/lit/ - Literature

he looks so arab in this pic

>>15833418
Based

>>15833418
He's pro-nigger so who gives a shit.

Hylics BTFOed

>>15833418
based, but not redpilled

>>15833418
>those who exercise their skepticism against religion but not against economists, social scientists, and phony statisticians
This actually really is a major aspect of modern society, regardless what you think of the mad leb and his ideas on IQ and med supremacy.

>>15833418
Does it apply to christianity and islam or is islam exluded?

>>15833747
he's talking about atheists, they reject every religion. taleb isn't a muslim

>>15833418
Whataboutism logical fallacy
"Religion is bad"
"Well, what about nationalism? Huh?"

>>15833808
Saying that you fail to apply the same level of critique to different concepts based on whether you support them a priori or not is a valid criticism, even if you try to write it off under some neologism "fallacy" created by the media in recent memory

>>15833754
But when someone says that islam is religion of peace and is not responsible for deaths of hundreds of thousands if not millions of people, does that make him or does it irritate him also?

>>15833827
But we DO apply the same level of critique to nationalism. Why do you think republicans are shunned?
At least in the intellectual world, nationalism is highly criticized.

Atheists happily heap scorn on economists, social scientists, securities analysts, squid ink peddlers, and statisticians. Liberals are not atheists, they're still Christians, they're just following a radical heresy.

>>15833727
Does Taleb believe Lebanon should do more to accept African refugees? Maybe Israel can send its Sudanese and Eritrean refugees to Lebanon?

He's on the money there, but usually hes retarded.

That's not really about religion though
Taleb follows the l orthodox fasting calendar last I checked but I'm not sure how religious he actually is
He does really hate scientism though

>>15833848
>>15833848
>At least in the intellectual world, nationalism is highly criticized
Not the social sciences, statistics, or IYIs though.
>>15833851
They'll happily listen to the epidemiologist who appears on the news, or an economist who is writing in the New York Times.

>>15833873
He's usually on point. Only on genetics and linguistics is he a tard.

>>15833873
Taleb has a great nose for bullshit, but 99% of the time his reasoning is absolutely retarded. His stance on IQ is a good example of this: it's a useful measure that is empirically verifiable and has intense predictive power. Does it actually explain anything? No, intelligence is far more complex than just g, and IQ says nothing about how intelligence actually works. All correlations relating to IQ are based on probability, as well.

But none of that means that IQ isn't useful, and the fact that Arabs being only a few IQ points above Blacks makes him butthurt is irrelevant.

This is now a contextless Taleb thread
>Here are some verified and potential examples of iatrogenics (in terms of larger downside outside of very ill patients, whether such downside has been verified or not)4: Vioxx, the anti-inflammatory medicine with delayed heart problems as side effects. Antidepressants (used beyond the necessary cases). Bariatric surgery (in place of starvation of overweight diabetic patients). Cortisone. Disinfectants, cleaning products potentially giving rise to autoimmune diseases. Hormone replacement therapy. Hysterectomies. Cesarean births beyond the strictly necessary. Ear tubes in babies as an immediate response to ear infection. Lobotomies. Iron supplementation. Whitening of rice and wheat—it was considered progress. The sunscreen creams suspected to cause harm. Hygiene (beyond a certain point, hygiene may make you fragile by denying hormesis—our own antifragility). We ingest probiotics because we don’t eat enough “dirt” anymore. Lysol and other disinfectants killing so many “germs” that kids’ developing immune systems are robbed of necessary workout (or robbed of the “good” friendly germs and parasites). Dental hygiene: I wonder if brushing our teeth with toothpaste full of chemical substances is not mostly to generate profits for the toothpaste industry—the brush is natural, the toothpaste might just be to counter the abnormal products we consume, such as starches, sugars and high fructose corn syrup. Speaking of which, high fructose corn syrup was the result of neomania, financed by a Nixon administration in love with technology and victim of some urge to subsidize corn farmers. Insulin injections for Type II diabetics, based on the assumption that the harm from diabetes comes from blood sugar, not insulin resistance (or something else associated with it). Onions milk. Cow milk for people of Mediterranean and Asian descent. Heroin, the most dangerously addictive substance one can imagine, was developed as a morphine substitute for cough suppressants that did not have morphine’s addictive side effects. Psychiatry, particularly child psychiatry—but I guess I don’t need to convince anyone about its dangers. I stop here.

