterson's gift, if it can be called that, is in making conservative orthodoxy sound profound, and the fact he's a professor which helps his air of authority.
> Nobody living in the Western world has been spared exposure to the ideas he is so in love with.
Where might a person acquire such knowledge? It implies that someone would have had to compile all of JP's ideas, and then compare it against the knowledge of all Westen people. That sounds like quite an undertaking.
Are you yet another one of those people that things the onus is on other people to disprove your assertion (whoever speaks first is correct by default)? For all I know you know nothing of him and are simply writing an uninformed opinion, something that is extremely common, and becoming moreso every day.
A millionaire has the luxury of indulging any hobby he wishes. Some people like to fish, some like to argue on the internet.
Case in point, here we are.
With money and notoriety, he can flex that love of argument all he wants without having to worry about upsetting his masters.
JBP is a rehash of 1990's Heritage Foundation whitepapers. He's a good speaker, but there is no new ground there; Talib at least can hold some water with Black Swan and Fooled By Randomness.
I know he doesnt seem to be popular here, but Taleb seems to be one of the most important thinkers of our time. The fact that he is such a dick in public turns a lot of people off but it seems most of his core ideas are salient.
When it comes to finance - I recommend anything that's "long convexity". For example papers by Artemis, the 100 years portfolio is quite good https://www.artemiscm.com/welcome
Then I'd say reading history and trying to imagine how those people thought like. I think Taleb is basically a historian that happened to trade a lot of options in his past life. I like Robert Shiller's idea of "moving back in time", where you read today's NYTimes daily but from say, 1925, instead of 2020.
>Taleb seems to be one of the most important thinkers of our time.
Considering basically nothing he talks about is a thought original to him, I can't say I agree. He's good at popularizing things with the general public that were already well known within specialist circles, though.
He's also quite spotty on a bunch of science related subjects, including GMOs
Yeah. Nassim has some great if somewhat obvious points but his take on GMOs is weak. Any technology, from fire to GMOs, can be beneficial or abused. His insistence that we should not be playing around with genes at all because we are completely over our head is silly.
We have always been over our head. And you don't have to be a "Monsanto shill" to realize that.
He's very trigger happy with the block button, which ironically limits his exposure to contrarian views and likely makes his ideas less anti-fragile in the long run.
From everything I have read about Monsanto (none of it from Taleb), they are a pretty shitty, unethical company. They have ruined the lives of farmer in many places inside and out outside the US. I mean, round up is illegal in the EU.
His issue with GMOs, as I understand it, is mother nature "developed" and evolved these crops over a long period of time, and we should not trust a few IYI scientists at Monsanto, etc to play with that evolution via genetic manipulation.
Monsanto uses GMOs. GMOs are not equivalent to Monsanto.
There are many many examples of GMO foods that we all eat every day that are not related to the genetic modification done to make plants able to handle having roundup sprayed on them. I had some papayas over the weekend - something like 4/5ths of all papayas in the US are GMO because the ringspot virus nearly wiped them out prior to scientists genetically modifying them.
Taleb basically sticks his head in the sand and acts like Monsanto is the only game in town when it comes to GMOs and thinks that it is too dangerous for us to do at all.
The linked article is a damning indictment of Taleb's statements on GMOs. Just read some of the specific criticisms at the bottom.
> mother nature "developed" and evolved these crops over a long period of time, and we should not trust a few IYI scientists at Monsanto, etc to play with that evolution via genetic manipulation
We evolved sleeping on the earth, but very few treat that as an argument against beds.
According to the book "Poison Spring: Secret History of Pollution and EPA," GMOs are primarily developed in order to genetically engineer crops that are able to withstand chemical herbicides and pesticides: "Glyphosate is a powerful driver of genetic engineering. Its creator, Monsanto, has bioengineered 'Roundup Ready' soybeans, corn and other crops to resist Roundup's killing power" (p. 205)... "All genetically modified crops harm the natural world and human health, in large part because they (by definition) invite and encourage the spraying of toxic pesticides" (p. 212). Quoted from E.G. Vallianatos (2014) Poison Spring: Secret History of Pollution and EPA
https://www.amazon.com/Poison-Spring-Secret-History-Pollutio...
> A 2014 meta-analysis concluded that GM technology adoption had reduced chemical pesticide use by 37%, increased crop yields by 22%, and increased farmer profits by 68%.[3]
> All genetically modified crops harm the natural world and human health, in large part because they (by definition) invite and encourage the spraying of toxic pesticides
That is a flagrant abuse of the phrase "by definition"! Who is Vallianatos and on what basis does he make these claims? I looked him up and found that he has a BA in zoology and a doctorate in history, so I'd be keen to look at original sources rather than treat him as an expert.
