/lit/ - Literature

>All I hear is how to live longer, richer, and, of course, more laden with electronic gadgets. We are not the first generation to believe that the worst possible thing to befall us is death. But for the ancients, the worst possible outcome was not death, but a dishonorable death, or even just a regular one. For a classical hero, dying in a retirement home with a rude nurse and a network of tubes coming into and out of your nose would not be the attractive telos for a life.
>And, of course, we have this modern illusion that we should live as long as we can. As if we were each the end product. This idea of the “me” as a unit can be traced to the Enlightenment. And, with it, fragility.
>Before that, we were part of the present collective and future progeny. Both present and the future tribes exploited the fragility of individuals to strengthen themselves. People engaged in sacrifices, sought martyrdom, died for the group, and derived pride from doing so; they worked hard for future generations.
>Sadly, as I am writing these lines, the economic system is loading future generations with public governmental debt, causing depletion of resources, and environmental blight to satisfy the requirements of the security analysts and the banking establishment (once again, we cannot separate fragility from ethics).
>As I wrote in Chapter 4, while the gene is antifragile, since it is information, the carrier of the gene is fragile, and needs to be so for the gene to get stronger. We live to produce information, or improve on it. Nietzsche had the Latin pun aut liberi, aut libri—either children or books, both information that carries through the centuries.
>I was just reading in John Gray’s wonderful The Immortalization Commission about attempts to use science, in a postreligious world, to achieve immortality. I felt some deep disgust—as would any ancient—at the efforts of the “singularity” thinkers (such as Ray Kurzweil) who believe in humans’ potential to live forever. Note that if I had to find the anti-me, the person with diametrically opposite ideas and lifestyle on the planet, it would be that Ray Kurzweil fellow. It is not just neomania. While I propose removing offensive elements from people’s diets (and lives), he works by adding, popping close to two hundred pills daily. Beyond that, these attempts at immortality leave me with deep moral revulsion.

>>16495294
Not even joking. Read Taleb.

BTFO by Taleb

>You have read my books, right Anon?

>At age 13 Taleb was reading between 30 and 60 hours per week
How does one do this much reading at such a young age?

Taleb's take on Dalio:
>I like Ray as a person. I like him personally but I think this point of view is profoundly mistaken because it's not capitalism that's wrong. It's absence of skin in the game. That is wrong. Absent yes going back to risk taking going back to risk taking. Absence of accountability. You have people making decisions that harm others without being harmed. That's not capitalism that's corporatists. Who are we talking about. What I would say is the structure that we have today Israel has skin in the game. Gray hat's kind of game was his fun. But he doesn't really protect to society where we have centralization of people in Washington making decisions like Alan Greenspan that affect this whole country. And when people you know are harmed they don't pay the price. Well that that one person is Jay Powell now the chairman of the Federal Reserve. Yes. But he's more responsible OK because he he understands the job of the Federal Reserve should be minimum harm not policies that may entail side effects more generally. Jay Powell gets that better than Alan Greenspan. He gets a lot better but of course he's not the great Volcker Volcker. OK. Not yet. OK. Hasn't Sean a swan. No let's go back to the core problem is you want to live in a society that is decentralized enough that people who make a mistake are also harmed by their sit by their mistake not just inflict harm on other bailed out. What happened is we have evolved into thanks to a large state to a situation of corporatism those close to the state are bailed out It's crony capitalism. That's not capitalism crony cup. How do you fix it. There are a lot of that. I wrote a whole book on it. The skin in the game. I wrote a whole book about it. Skin in the game. So for those who haven't read the book. OK. So the idea is is locally. First of all the shameful to make a recommendation without being harm. OK. If something goes wrong it forecast without having some skin in the game sense being harmed by it how you structure a society in a way to be smaller companies. Is that not what happened is the minute we decentralize be like Germany when you decentralized.

>>16338427
>>16338685
IQ is pseudoscientific nonsense
https://medium.com/incerto/iq-is-largely-a-pseudoscientific-swindle-f131c101ba39

>>16270525
IQ is fraudulent Pseudoscience.
https://medium.com/incerto/iq-is-largely-a-pseudoscientific-swindle-f131c101ba39

What do I read after him? He's basically solved philosophy.

Will his work be the most highly regarded of the century in terms of philosophy?

Taleb writes better than europeans.

