
What Nassim Taleb can teach us - yusufp
https://mises.org/blog/what-nassim-taleb-can-teach-us
======
qubex
I really appreciate his books, _The Black Swan_ and _Antifragile_
particularly, though it does seem to me he's set up something of a cottage
industry churning the same general idea into a sequence of very similar books.
Then again, as long as he has extra stuff to add, and a readership willing to
purchase them, I suppose this is utterly acceptable.

However, as a person, he seems to be an absolute rabid nutter. At one point he
was planning to publish a book of his own aphorisms, as quoted by himself,
while he is still alive. He rants and raves on Twitter[1]. Lately he's been
engaged in an utterly hysterical tirade against a historian about the ethnic
diversity (or lack thereof) in Roman Britain... whichever side you take in
this at an intellectual level (personally, I'm more on his side than not), the
tone and mode of the conversation as conducted by him is absolutely rabid and
unacceptable.

[1] Full disclosure: he banned me on Twitter years ago because I fucked up an
integral he had posed as a question for followers. Make of this what you will.

~~~
jdavis703
Have you read his books (not just the summary but all the chapters)? While he
has good points, he is so egotistical, self-absorbed, and full of pseudo-
scientific theories (e.g. that one should go between gorging themselves on
food and fasting) that it makes it hard to actually extract out the good
parts.

~~~
darawk
Ya, it's really a shame. He's got some very interesting stuff to say, but he's
such a completely insufferable jackass. It's really unfortunate. I manage to
ignore it and enjoy his books anyway, but he's a pretty easy person to hate.

~~~
jcahill
if you start from a position of disdain instead, you'll be able to move past
thinking his works have enough value to suffer the bullshit antics and be well
on your way to never thinking about him again except in passing social
context.

taleb is ultimately just another LARPer. people get the impression that he's
something more for ~4 basic reasons:

1\. he's more verbal than them.

2\. they don't know stats too good.

so, given a crisis of confidence in all statistical orthodoxy plus a guy who
really really seems to talk like he knows about stats a lot, and whom others —
who _also_ don't know stats, but want social proof of reading & shit — say
knows about stats, they have no choice but to remain agnostic or go along with
taleb's dogmatic-sophist-monkey-dance.

3\. they fail to appreciate that his depth of extended expertise is never more
than ankle-deep, and breadth very agonizingly chosen so as to min-max in terms
of knowledge required to signal learnedness to the unlearned.

he'll say some poncy shit like « flâneur » out of context _just_ because his
readers are unfamiliar with it. he'll go on seeming deep-dives about language
evolution and community segregation in the spinning of statistical fables —
and it'll be utter horseshit, but nobody reading him will suspect that, and
anyone with the requisite expertise to debunk it line by line doesn't give a
shit about him and has no incentive to do so: why debunk a LARPer whose entire
shtick is being a cleverer obscurant than most with an institutionally-enabled
gish gallop lifestyle?

4\. academic culture is so actively pathetic and conflict-avoidant that it's
trivial to come across as some sort of masculine breaker-of-chains figure
merely by not sucking in the _majority_ mould — sucking differently is
sometimes sufficient, at this point.

just look at jordan peterson. i don't intend to imply that he sucks, but _look
at him_ , presentation-wise. dude's basically a couple slices of ham held up
by suspenders wrapped in a blazer, mouth-hole cut out so wind can blow
through, and he's hailed as some kind of triumphant anti-establishment figure
simply because culture wars shit has gotten so farcical.

wonks are thrown off by taleb's eagerness to be crass in the middle of
otherwise frou-frou discourse, and that's the only thing that gives it any
influence — because he discards all epistemic norms in the process. he won't
circle back for them if they wait it out, or otherwise re-engage like a good
lad. he doesn't choose to be vulgar for shits and giggles while nevertheless
maintaining soundness of argumentation, he does it simply as a short-
circuiting mechanism.

the posturing is slumming to him: he's aping a working class affectation
without the life experience of having an epistemic peer+ interrupt the ritual
to physically dickslap him and then resume reasoned discussion.

you see it with the powerlifting posturing as well.

i mean, nobody gives a shit what some physically unremarkable old man lifts.
not young girls who don't wanna fuck unremarkable old men, nor young
powerlifting guys who don't wanna have their sets interrupted by some old
poseur pretending to do a 2016 election exit poll so he can inevitably find
that

    
    
      HIGH T ⇒ TRUMP VOTER
      LOW T ⇒ HILLURRY
      
      LUK, A BUNCHA MATHEMATICA BULLSHIT
      BUNCHA MATHEMATICA BULLSHIT ⇒ IMRITE
      AND IT'S A PICTURE SOOOOO…
      YOU CAN'T USE IT W/O TRANSCRIBING IT
      DESPITE ALREADY KNOWING IT'S BULLSHIT
      HEE HAW AREN'T I SUCH TROLE
      
      GLOBALIST CUCKS BTFO BY #BLACKSWAN
    

(yeah, this refers to an actual thing⁽¹⁾ he did on twitter)

in fact, the _only_ possible audience for such effete anti-intellectual
snobbery is Young Male Scholars™, pencilneck NYU Stern dandies who can project
aspirations onto such a transparently less-than-nothing caricature as taleb in
the same way that lots of young guys get really into _BEING LIBERTARIAN_ as a
social posture & gender identity.

so taleb, then: a brand for dullwits, a statistician who squandered nigh-
unsquanderably fortuitous career timing to shitpost about things he just read
a single wikipedia entry on, a guy who needed to be spanked a lot more as a
kid, gist him however you like.

it doesn't really matter how you do it, because he doesn't matter

____________________

¹
[https://twitter.com/nntaleb/status/814560759577513984](https://twitter.com/nntaleb/status/814560759577513984)