He has all the f u money he needs, no day job, genuine curiosity, there is no need to doubt it. His intellectual curiosity is so refreshing when almost everybody reads books to signal something.
Other people read books to signal, but Talib has enough cloud to just say shit instead of signaling. Arguably, this is why he has the reputation of being a jerk or putting his foot in his mouth.
indeed that's the correct one. I mistakenly copy pasted things from browser history without loading the page. sorry about that & thanks for correcting it
One thing I both like and dislike about Taleb is his habit of "name dropping". In his earlier works (e.g. Fooled by Randomness) this was great as it produced a wonderful reading list (e.g. try Popper, it's far more accessible than I expected). In his later works, I find it fairly unpleasant.
But Read (or re-read) Fooled by Randomness with a notepad handy and note down any author he recommends and that should answer your question.
I wonder about this aspect of his personality. For instance, if I knew gravity = 9.8 m/s^2 and everyone around me still thought the earth was flat, would the daily interactions with people start to grate on me? Probably.
Of course, if I really thought I knew, but was wrong, then I'd just be an idiot & a jerk.
Seriously though, what if he's completely right about something that other people don't see? Then is he really being a dick, or is everyone else being one for calling him that and not seeing the same answers he sees?
It's got to be hard to know something that nobody else does and still be patient with everyone while they question you incessantly.
A good proxy for me is being a parent and trying to explain something for the umpteenth time to my kid - it get frustrating at times.
> if I knew gravity = 9.8 m/s^2 and everyone around me still thought the earth was flat, would the daily interactions with people start to grate on me?
If you have a decent amount of humility and good will, I honestly think you'd settle into working on finding the best way to communicate your ideas without belittling people.
I think it's very different. When you're a parent explaining something to a kid, you are responsible for their life and actions. You can't just take a few hours/days out to formulate your response or decide this person isn't worth your time. Taleb can. Also, you are evidently more competent at dealing with life than they are, whereas it's unclear in cases I've looked at whether Taleb is more insightful or competent than people he's called an "imbecile". How is the layman supposed to measure whether he really know what he's talking about? His poor writing skills and attitude give off quite a strong impression that he's not secure in his knowledge.
It’s not that he’s a dick, but he just seems to rename a lot of pretty standard psychology and economic phenomena with his own terminology, then speaks as though he was the first one to think of it. Giving the illusion that he’s some sort of lone genius rather than someone who can synthesize a lot of information very well ingratiates himself to a certain kind of asshole who are perfectly happy to talk condescendingly to you while parroting Taleb’s opinions exactly.
HN doesn't like Taleb because he dunks on a demographic particularly prevalent on here: well-educated laymen, or the less charitable 'intellectuals yet idiots'. I'd be lying if I didn't also feel targeted by him but I think it is also a core hacker value to grow thick skin and learn instead of getting offended and whining.
That, and of course he also wrote a take-down of IQ (and psychology in general) that pissed off a lot of IQ-fetishists on here.
He also made a bunch of money, knows a lot of advanced and ultrarigorous (read: French-educated) math and reads in a bunch of languages so even though he's a colossal asshole no one can exactly dismiss him as a hack, so he just kind of sticks there like an annoying wart in the face of "the discourse" that just won't go away. Personally, and in case it wasn't obvious, I sort of like him.
Edit: I forgot to mention he sometimes blocks people who give the wrong answer to the integral solving problems he posts on Twitter. I don't expect you to understand but I really respect that.
Taleb isn't targeting well-educated laymen when he talks of IYIs. He's speaking of intellectuals who are divorced from reality. As he puts it, "No skin in the game", e.g. economists, journalists, forecasters, career academics, social "scientists", etc.
Sure, and how does this not describe out-of-field tech workers and PhD havers pontificating over a bunch of questions where their job and/or reputation isn't on the line? I see plenty of people on here doing it in my field, and a cursory look at my post history will easily show I do the same in others (and with a throwaway account at that). It's just a thing we do, it seems ;-) nothing wrong with that as long as we're aware it's more of a self-indulgence than any kind of intellectual posturing. In that Taleb is useful as he keeps us honest, even if he's an asshole about it.