>>15833418
He doesn't look white so he's wrong.

>>15833906
No. He actually knows quite a bit about genetics and linguistics. And he uses both of the fields to dunk on Panarabism and Nordicism.

>>15833418
actually he just btfo his anus.

>>15833904
Correct, Liberals will, unwaveringly, without a thought in their minds. Atheists won't. The skepticism required to actually be an atheist (just because you call yourself an atheist doesn't mean you are one) for any prolonged period of time literally prevents such things as blindly trusting the Huffington Post or whatever. The kind of person who is going to say "There is no God or higher power(s) of any kind" and actually stick with that belief and take it to its logical conclusions (which in my opinion are very depressing) is going to be such an obnoxious skeptical prick that they're going to tip their fedora and do their own research (or "research") at any given opportunity.

>>15833747
Religion in general is built up as 'bad word', this is exactly why Westoids steal the title Buddhism and try to say it's secular, they write whole books trying to cope with this. They cannot deal with religion because it's so brainwashed in them that their prejudice is absolute, of course if you change the label and aesthetics slightly (generally including giving it to a familiar authority like the state), they're perfectly fine with it, uncritical. The point is that there are far more ideological, far more fanatic, 'religions' that actually influence the world and cause cultic behaviour. Religious authority long ago stopped being relevant and was never the sole power to begin with. It's a pretence of critique of something irrelevant yet blind subservience to everything else. Furthermore, their critiques are really reaching because they are too dumb to make a serious one. Vague attribution of deaths and alleged oppression apparently under the unified faction 'religion' but nothing for the tangible actions of questionable individuals or institutional problems today.

>>15833904
Also depends what you mean by nationalism. An American leftist is among the most ignorant and jingoist person in the world culturally, he reaches across the world to shatter things he doesn't understand and impose his terms on others. Obvious examples are anything to do with class, grammatical gender in other languages, words that have different meanings or no real meaning in other dialects of English (fag and nigger for example), misrepresenting politics by incorrectly imposing American pseudo-political logic, etc.

>These were the days before I decided to climb up the mountain, speak slowly and in a priestly tone, and try shaming people rather than insulting them. Listening to Kato’s presentation, I could not control myself and flew into a rage in front of two thousand Koreans—I was so angry that I almost started shouting in French, forgetting that I was in Korea. I ran to the podium and told the audience that the next time someone in a suit and tie gave them projections for some dates in the future, they should ask him to show what he had projected in the past—in this case, what he had been forecasting for 2008 and 2009 (the crisis years) two to five years earlier, in 2004, 2005, 2006, and 2007. They would then verify that Highly Venerable Kato-san and his colleagues are, to put it mildly, not very good at this predictionizing business. And it is not just Mr. Kato: our track record in figuring out significant rare events in politics and economics is not close to zero; it is zero. I improvised, on the spot, my solution. We can’t put all false predictors in jail; we can’t stop people from asking for predictions; we can’t tell people not to hire the next person who makes promises about the future. “All I want is to live in a world in which predictions such as those by Mr. Kato do not harm you. And such a world has unique attributes: robustness.”

>>15833875
I don't even think he believes in God. (In this one article, he is described as agnostic: https://www.newstatesman.com/religion/2012/02/neo-atheism-atheists-dawkins and he has never explicitly stated whether he believes in God.) He follows Eastern Orthodox rituals because they are good heuristics and because religion is Lindy.

>>15833834
He differentiates between types of Islam. I know for sure he has spoken against wahhabism in a few of his books now.

>>15833848
You're focusing too much on nationalism when it's not even the main subject of his poast. Nationalism as practiced say in Russia is certainly heavily criticized by normies in the west. He's employing it as a subset of the "soft science" ideologies that go unquestioned by peoeple who otherwise Fawkin Love Science atheism neil degrasson tyson etc types.

