/lit/ - Literature

Should I read all of Incerto or just Black Swan ?

where to start with taleb?

>>13565829
Inspiration for the shire was western Worcestershire you imbecile

Nothing is more Lindy than Islam

>Nationwide protests by parents against new relationships and sex-education lessons are planned for September, and head teachers across England are bracing themselves for angry scenes. About 70 state schools are pleading for help to deal with demands from parents that they drop the lessons, which include information about LGBT sex and relationships.

>On Friday, 350 children were withdrawn from Parkfield Primary School in Birmingham because teachers have refused to stop using picture books to teach young children that same-sex relationships are normal. Demonstrations outside nearby Anderton Park Primary School have been banned by the High Court after ugly scenes upset children and teachers.

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/parent-demos-against-lgbt-lessons-sweep-the-country-5t3k89qhx

>“It’s a mob chanting and shouting and engaging in intimidating and threatening behaviour. And I think we have to recognise that and call it out for what it is.”

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2019/jul/15/lgbt-lessons-row-parkfield-school-birmingham-government-slow-response-protests

>>13369291
he just completely ignores the last point because it destroys his argument.

Why is this genius not talked about more? Was there a book released by him that showcases his groundbreaking discovery?

Thoughts on ancient Arab philosopher Nassim Nicholas Taleb?

I know many of you love this guy, and think he's a genius. I can assure you, none among you, are as impressed with his intelligence as he is. This guy is just insufferable. I've actually never witnessed a marriage of incompetence and confidence so fully and grotesquely consummated in the mind of a person with a public platform. This is the most arrogant person I have ever had the misfortune of meeting. When you meet him you quickly discover that he radiates a sense of grievance from his pores in a way that few people do. It's kind of like a preternatural force of negative charisma. He is a child in a man's body. And the mismatch between his estimation of himself and the quality of his utterances is so complete and so mortifying to witness in person that you just find you're jumping out of your skin.

>Bureaucracy is a construction designed to maximize the distance between a decision-maker and the risks of the decision.
Woah...

Memes aside, have any of you guys properly read Taleb? Is he worth getting into? Particularly Black Swan or Antifragile. What are your opinions /lit/?

leave uncertainty to me

>>12340338
*blocks Mary Beard's path*

>If intellectuals are overly worried about inequality, it is because they tend to view themselves in hierarchical terms, and thus think that others do too. Furthermore, as is by pathology, discussions in competitive universities are all about hierarchy. Most people in the real world don't obsess over it.

>...In writing, I feel corrupt and unethical if I have to look up a subject in a library as part of the writing itself. This acts as a filter. It is the only filter. If the subject is not interesting enough for me to look it up independently, for my own curiosity or purposes, and I had not done so before, then I should not be writing about it at all. Period. It does not mean that libraries, physical and virtual, are not acceptable. It means that they should not be the source of any idea. Students pay to write essays on topics for which they have to derive knowledge from a library as a self-enhancement exercise. A professional who is compensated to write, and who is taken seriously by others, should use a more potent filter: only distilled ideas, ones that sit in us for a long time, are acceptable; and those that come from reality. It is time to revive the not well-known philosophical notion of doxastic commitment, a class of beliefs that go beyond talk, and to which we are committed enough to take personal risks.

Do you agree? Is having to look something up to write about it, the sign of bad writing or a corrupt mind?

In what book does Nassim Taleb write about how you should not pay attention to the news, or how always paying attention gives you a wrong reflection of reality? I have seen people bring this up but I have read Skin in the Game and I didn't really see a section on it. What book does he mainly go into detail on this? Also does he have a point, or is "don't pay attention" a really anti-intellectual stance?

>>11682482
You called?

>Perhaps by definition an employable person is the one that you will never find in a history book because these people are designed to never leave their mark on the course of events. They are, by design, uninteresting to historians.

>Someone who has been employed for a while is giving you the evidence of submission

>Evidence of submission is displayed by having gone through years of the ritual of depriving himself of his personal freedom for nine hours every day, punctual arrival at an office, denying himself his own schedule, and not having beaten up anyone. You have an obedient, housebroken dog.

"Never go for medium profession. Literary writers should have a menial job or (if possible) a sinecure, and write on the side. Otherwise writing for a living under other people’s standards debases their literature. The same for artists. The best philosophers were not academics, but had another job, so their philosophy was not corrupted by careerism. "