The only thing that bugs me about him is his take on religion. He claims he is not muslim but on multiple occasions he defends Islam and also he is mildly anti Jewish. He is against Richard Dawkins stating his math is wrong. I could not find the source of the problem that Richard Dawkins made an error in calculating. If somebodycan point out to math problem preferably if the problem is in python notebook for verification,that would be great
He's Orthodox Christian [1], but he defends all peaceful religious practice against the attacks from celebrity atheists like Dawkins and Sam Harris. But he also attacks violent religious extremists like Wahabis. I don't know about him being anti-Jewish. That doesn't sound right to me. Can you point to anything?
I also don't know about him attacking Dawkins' math; I don't know of any significant math Dawkins has ever published. You may be referring to Taleb's defence of E.O. Wilson, Nowak et al [2], which was attacked by Dawkins and Steven Pinker, without disproving the math in the paper, which Taleb claims to have verified.
NNT is the ultimate intellectual yet horribly idiot, its all-in on Chloroquine with fancy math, which appeared the tool for dictators to force the poor mass to continue taking risks for them, was an ungrounded effort, he only have been swindled by Raoult another UIYI like him.
Also there is nobody with less skin on himself as NNT, he blocks everybody that disagree with him, and carefully cultivate replies of yes-men, and cultist, who are ridiculous stans.
He’s an asshole but I wish I could understand anything he wrote. He seems to take pleasure in demonstrating how much more clever than anyone else he is, and that shows in his books: sentences are long and convoluted. I wish there was a dumbed down version of his books just so that I could make up my own mind about his ideas but alas.
Last time I checked, Taleb lives in NYC. Surprise! That's where the "doom" will happen once the USD is hyper-inflated and the USA is bankrupt. Someone is not following his own advice.
I'd also bet that Taleb is using in his daily-life more big corp products than small-family owned ones. I'm really wondering where this cognitive dissonance is coming from since many "high-profile" people seem to be suffering from it.
I think his biggest mis-read here was decentralization. If anything everything is becoming increasingly centralized to the point that we NEED to decentralize to keep things stable, but not to the level he is saying.
I just think the worst case here we're really going towards Dystopian Sci-Fi "one world government and super corporations" rather than city states.
So far, right on 2 out of 9 predictions. Here are the nine predictions and their current status:
> The great top-down nation-state will be only cosmetically alive, weakened by deficits, politicians' misalignment of interests and the magnification of errors by centralised systems. The pre-modernist robust model of city-states and statelings will prevail, with obsessive fiscal prudence.
1. So far, NOT TRUE. Nation-states still dominate the global landscape, and a majority have annual budget deficits (i.e., there is no "fiscal prudence").
> Currencies might still exist, but, after the disastrous experience of America's Federal Reserve, they will peg to some currency without a government, such as gold.
2. So far, NOT TRUE. AFAIK, no national currencies are pegged to gold nor to some other "currency without a government". Currencies created by government fiat dominate.
> Companies that are currently large, debt-laden, listed on an exchange (hence “efficient”) and paying bonuses will be gone. Those that will survive will be the more black swan-resistant—smaller, family-owned, unlisted on exchanges and free of debt. There will be large companies then, but these will be new—and short-lived.
3. So far, NOT TRUE. Most companies that are large, debt-laden, and exchange-traded are still around in their current form, though many have been supported by government largesse during the covid-19 pandemic.
> Most of the technologies that are now 25 years old or more will be around; almost all of the younger ones “providing efficiencies” will be gone, either supplanted by competing ones or progressively replaced by the more robust archaic ones. So the car, the plane, the bicycle, the voice-only telephone, the espresso machine and, luckily, the wall-to-wall bookshelf will still be with us.
4. So far, TRUE.
> The world will face severe biological and electronic pandemics, another gift from globalisation.
5. TRUE on the biological front!!!
6. So far, NOT TRUE on the electronic front.
> Religious practice will experience a revival, seen as a conveyor of robust heuristics, cultural values and rituals.
> Science will produce smaller and smaller gains in the non-linear domain, in spite of the enormous resources it will consume; instead it will start focusing on what it cannot—and should not—do.
8. So far... MAYBE? I mean, we have seen remarkable advances in AI (vision, NLP, speech, etc.), distributed systems (e.g., blockchains), quantum computing (Google, IBM, others), space exploration (Tesla, Blue Origin, others), green energy (Tesla again)... I'm inclined to say, as of yet, NOT TRUE.
> Finally, what is now called academic economics will be treated with the same disrespect that rigorous (and practical) minds currently have for Derrida-style post-modernist verbiage.
