
The World in 2036: Nassim Taleb looks at what will break, and what won't (2010) - pedrodelfino
https://www.economist.com/news/2010/11/22/nassim-taleb-looks-at-what-will-break-and-what-wont
======
misiti3780
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.

If I like Taleb, who else should be reading?

~~~
throwaway4666
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.

~~~
radomysisky
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.

~~~
throwaway4666
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.

------
motohagiography
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.

~~~
xhrpost
> the de-dollarization of the global economy is well underway

Interesting, can you mention by chance what major data points you see that are
suggesting this? Thanks.

~~~
anttifoobar
Not GP, but this is an informative piece:
[https://amp.ft.com/content/f3ee37e0-b086-11ea-a4b6-31f1eedf7...](https://amp.ft.com/content/f3ee37e0-b086-11ea-a4b6-31f1eedf762e?__twitter_impression=true)

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...](https://www.bloomberg.com/amp/news/articles/2020-06-22/ecb-
looks-to-defuse-german-legal-timebomb-threatening-
stimulus?sref=61mHmpU4&__twitter_impression=true) )

------
csomar
Here is something funny: The USA "doomers" happen to live, _surprisingly_ in
the USA or somewhere else doomed (Europe).

>
> [https://twitter.com/nntaleb/status/1204827396999929857](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.

~~~
swanson
Taleb doesnt live in NYC anymore

~~~
csomar
Must have missed it. Where was the update?

------
haltingproblem
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).

~~~
dragonwriter
> 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.”

~~~
haltingproblem
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.

------
ErikAugust
"The world will face severe biological and electronic pandemics, another gift
from globalisation."

------
simonebrunozzi
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.

[0]: [https://medium.com/incerto/inequality-and-skin-in-the-
game-d...](https://medium.com/incerto/inequality-and-skin-in-the-
game-d8f00bc0cb46)

~~~
H8crilA
That's because inequality is not really the problem.

Insecurity is the problem. People in Florence are secure (their basic needs
are met), while SF has an open defecation problem.

~~~
redisman
What causes the insecurity if not inequality?

~~~
H8crilA
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.

------
dang
A tiny thread from 2010:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1940661](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1940661)

------
cs702
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._

7\. So far, NOT TRUE. See, for example:
[https://www.pewforum.org/2019/10/17/in-u-s-decline-of-
christ...](https://www.pewforum.org/2019/10/17/in-u-s-decline-of-christianity-
continues-at-rapid-pace/)

 _> 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.

~~~
blaser-waffle
> 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.

------
magicsmoke
"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.

~~~
abakker
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.

~~~
raihansaputra
> 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.

------
0xCMP
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.

------
ur-whale
[http://archive.is/8hR2P](http://archive.is/8hR2P)

------
playingchanges
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.

~~~
lowdose
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.

~~~
ipsum2
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.

~~~
blaser-waffle
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.

------
dvt
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.

~~~
mjburgess
> 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".

~~~
harry8
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).

~~~
mjburgess
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".

~~~
harry8
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.

~~~
mjburgess
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.

~~~
harry8
> 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.

~~~
mjburgess
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.

~~~
harry8
>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.

------
aerodog
I like Taleb but he was off on voice-only telephones :D

------
fergie
How do we get around the Economist’s paywall these days?

~~~
martonlanga
[https://outline.com/[INSERT_URL]](https://outline.com/\[INSERT_URL\])