>>15833871
>Does Taleb believe Lebanon should do more to accept African refugees
I don't fucking know? Sounds like you should grind your axe with him on twitter

>>15833944
How can one man be so based in his books but such a sperg on twitter
It's like two completely different people
On his books, he despises the very concept of nation and explicitly denies ethnic temperament but he's very larpy about genes on twitter

>>15833909
There's no recovering from Taleb's refutation of IQ. Sorry, retard.
>>15833933
You're speaking of the exception. Most will trust authorities within academia and in bullshit fields like psychology. The amount of times I've seen this is astounding. But I suspect the reason for this is because they don't know that the fields which Taleb mentions in the passage are BS.

>>15834003
>Sperg on Twitter
Read the replies to his tweets. You'll see the BS he has to deal with all the time. And the reason he is like that with genetics is because he uses it to undermine Panarabist nationalism. Either today or yesterday, he denounced nationalism for destroying Mediterranean cosmopolitanism.

>>15834004
Taleb didn't "refute" IQ. At all. Even close. He's mad that it's not a perfectly explanatory system to perfectly describe intelligence from the ground up, and that's not what it's supposed to be.

Taleb himself outright says you should never trust anything he says, or any reasoning he gives, about literally anything, because you have no way of knowing if he's right. Hell, Taleb says he has no way of knowing if he's right about his reasoning, and that he just has a "nose for bullshit". The core reason he distrusts IYIs is because they put explanatory power where there is none. This is all pretty basic stuff in literally all of his books.

>>15834004
Rabid skepticism is literally required to remain an atheist and not just collapse into some other religion. You, by definition, cannot blindly trust authorities on anything and remain an atheist.

>>15834004
taleb's pretty clever at math and finance, but he makes the classic mistake of assuming that because he's competent in one field, that that extends to every field.

but that's okay because he talks about this, calls himself out on it, and calls for people to not trust authority figures, even him. you'd know this if you read literally anything by him

>>15834046
Refute his math paper about it then idiot

>>15834063
You're missing the point. Taleb is pointing out the double standards of many atheist, whereby they blindly trust economic, epidemiological, and psychological authorities while criticizing religion for doing exactly that.

>>15834083
That's not how academic papers work, you can't "refute" a paper. Even if you tried, it wouldn't be accepted. There've been plenty of arguments as to why he's wrong, namely the one I gave (Taleb doesn't like that IQ lacks explanatory power; literally nobody argues that it has that, or that it should, except Taleb). If you want a bunch of papers explaining why he's wrong, see >>15834076 (I actually meant to post that, but forgot to, kudos anon).

>>15834076
This critique does the which every other one falls victim to: citing studies that Taleb has already disputed, then going on to say that IQ doesn't need to non linear.

The response to them is easy: come back once you've invented a new form of math.

>>15834121
>explain why X is wrong!
>okay, here
>no, that explains why X is wrong, you can't do that!
not an argument, retard.

>>15833848
Idk when I watch "liberal" shit like msnbc I see plenty of crazy nationalism. In the states it is bipartisan outside of some phony virtue signaling.

>>15834171
You'll never refute Taleb until you invent a new form of math. Better get to work!

>>15833418
>HEHEHE ATHEIS BTFOO FOREVER!11!!
>BASED TALEB WILL SURELY CONVINCE NORMIES TO SUBSIDISE PEDOPHILIC CULTS WHO FORCE SLAVE MORALITY ON THE NEXT GENERATION!!!1

>>15834275
>NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO WHY WON'T YOU FOLLOW MY UNLINDY CULT

>>15833418
You should distinguish between atheism and secular chauvinism. Atheism is a purely ontological argument — not a pragmatic one — and as such it does not commit an atheist to any particular bias regarding the efficacy of secular vs. spiritual social organization.