~~~
darawk
I don't disagree with your assessment of his character. But I do think that
his insights about risk are, while not _novel_ per se, are interesting.
Particularly his concept of 'antifragility'. Now, is that a new idea? No. And
it's likely not his idea, either, and he also thinks that it applies way more
broadly than it actually does. He's a jackass. But the mental model supposed
by Antifragile is an interesting and useful one, and I don't regret having
waded through his idiocy to obtain it.

~~~
jcahill
Thing is that he picks an organizing principle⁽¹⁾ and rides it into the
ground, through the center of the earth, and back out the other side until
eventually de-emphasizing it in favor of some new organizing principle more
attractive to current audiences.

That is: there are geological layers of taleb based entirely in reader-
response. He can't make his subject matter audience-invariant, because how it
plays determines its significance to him: it's a feedback loop of bullshit by
design. Right now all his acolytes can manage to sputter forth is acronymized
slogans like SITG (skin in the game), so that's what he plays up. Formerly it
was stuff like antifragility, etc. It just keeps devolving.

____________________

¹ [http://enwp.org/organizing_principle](http://enwp.org/organizing_principle)

~~~
darawk
> Thing is that he picks an organizing principle⁽¹⁾ and rides it into the
> ground, through the center of the earth, and back out the other side until
> eventually de-emphasizing it in favor of some new organizing principle more
> attractive to current audiences.

I don't disagree, but I think that the organizing principles he's settled upon
(by whatever process) are interesting.

~~~
jcahill
the poetics of successful sophistry is a potential research topic in its own
right, so sure

~~~
darawk
It is possible to find a man to be a jackass, and have a few interesting ideas
simultaneously. You haven't attempted to criticize any of his actual ideas,
just his presentation of them. A criticism I agree with, though in so doing
you're really committing his own primary sin: Trying to defeat substance by
criticizing style. If you've got specific gripes with his math, i'd be curious
to hear that, or criticisms of his actual _ideas_ i'd be curious to hear those
too.

~~~
jcahill
Trouble there is simple: academically, he hasn't really innovated anything
substantial enough to bother discussing in isolation. I mean that in a purely
descriptive sense.

Just take a look at his google scholar⁽¹⁾ or crossref search⁽²⁾ hits and gloss
over the books, republications of books, translations of books. What remains
are miscellaneous vagaries about tail risk etc. In particular, lots of reviews
/ position papers that amount to him just setting up strawmen to tear down.

That contrarian browbeating is what drove him to prominence. And in sole-
author article form, the attendant research laziness manifests itself as junk
like this⁽³⁾ thing that's lower quality discussion of the subject matter than
a lot of replication forum posts.

____________________

¹
[https://scholar.google.com/citations?hl=en&user=64BtMdsAAAAJ](https://scholar.google.com/citations?hl=en&user=64BtMdsAAAAJ)

²
[https://search.crossref.org/?q=%2BNassim+%2BTaleb&type=Journ...](https://search.crossref.org/?q=%2BNassim+%2BTaleb&type=Journal+Article)

³ Taleb, N.N., 2016. The Meta-Distribution of Standard P-Values. SSRN.
[http://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.2834266](http://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.2834266)

------
emtel
Taleb holds that essentially all journalists are fools, and the articles they
publish are "noise". He says "to cure yourself of newspapers, spend a year
reading the previous week's newspapers". There's wisdom in this: the
importance of the news of the day can't be immediately apprehended. What seems
important at the time can quickly fade into irrelevance. Larger stories are
often completely missed or gotten totally wrong.

Buuuuuut apparently what Taleb means is that _no one but him_ can figure out
the importance of things immediately. The guy tweets, apparently believing
that he understands the lasting importance of what he's tweeting about. And
hey, maybe he does... except, among other things, he's in (or was in) a
twitter war with JK Rowling!

The guy is a loon who has figured a lot of things out, and now believes he
knows everything.

~~~
cmac2992
He totally lost me when he started talking about Michael Flynn being one of
the great military minds or praising The Mooch's rant and "being direct,
natural, and nononsense".

Seems like a smart guy but...