9. So far, NOT TRUE. Academic economists still seem to be treated with about as much respect as in 2010.
> The world will face severe biological and electronic pandemics, another gift from globalisation.
We know COVID exists; idiots argue about it on the street.
I don't think people realize how much propaganda and marketing dominate all facets of discourse. There is an electronic pandemic, and it's in your feed every day.
Yeah, Taleb is a tough one. His books and ideas have done more to change my thinking than almost anything else I have read. I recently got through Skin in the Game (finally!) adn it was head exploding especially in the light of Covid-19. I would rank it above his other books though he ranks Anti-Fragile as his most important work.
Some reasons Taleb comes off as so intransigent and just obstinate in real-life is two fold -
1) He sees as profoundly evil the privatization of profits and socialization of risks (banks) and sees "no consequence" professions - economists, experts, bureaucrats, war mongers, politicians and intellectuals as deeply unethical and predatory.
2) He went through a phase which he talks about in Anti Fragile, after the publication of Black Swan that he actually had to get security and was broadly shunned by the financial and intellectual elite which went against them. He is also independently wealthy and has learnt to inoculate himself to the circular congratulatory world of honors, awards, citations etc.
Taleb has been right about a lot of things and obviously wrong about few. However that is a difficult yardstick to measure on when the events he is talking about unfold once every 100 years or longer. It takes immense courage to make a stand on things that might never happen in your lifetime. For example he has been talking about the risks of pandemics for years and wrote a very prescient piece on Covid-19 in Jan. Now, China could have very well stopped Covid-19 in its tracks like they did SARs and we would have been spared and he would have looked like a fear monger. However it was the right call for Taleb to make and that is true courage.
I began reading Taleb when Fooled by Randomness came out in the early 200s. Read The Black Swan and then stopped because I did not find his work prescriptive. Recently got through the rest of his books and wished I had read them much much earlier. Now I plan to re-read them every two years.
Most intellectuals, including the general population of HN, have an almost allergic reaction to Taleb. They find him pompous, insufferable, unscientific, unoriginal and the rest. To each his own but it would behoove anyone who generally cares about how the world works to give the Incerto a read with an open mind.
BTW he is hugely bullish on the value of startups to both individuals and society (Anti-Fragile and Skin In the Game).
> Most intellectuals, including the general population of HN, have an almost allergic reaction to Taleb.
Taleb is one of the most frequently positively cited public intellectuals on HN.
Certainly, there are also negative reactions to him, but claiming the general population of HN has an “almost allergic reaction” to Taken is a ridiculously hyperbolic display of “my preferred viewpoint is persecuted here.”
You are lowering the level of discourse by bringing persecution into this. I almost want to ask if you have an allergic reaction to Taleb's point of view but given your hyperbole, since I did say general and not all, fair discussion is out of he picture.
You know what? I really like Taleb, despite certain aspects of his personality that might irritate most "normal" people. There's just one single thing that I very strongly disagree with (his take on inequality [0]), which is because I can't really understand but a tiny fraction of what he writes or says.
Can you imagine how beautiful that is? When I'm bored, I take a look at his twitter account and get inspired by things I would hardly find elsewhere.
Ah, on the inequality part: you would deserve a proper explanation, but in summary: I'm Italian, living in San Francisco for the past decade; when he says there's more inequality in Florence than in the US, I have a deep gut feeling that he's completely wrong. I know Florence and I know San Francisco, in terms of inequality I would always pick Florence (in terms of being a fairer system). I just need to pick outside my window to see several homeless people, and that's only scratching the surface.
Imagine (at current buying power of the $, including rent and everything; not saying that this is or isn't realistic) that everyone who's employed makes at least $100k/year, and unemployment is below 5% again. But at the same time there are pockets (perhaps even sizeable pockets) of people that make shit ton more. Do you think so many would be angry at the system?
The point is while "technically" (via some precise mathematical measure involving the entire wealth or income distribution) the inequality may be huge, if you can feel safe you'll not be very angry. "Safety" involves really basic things: shelter, healthcare, food, social purpose.
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[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 176 ms ] threadThis here is crucial. Investment in capitalism resolves around predicting future profits and committing yourself to those predictions via debt and leverage. However, the heavier your commitments or the further the future swings from your predictions, the more of today's production you've wastefully dumped into a hole.