>>15834121
If you think about it, Taleb's has two shitty arguments
>there is assymmetric variance when correlating IQ with a measure of success!
yes? it's called heteroscedasticity and there are plenty of robust methods to deal with this, if you look past the output results and actually try to interpret the data there are plenty of reasons why it wouldn't be a problem in this case. he's wrong about it though, so it's pointless to discuss
>the R2 found in these studies is too low!
pathetic midwit/STEMfag take. R2 doesn't mean anything by itself. stop being a soulless bugman and actually interpret the data. all the low R2 says in this case is there are many other variables other than measured intelligence that explain the life outcome. there is so much natural variance when you deal with non-experimental human data. you'd find low R2 results for practically any explanatory variable because none of them can explain success by themselves.

>>15834536
>heteroscedasticity
can the Talebposting moron who goes on about non-linearity please look up the simple English Wiki page for this?

He has the same surname as the prophets uncle and yet he doesn't call himself a muslim

>>15833516
I give you good deal on book anon, look, handcrafted, many hours. It make you very smart, real man when you read it anon.

>>15833418
So is he an anarchist then?

>>15833418
Wow, he really is an autist.

>>15833827
>is a valid criticism
It's not valid when it's directed vaguely at "people". If he wants to debunk a particular person or persons, name names.

>>15834545
>>15834536
You idiots are actually falling for pseudoscience. No linearity means no correlation: https://www.academia.edu/39797871/Fooled_by_Correlation_Common_Misinterpretations_in_Social_Science_

>>15833704
Right you are. Taleb: Discarded

>>15834579
Sorta
He believes that most government is harmful but that some is required
He abhors nationalism
He really hates corporations and banking He concludes that the best Modus operandi is one that goes bottom ~> development and that more emphasis and favour should be put on individuals rather than institutions which he views as plagiarising and arrogant

>>15834617
If IQ is pseudoscience then pseudoscience > Science.
End of discussion.

>>15834617
>No linearity means no correlation
Do Talebfags really..?

>>15834746
>>15834752
And here comes the cope and seethe after the BTFO.

>>15834637
based med, he cares about his own kind

>>15834766
I sincerely hope for your sake that you're false flagging to make Talebfags look bad

>>15834637
>shitting on mark manson
infinitely based

>>15833516
Imbecile

Bump, this Taleb thread is more interesting than the other.

>>15833808
>whataboutism
his point is simply consistency. the models given to us by the social sciences are mostly worthless. the imperial college covid model is a relevant and notorious example. if people were consistent they would apply the same level of skepticism towards science itself

>>15835205
that disgraceful model was hardly representative of the social sciences as a whole. skepticism yes, but Taleb's dogmatic approach is completely unhealthy (see his approach to IQ that was discussed earlier)

>>15835241
His dogmatic approach is extremely charming and part of his appeal.

>>15835269
ah yes, the famous Semitic guru personality around which pathetic whites form cults. Taleb has a lot in common with Freud

>>15835281
I would say a lot in common with Jesus (PBUH).

>>15833704
So is your girlfriend. Your gonna find out the hard way if you ever find out?? hahahaha
Ask your grandma!!

>>15833418
wtf? i thought taleb was supposed to be a pseud. this is pretty based. with the Church displaced from its position of power, other institutions gained power and now hold the experts, and we put a lot of faith in various experts and officials the same way people used to put faith in Church officials. People like to pretend it was awful under the Church but really it was not much different. The Church wasn't completely opposed to rationality and faith in political ideologies has been a thing during and after the age of the Church, and even now lots of influential people are openly opposed to rationality in favor of social justice and muh feelings. Society hasn't made as much progress as we like to think it has. The common man is still a pawn played by the powerful institutions.

>>15833418
For a more sophisticated development of this idea, see Alasdair MacIntyre's After Virtue, chapters 6-8.

>>15834035
>Either today or yesterday, he denounced nationalism for destroying Mediterranean cosmopolitanism.
Pretty sure life under the Maronite boot didn't feel very cosmopolitan to anyone, including the Maronites who weren't part of the wealthy elite.

>>15834637
That's taking a side if I've ever seen it happen - attacking a centrist who didn't even give his opinion on anything, on the sole basis of not giving his opinion.

Not that I have a problem with that, but he could've just said he was pro-BLM like a normal person instead of being a faggot about it and attacking people who simply want to talk about it yet avoid getting caught up in bipartisan political bullshit.