>>16123704
>It is the same kind of deep internal disgust that takes hold of me when I see a rich eighty-two-year-old man surrounded with “babes,” twentysomething mistresses (often Russian or Ukrainian). I am not here to live forever, as a sick animal. Recall that the antifragility of a system comes from the mortality of its components—and I am part of that larger population called humans. I am here to die a heroic death for the sake of the collective, to produce offspring (and prepare them for life and provide for them), or eventually, books—my information, that is, my genes, the antifragile in me, should be the ones seeking immortality, not me.
>Then say goodbye, have a nice funeral in St. Sergius (Mar Sarkis) in Amioun, and, as the French say, place aux autres—make room for others.

>>16113750
https://medium.com/incerto/iq-is-largely-a-pseudoscientific-swindle-f131c101ba39

>BTFO atheism
>BTFO social "science"
>BTFO economics
>BTFO historians
>BTFO linguistics
>BTFO doctors
>BTFO medicine
>BTFO epidemiology
>BTFO academia
>BTFO nutrition "sciences"
>BTFO GMOs
>BTFO COVID deniers
>BTFO anti maskers
>BTFO socialists
>BTFO libertarians
>BTFO globalists
>BTFO nationalists
>BTFO wageslaving
>BTFO neoconservatives
>BTFO modernity
>BTFO evidence based "science"
>BTFO naive empiricism
>BTFO rationality
>BTFO cancel culture
>BTFO IQ
>BTFO racism
>BTFO identity politics
>BTFO Panarabism
>BTFO Nordicism
>BTFO Pinker
>BTFO Harris
>BTFO Sunstein
>BTFO Tetlock
>BTFO Dawkins
>BTFO Molyneux
>BTFO Murray
>BTFO Mary Beard
How did he do it in a mere 4 books?

>The problem is of course that these researchers did not have a clear idea of where the burden of empirical evidence lies (the difference between naive or pseudo empiricism and rigorous empiricism)—the onus is on the doctors to show us why reducing fever is good, why eating breakfast before engaging in activity is healthy (there is no evidence), or why bleeding patients is the best alternative (they’ve stopped doing so). Sometimes I get the answer that they have no clue when they have to utter defensively “I am a doctor” or “are you a doctor?” But worst, I sometimes get some letters of support and sympathy from the alternative medicine fellows, which makes me go postal: the approach in this book is ultra-orthodox, ultra-rigorous, and ultra-scientific, certainly not in favor of alternative medicine.
>The hidden costs of health care are largely in the denial of antifragility. But it may not be just medicine—what we call diseases of civilization result from the attempt by humans to make life comfortable for ourselves against our own interest, since the comfortable is what fragilizes. The rest of this chapter focuses on specific medical cases with hidden negative convexity effects (small gains, large losses)—and reframes the ideas of iatrogenics in connection with my notion of fragility and nonlinearities.

Read Taleb's work. Life changing.

>>16044977
>IQ
Racists are retarded, but IQ shitters are even more retarded.
https://medium.com/incerto/iq-is-largely-a-pseudoscientific-swindle-f131c101ba39

>So this idea of shedding possessions to go to the desert can be quite potent as a via negativa–style subtractive strategy. Few have considered that money has its own iatrogenics, and that separating some people from their fortune would simplify their lives and bring great benefits in the form of healthy stressors. So being poorer might not be completely devoid of benefits if one does it right. We need modern civilization for many things, such as the legal system and emergency room surgery. But just imagine how by the subtractive perspective, via negativa, we can be better off by getting tougher: no sunscreen, no sunglasses if you have brown eyes, no air-conditioning, no orange juice (just water), no smooth surfaces, no soft drinks, no complicated pills, no loud music, no elevator, no juicer, no…I stop.
>When I see pictures of my friend the godfather of the Paleo ancestral lifestyle, Art De Vany, who is extremely fit in his seventies (much more than most people thirty years younger than him), and those of the pear-shaped billionaires Rupert Murdoch or Warren Buffett or others in the same age group, I am invariably hit with the following idea. If true wealth consists in worriless sleeping, clear conscience, reciprocal gratitude, absence of envy, good appetite, muscle strength, physical energy, frequent laughs, no meals alone, no gym class, some physical labor (or hobby), good bowel movements, no meeting rooms, and periodic surprises, then it is largely subtractive (elimination of iatrogenics).

>>15693238
>tfw the more insanity i see by americans the more i don't care for being called a racist
his theory works desu

>IQ

It's decent, but desu it's just a more confined version of what Taleb talks about. Worth reading if you are interested in economics/finance.

Shiller is one of the only economists left standing that isn't a total simp.

>first person omniscient

This guy is pretty /lit/ and his field is math

high low culture > high culture > low culture > low high culture > no culture > middle culture > amerimutt "culture"