I haven't read The End of Alchemy, but Taleb also doesn't even think modelling black swan events is possible or even useful. Any attempts that claims can predict black swan events is assumed as harmful. And he would also propose the same to build greater buffers into assumptions or even assume that it will fail in time. Antifragile is the book that explores this more on how fragile are predictions and it's far more useful to know where is the risk exposure and compensate for that instead of calculating the risk and trying to avoid it.
https://www.amazon.com/review/R1GJ1RXSS8ZXME/
and it made me think of how it applies to software development:
https://henrikwarne.com/2014/06/08/antifragility-and-softwar...
Interesting, can you mention by chance what major data points you see that are suggesting this? Thanks.
Specifically on major data points, FT writes “if foreigners want to hold American liquid assets in vast amounts, the US must run a huge external deficit, unless its private sector wishes to load itself up with riskier foreign assets on a comparable scale“ which doesn’t seem very sustainable in longer term. (We’re operating in the current system effectively since 1971.)
(The piece further mentions the possibility of the current system “destroying the open world economy” which does indeed seem a bit gloomy.)
(It doesn’t look very good for Euro either: https://www.bloomberg.com/amp/news/articles/2020-06-22/ecb-l... )
Taleb’s point has consistently been that one must focus on the impact rather than the event (the nonlinearity of that map is often the source of fat tails).
It doesn’t matter if a lot of small family-owned businesses fail. In the short term (months-years) it will be painful, but can be weathered easily with some government support and start thriving on the 2-3 year time scale. Small entities are naturally nimble.
The failure of numerous large and highly-leveraged businesses has a very different kind of impact because of the ripple effects that might cause serious systemic damage.
Tell that to the families involved.
I read his entire Incerto, and it was an absolute slog. Endless chapters just about how he's smarter than other Wall Street guys. Antifragile is probably the best book in the series, but the concept itself could be relegated to an essay -- not a whole book. As far as the article itself is concerned, it's typical doomerism. His entire post-Wall Street career revolves around doom and gloom (his main claim to fame being "black swan" events), so of course it makes sense that, from a Talebian perspective, the world will end by 2035.
Becoming a millionaire isn't like winning the lottery. For those who achieve it through passion & work, they are self-selectively not the people who will wake up one morning and "go fishing".
Don't kid yourself. Risk is risk. The only inevitability is death. (Remember when that used to be "Death and Taxes." We should go back to when taxes were in that list).
A lottery requires no specific sort of character. Making a million, often, does.
The sort of determined character that isn't going to wake up one morning and "stop doing what made them rich". Because it was never about being rich, it was always about what they were doing.
It's why Jerry Seinfeld, a billionaire, continues to do stand up. He's on stage for netflix, not "fishing".
It sucks that there's not much "justice" in getting hugely rich but the fact remains. All kinds of folks get there. All kinds don't. Some work hard. Some just fail upwards. Don't fall for the cherry picked BS of "which of you sublime charter traits ensured your success" It's crap and it smells bad too.
"Get up early. Strike oil." Doesn't matter what style of person you are.
Don't fall for the leftwing resentiment of hating the rich either.
The reality is that there's huge amounts of social mobility across all wealth brackets, and enmass, those moving in/out of the top 5% do have quite reliable characteristics.
Eg., of the "top 1%" almost everyone in that class is only it in for, on average, 9mo in their entire lifetime. The risk-taking needed to get you there, equally, knocks you out.
The reality of a functioning economy is that a certain kind of "competence" (even if its psychopathic) is selected for. Regardless of the handful of celebrities and strike-it-rich anecdotes you can analyse in tabloid fashion.
The comment i was replying to expressed surprise that a rich person would be doing anything other than wasting time on a holiday: thus they express their (relative) poverty. Very few rich people would find it remarkable they weren't wasting time: that is precisely what they have never done.
That is /exactly/ what I'm disputing. To the point where you can't even generalise about so-called "self-made" rich people.
But beyond that, I'm not left-wing. At all. There's nothing left-wing about being a bit contemptuous of the successful who believe their monetary success is proof of themselves as superior humans. And there are at least some successful people who agree with that. Takes all kinds. Some fail upwards.
I'm not saying anyone deserves anything. I'm not saying anyone is superior.
I'm saying that commonly, amongst people who become millionaires, you find a certain set of characteristics.
In particular, you often find an obsessive interest in something which is greater than their desire to vacation or to spend frivolously: typically their business.
Poorer people misunderstand wealth. To them it is essentially just a series of inexplicable lotteries, "falling up" as you say.
But in functioning societies most people who become wealth don't just "fall up" -- there is a pattern to their personality (including risk tasking, say) which facilitates this movement.
