/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.13412611]

Become Antifragile or die.

[Anonymous No.13412617]

>>13412611
The only usefulness of Taleb to society is to rightful expose the fraudsters that thinkers like Steven Pinker are.

[Anonymous No.13413667]

>>13412617
So he's the modern day Socrates against the sophists

[Anonymous No.13413698]

>>13413667
>he's the modern day Socrates

[Anonymous No.13413701]

>>13412611
the truest interpretation of the precautionary principle is a proactionary imperative to develop advanced technology at all costs so as to sustainably escape into space and become robust to local catastrophic risks. Amish society is not lindy because it cannot survive a massive asteroid strike. change my mind.

[Anonymous No.13413723]

>>13413701
That would be global stability, not local stability. It is still locally robust because it can endure risks up to a given magnitude.

[Anonymous No.13413745]

>>13413723
sure

[Anonymous No.13413763]

how do I become what I was born?

[Anonymous No.13413767]

>>13412611
based taleb poster

[Anonymous No.13413801]

>>13413701
Taleb is okay with religion though because by probability it must have had an utility to societies at the time for it to persist, since religion gives explicit moral prerogatives. But Taleb dismisses fundamentalist because it focuses on the wrong things that allowed religions to persist in the first place. The reason why he's so attached to the classical tradition is because the greeks and romans thought a lot about what should be done, instead of what we should build. When we're just building we don't necessarily think of how these very constructions may build fragile systems. Taleb's argument against MGOs certainly deserves thought before being rejected. I do not think he has that much of a grasp on evolution but he's not wrong to assume that there is a small possibility of catastrophe that is always being tested as we heavily manipulate plant genes that they could fuck humanity over. People dismiss him because he has a very clear moral prerogative. If he didn't obsess so much with his tradition and origins he would be worthy of being called an ubermensch.

Also, our goal isn't to get the fuck out of the planet because of a miserable probability that this will happen. Our goal is to be PREPARED for it. When people say he predicted the 2008 crash what they really mean is that Taleb noticed that several sectors of the financial market and the overall economy of America are left unchecked and businessmen and economists do not pay attention to small flaws in the systems they build (i.e. economic policies or the structure of a company). What exacerbated the crisis is precisely what Taleb called out, which is the lack of structure the economy had in response to the rising default rates of mortgages among homeowners, as they were extremely fragile (adjustable rate, NINJA loans, no income verification, horrible FICO scores, etc.).
The same thing applies to an imperative for advanced technology. Taleb would say no, you expose society to too many risks by leaving technology unchecked.

[Anonymous No.13413854]

>>13413801
good post friend. ultimately though, you have no choice but to take on all these many risks from new technology because if you *don't* do it, you'll be wiped out with probability of ~1 this is why Taleb's analysis of existential risk is not good: his system isn't really designed to see the desperate and precarious situation humanity is in with respect to its long-term survival. we have to take the high-variance, risky strategy of developing tons of advanced technologies, each with huge downside potential, because if we don't we die for sure.

[Anonymous No.13413920]

>>13413667
Sophists were based and addressed a wide range of questions and perspectives, Socrates was equally based, Plato's Socrates is a dumb autist. Pinker is an enforcer of the status quo and unreflective submission to it.

[Anonymous No.13414176]

Not sure I understand his point here. The article lists several examples of a broader point for the purposes of illustration rather than "proof by anecdote.
https://archive.fo/HNrnS

Someone apprise me on the essence of this feud with Pinker et. al.

[Anonymous No.13414182]

>>13412611
BASED leventine arab man

[Anonymous No.13414204]

>An awareness of the infirmity of unaided human intuition should be part of the conventional wisdom of every educated person.
Maybe that his conclusion is vague and over-broad?

[Anonymous No.13414597]

>>13414176
Pinker stated in a book of his that the world is progressively improving since less people are suffering thanks to the advance of science, technology and medicine. It is very much a pro-enlightenment account of human history that conveniently ignores the political influence of enlightenment thinkers that sometimes ran completely against scientific thought.
He uses graphs and data to illustrate his point in the book; however, it is not a rigorous, statistical treatment of the matter. He uses basic mathematics and takes on a very western perspective of the world. The fact that he emphasizes exclusively the western world to analyze the impact of wars upon civilization is one of the main flaws that Taleb points out in his paper against Pinker. Pinker has no training as a statician, historian or philosopher, and he does not demonstrate an overarching gasp of the diversity of thought in the enlightenment.

You have to read Taleb's academic paper on this, really, but if I recall correctly he shows that, for example, the greatest war in terms of relative population depression was in the warring states period of China. This is a really big problem in Pinker's account because he more or less supposes more of a zig-zag model of population change IIRC, where technology allows humans to reproduce and have more children, and then levels it off with the costs of living in an urban environment, and so and so forth. It's been a while but I would guess that Pinker probably crowns the current era as the period of greatest stability and happiness in civilization, and despite my distaste for Harari and his crude assumptions, at least he understands there is anything but a bright future for humanity.
Pinker is very much pro-establishment because the ideas he sets forth puts science onto a pedestal, while doing the same-old circular humanistic rhetoric about progress, ethics, etc.

This is actually dangerous to spread to the world to be honest because it literally leads people to be complacent in life, under the belief that there is nothing to fight for the world as science is already doing everything it needs. This puts science into a completely unwarranted pedestal in which it supposedly guides society. But even with this toxic philosophy Pinker fails as a scientist by cheerypicking data and recounting anecdotes as bullets for his arguments. Which miserably fail when confronted by the sophist-proof vest of Taleb.

tl;dr pinker is a hack and a brainlet

[Anonymous No.13414719]

>Larping as a fat mobster named Tony

[Anonymous No.13414771]

>>13414719
no taleb is Nero Tulip

[Anonymous No.13414832]

>>13414597
Valid reading. Shitty conclusion.
We are clearly living in the best of times with a bright future ahead of us.

[Anonymous No.13415196]

>>13414832
>We are clearly living in the best of times with a bright future ahead of us.
I genuinely hope you experience a gruesome death, Joel Osteen.

[Anonymous No.13416236]

>>13414832
I wonder if you'd say that if you were born in Africa.

[Anonymous No.13416265]

>>13412611
Kill me

[Anonymous No.13416280]

>>13414832
Taleb's entire philosophy is basically to say: You don't know that, shut the fuck up.


You don't know that, shut the fuck up. Gabish?

[Anonymous No.13416284]

>he doesn't even lift
>he thinks reading will protect him from the chaos

pathetic

[Anonymous No.13416343]

>>13416280
>Taleb's entire philosophy is basically to say: You don't know that, shut the fuck up.
Fuck no. He's just explaining the Central Limit Theorem's conditions.

Here they are: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_limit_theorem

> ...a sequence of independent and identically distributed (i.i.d.) random variables drawn from a distribution of expected value given by µ and finite variance given by σ2.

That's literally it. He spent tens of thousands of pages explaining this tiny paragraph, one that is already obvious to anybody who has ever studied probability theory to at least a sophomore level.

[Anonymous No.13416474]

[Anonymous No.13416523]

>>13416343
I am aware of the central limit theorem. I have taken undergraduate classes in mathematics. However this is really not the point of Taleb. That would imply, as he would put it, that his philosophy is ultimately a "nerd" philosophy. That is, he's really just explaining an abstract concept and applying it into reality. This is literally the opposite of what Taleb does. Taleb doesn't use any mathematical model for the sake of it. He's a pragmatist and his ideas go way beyond just math. His belief in the uncertainty of probability is confirmed by his experiences in real life, not by your a-priori, nerd platonic bullshit.