------
chollida1
I love Nassim Taleb as an academic and philosopher. I think he has a Peter
Thiel like quality of being able to thinking differently, but in a very
applicable way.

Nassim Taleb the author though I really can't get into, and to be fair he's
had so much success that this is probably my fault.

If you want to get the most out of his work then read his medium blog. Most of
his pieces are written in easily digestible formats.

[https://medium.com/@nntaleb](https://medium.com/@nntaleb)

I've re-started trying to read the Black Swan about 10 times and IMHO if you
just read the first 3 chapters then you'll get about 95% of what you would if
you had read the entire book.

I think the problem with his books that I have is that he considers himself
not just an author but a modern day philosopher, and with that comes a level
of rigor in his writing that brings me back to my measure theory and real
analysis courses.

If you really want to read his books, then start backwards.

Antifragile is awesome, but still very wordy, and builds on top of all his
other works. It almost seems to be the culmination of the idea's he's been
writing about since the black Swan.

As a side note, for anyone who wants to learn about options trading with a
focus on how a trader would view them, ie from a mathematical perspective,
then check out one of his first books...... Dynamic Hedging of Options.

[http://ca.wiley.com/WileyCDA/WileyTitle/productCd-0471152803...](http://ca.wiley.com/WileyCDA/WileyTitle/productCd-0471152803.html)

As a second side note........

His latest concept of “Skin in the game” is the best form of risk control that
we've found for reigning in traders. Once traders are required to

1) keep the vast majority of their bonus in the fund for a few years

2) take part of their bonus in the form of non liquid securities if they want
to hold more than a certain percentage of their portfolio in non liquid assets

we have found they pay alot more attention to the liquidity of their portfolio
and the long term profitability of their portfolio, both of which are good for
the long term success of the fund.

~~~
stretchwithme
Or bonuses should be based on what happens during a long period of time. Say
you lead a company from 2015 to 2020, but your bonus is based on how well the
company does from 2020 through 2025. And if the company fails before you get
your bonus, too bad for you.

I haven't read his books but find his ideas as presented in videos and
podcasts to be valuable.

~~~
mseebach
That's exactly the idea. Your bonuses 2015-2020 are invested in the company
every year, and you can only cash them out after five years, in 2020-2025. If
the company tanks in 2020 your bonuses for 2015-2020 are retroactively zero.

~~~
stretchwithme
I think companies should be rated by how much skin in the game its leaders
have.

Companies run by founders that still have a substantial percentage of their
wealth in the company would get the highest rating. And professional managers
getting stock-based short term incentives would be on the low end.

------
maxthegeek1
Jeff Deist, the author of this article is a crypto white nationalist. You can
pick up a hint of this from the article above,

"He understands that globalism is not liberalism, that identity and culture
matter"

A quote from another article,

"Jeff Deist, President of the Ludwig von Mises Institute, a right-libertarian
think tank for promoting Rothbardian anarcho-capitalism and the Austrian
School of economics, said of the Alt-right that he found their writings
"interesting...and somewhat refreshing".[20] In 2017, Deist concluded a speech
at the Mises Institute titled 'For a New Libertarian' with the words, "In
other words, blood and soil and God and nation still matter to people.
Libertarians ignore this at the risk of irrelevance."[21]

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paleolibertarianism#United_Sta...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paleolibertarianism#United_States)

Note that "blood and soil" refers to the nazi phrase "blut and boden".

~~~
oh_sigh
Why is he a 'white nationalist' and not just a 'nationalist'?

Do you have any indication that, so long as people conform to his idea of what
his country's culture should be, that he wouldn't accept black, asian, etc
people?

~~~
maxthegeek1
I just brought up his use of the nazi slogan "blood and soil".

Also, listen to this. It's Jeff Deist's take on Richard Spencer.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l6kJNHZvanI&t=1s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l6kJNHZvanI&t=1s)

Within the video Deist advocates for what he calls a "Benedict Option" whereby
a white ethnostate would secede from the US.

Overall the tone of the video is that Deist disagrees with Richard Spencer's
economic stance, but that he doesn't take issue with Spencer's views on race.

------
questerzen
The Black Swan has a good point to make about reliance on over-simplified
mathematical models, but Taleb's macho anti-intellectualism is ultimately
nihilistic since he denies even the possibility of achieving a deeper
mathematical understanding of risk. But what I really have a problem with is
that he has created a band of idiot Twitter acolytes who can be counted on to
heap brainless abuse at anyone who Taleb chooses to disagree with, which these
days seems to be almost everyone with even slightly diverging views to his. He
will not attempt reasonable debate, especially when he is faced with superior
erudition: in this regard Mary Beard is only the latest of his many victims.
The guy is a pure and simple thug.

~~~
ukj
I followed the drama around it and my end conclusion (to paraphrase somebody's
tweet)

Mary Beard is respectable, well educated and gracious. Taleb is right.

------
blueyes
How to be a blowhard...

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rtx
I see more people are now against hims since he stopped virtue signalling.