I continue to disagree strongly with this. There are /all/ kinds.
We're now talking past each other. Some are successful for reasons one can attribute to their nature. Some just fail upwards. Really they do. It's actually hard to miss examples of this when you look a little critically. I'm not sure how you've come to the conclusion such people don't exist... Luck is always a huuuge factor, even among the best of us. Anyway, best.
my problem with JBP is that he presents his ideas as facts but they are nothing more than pseudo science and cherry picking to fit his narrative (e.g. he hasn't really understood the Jungian archetypes and keeps waffling on about it with great confidence). He seems to fit very well into Alan Sokal's definition of the "intellectual imposter". (the irony here is that Sokal himself hasn't understood postmodernism lol)
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EHtvTGaPzF4
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lkfH87CgKOQ
All Jungian psychology is pseudoscience; hell most psychology is pseudoscience outside of measurable behaviorist or cognitive approaches.
The thing people miss is there are a lot of people out there who haven't been exposed to such ideas.
I do think he got too big too fast and wasn't really ready to be a cultural icon like he became.
I think him and NN Taleb are on similar footing when it comes to the quality of their thought though. Both are interesting, but the well isn't very deep and you'll have to move on to something new before long.
Every single idea he has is conservative orthodoxy of one kind or another. Nobody living in the Western world has been spared exposure to the ideas he is so in love with. He is just good at failing to explaining them while being as un-concise as possible.
If that were the case, he wouldn't have the massive following he does.
His followers follow him because he reinforces existing points of view. Nothing wrong with that, just saying that having such following doesn't imply original ideas.
I recommend the "what is true?" making sense podcast episode (https://samharris.org/podcasts/what-is-true/). It helped me better understand Peterson outside of the spotlight generated by him touching the controversial topics if our society. My opinion on him after that interview is even less flattering: he seemed interested in bending terminology and logic itself for the benefit of crafting a worldview he deems innate to humans, instead of researching our nature though inquiry. The feeling I got was that of an erudite anti-scientist.
In particular, the anecdote about how Peterson wanted to be a preacher.
Where might a person acquire such knowledge? It implies that someone would have had to compile all of JP's ideas, and then compare it against the knowledge of all Westen people. That sounds like quite an undertaking.
Nice weather, but not much fish. https://eu.oceana.org/en/press-center/press-releases/un-aler...
Case in point, here we are.
With money and notoriety, he can flex that love of argument all he wants without having to worry about upsetting his masters.
JBP is a rehash of 1990's Heritage Foundation whitepapers. He's a good speaker, but there is no new ground there; Talib at least can hold some water with Black Swan and Fooled By Randomness.
So I guess the answer is to block JavaScript and cookies
If I like Taleb, who else should be reading?
Then I'd say reading history and trying to imagine how those people thought like. I think Taleb is basically a historian that happened to trade a lot of options in his past life. I like Robert Shiller's idea of "moving back in time", where you read today's NYTimes daily but from say, 1925, instead of 2020.
Also, here is a list of authors Taleb himself considers to be, in classic Taleb fashion, "non BS vendors":
https://twitter.com/nntaleb/status/1231560522157494279
Considering basically nothing he talks about is a thought original to him, I can't say I agree. He's good at popularizing things with the general public that were already well known within specialist circles, though.
He's also quite spotty on a bunch of science related subjects, including GMOs
https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Nassim_Nicholas_Taleb
We have always been over our head. And you don't have to be a "Monsanto shill" to realize that.
He's very trigger happy with the block button, which ironically limits his exposure to contrarian views and likely makes his ideas less anti-fragile in the long run.
From everything I have read about Monsanto (none of it from Taleb), they are a pretty shitty, unethical company. They have ruined the lives of farmer in many places inside and out outside the US. I mean, round up is illegal in the EU.
His issue with GMOs, as I understand it, is mother nature "developed" and evolved these crops over a long period of time, and we should not trust a few IYI scientists at Monsanto, etc to play with that evolution via genetic manipulation.
There are many many examples of GMO foods that we all eat every day that are not related to the genetic modification done to make plants able to handle having roundup sprayed on them. I had some papayas over the weekend - something like 4/5ths of all papayas in the US are GMO because the ringspot virus nearly wiped them out prior to scientists genetically modifying them.
Taleb basically sticks his head in the sand and acts like Monsanto is the only game in town when it comes to GMOs and thinks that it is too dangerous for us to do at all.
> mother nature "developed" and evolved these crops over a long period of time, and we should not trust a few IYI scientists at Monsanto, etc to play with that evolution via genetic manipulation
We evolved sleeping on the earth, but very few treat that as an argument against beds.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetically_modified_crops
That is a flagrant abuse of the phrase "by definition"! Who is Vallianatos and on what basis does he make these claims? I looked him up and found that he has a BA in zoology and a doctorate in history, so I'd be keen to look at original sources rather than treat him as an expert.
He's obviously important in general - I just think there's probably a better label thank thinker. Evangelist, maybe?
https://www.amazon.com/Nassim-Nicholas-Taleb/e/B000APVZ7W
https://www.thewaystowealth.com/nassim-taleb-reading-list/
https://www.amazon.com/gp/profile/amzn1.account.AHMHNR4MRTDL...
But Read (or re-read) Fooled by Randomness with a notepad handy and note down any author he recommends and that should answer your question.
I wonder about this aspect of his personality. For instance, if I knew gravity = 9.8 m/s^2 and everyone around me still thought the earth was flat, would the daily interactions with people start to grate on me? Probably.
Of course, if I really thought I knew, but was wrong, then I'd just be an idiot & a jerk.
Seriously though, what if he's completely right about something that other people don't see? Then is he really being a dick, or is everyone else being one for calling him that and not seeing the same answers he sees?
It's got to be hard to know something that nobody else does and still be patient with everyone while they question you incessantly.
A good proxy for me is being a parent and trying to explain something for the umpteenth time to my kid - it get frustrating at times.
If you have a decent amount of humility and good will, I honestly think you'd settle into working on finding the best way to communicate your ideas without belittling people.
The great things about kids is that they grow, and you are explaining new things to them over the years, not the same thing for 20 years.
EDIT - just to clarify my original comment, I was not excusing his behavior - only pondering the source of it.
Ole Peters work on ergodocity
Paul Skallas / "Lindy Table" on Twitter
That, and of course he also wrote a take-down of IQ (and psychology in general) that pissed off a lot of IQ-fetishists on here.
He also made a bunch of money, knows a lot of advanced and ultrarigorous (read: French-educated) math and reads in a bunch of languages so even though he's a colossal asshole no one can exactly dismiss him as a hack, so he just kind of sticks there like an annoying wart in the face of "the discourse" that just won't go away. Personally, and in case it wasn't obvious, I sort of like him.
Edit: I forgot to mention he sometimes blocks people who give the wrong answer to the integral solving problems he posts on Twitter. I don't expect you to understand but I really respect that.
I also don't know about him attacking Dawkins' math; I don't know of any significant math Dawkins has ever published. You may be referring to Taleb's defence of E.O. Wilson, Nowak et al [2], which was attacked by Dawkins and Steven Pinker, without disproving the math in the paper, which Taleb claims to have verified.
[1] https://twitter.com/nntaleb/status/1177630356327075841
[2] https://www.facebook.com/nntaleb/posts/eo-wilson-nowak-et-al...
> https://twitter.com/nntaleb/status/1204827396999929857
Last time I checked, Taleb lives in NYC. Surprise! That's where the "doom" will happen once the USD is hyper-inflated and the USA is bankrupt. Someone is not following his own advice.
I'd also bet that Taleb is using in his daily-life more big corp products than small-family owned ones. I'm really wondering where this cognitive dissonance is coming from since many "high-profile" people seem to be suffering from it.
I just think the worst case here we're really going towards Dystopian Sci-Fi "one world government and super corporations" rather than city states.
> The great top-down nation-state will be only cosmetically alive, weakened by deficits, politicians' misalignment of interests and the magnification of errors by centralised systems. The pre-modernist robust model of city-states and statelings will prevail, with obsessive fiscal prudence.
1. So far, NOT TRUE. Nation-states still dominate the global landscape, and a majority have annual budget deficits (i.e., there is no "fiscal prudence").
> Currencies might still exist, but, after the disastrous experience of America's Federal Reserve, they will peg to some currency without a government, such as gold.
2. So far, NOT TRUE. AFAIK, no national currencies are pegged to gold nor to some other "currency without a government". Currencies created by government fiat dominate.
> Companies that are currently large, debt-laden, listed on an exchange (hence “efficient”) and paying bonuses will be gone. Those that will survive will be the more black swan-resistant—smaller, family-owned, unlisted on exchanges and free of debt. There will be large companies then, but these will be new—and short-lived.
3. So far, NOT TRUE. Most companies that are large, debt-laden, and exchange-traded are still around in their current form, though many have been supported by government largesse during the covid-19 pandemic.
> Most of the technologies that are now 25 years old or more will be around; almost all of the younger ones “providing efficiencies” will be gone, either supplanted by competing ones or progressively replaced by the more robust archaic ones. So the car, the plane, the bicycle, the voice-only telephone, the espresso machine and, luckily, the wall-to-wall bookshelf will still be with us.
4. So far, TRUE.
> The world will face severe biological and electronic pandemics, another gift from globalisation.
5. TRUE on the biological front!!!
6. So far, NOT TRUE on the electronic front.
> Religious practice will experience a revival, seen as a conveyor of robust heuristics, cultural values and rituals.
7. So far, NOT TRUE. See, for example: https://www.pewforum.org/2019/10/17/in-u-s-decline-of-christ...
> Science will produce smaller and smaller gains in the non-linear domain, in spite of the enormous resources it will consume; instead it will start focusing on what it cannot—and should not—do.
8. So far... MAYBE? I mean, we have seen remarkable advances in AI (vision, NLP, speech, etc.), distributed systems (e.g., blockchains), quantum computing (Google, IBM, others), space exploration (Tesla, Blue Origin, others), green energy (Tesla again)... I'm inclined to say, as of yet, NOT TRUE.
> Finally, what is now called academic economics will be treated with the same disrespect that rigorous (and practical) minds currently have for Derrida-style post-modernist verbiage.
9. So far, NOT TRUE. Academic economists still seem to be treated with about as much respect as in 2010.
We know COVID exists; idiots argue about it on the street.
I don't think people realize how much propaganda and marketing dominate all facets of discourse. There is an electronic pandemic, and it's in your feed every day.
Some reasons Taleb comes off as so intransigent and just obstinate in real-life is two fold -
1) He sees as profoundly evil the privatization of profits and socialization of risks (banks) and sees "no consequence" professions - economists, experts, bureaucrats, war mongers, politicians and intellectuals as deeply unethical and predatory.
2) He went through a phase which he talks about in Anti Fragile, after the publication of Black Swan that he actually had to get security and was broadly shunned by the financial and intellectual elite which went against them. He is also independently wealthy and has learnt to inoculate himself to the circular congratulatory world of honors, awards, citations etc.
Taleb has been right about a lot of things and obviously wrong about few. However that is a difficult yardstick to measure on when the events he is talking about unfold once every 100 years or longer. It takes immense courage to make a stand on things that might never happen in your lifetime. For example he has been talking about the risks of pandemics for years and wrote a very prescient piece on Covid-19 in Jan. Now, China could have very well stopped Covid-19 in its tracks like they did SARs and we would have been spared and he would have looked like a fear monger. However it was the right call for Taleb to make and that is true courage.
I began reading Taleb when Fooled by Randomness came out in the early 200s. Read The Black Swan and then stopped because I did not find his work prescriptive. Recently got through the rest of his books and wished I had read them much much earlier. Now I plan to re-read them every two years.
Most intellectuals, including the general population of HN, have an almost allergic reaction to Taleb. They find him pompous, insufferable, unscientific, unoriginal and the rest. To each his own but it would behoove anyone who generally cares about how the world works to give the Incerto a read with an open mind.
BTW he is hugely bullish on the value of startups to both individuals and society (Anti-Fragile and Skin In the Game).
Taleb is one of the most frequently positively cited public intellectuals on HN.
Certainly, there are also negative reactions to him, but claiming the general population of HN has an “almost allergic reaction” to Taken is a ridiculously hyperbolic display of “my preferred viewpoint is persecuted here.”
Can you imagine how beautiful that is? When I'm bored, I take a look at his twitter account and get inspired by things I would hardly find elsewhere.
Ah, on the inequality part: you would deserve a proper explanation, but in summary: I'm Italian, living in San Francisco for the past decade; when he says there's more inequality in Florence than in the US, I have a deep gut feeling that he's completely wrong. I know Florence and I know San Francisco, in terms of inequality I would always pick Florence (in terms of being a fairer system). I just need to pick outside my window to see several homeless people, and that's only scratching the surface.
[0]: https://medium.com/incerto/inequality-and-skin-in-the-game-d...
Insecurity is the problem. People in Florence are secure (their basic needs are met), while SF has an open defecation problem.
The point is while "technically" (via some precise mathematical measure involving the entire wealth or income distribution) the inequality may be huge, if you can feel safe you'll not be very angry. "Safety" involves really basic things: shelter, healthcare, food, social purpose.