/lit/ - Literature

He's a smart guy

What's my opinion on Taleb? What can we tell of his works?

thoughts?

Opinions on this dude?

A friend left "Skin in the Game" sitting on the table (would never touch Taleb with a 50-foot laser pointer ordinarily) and I read the first 50 or so pages (you know how it be) and I must say... his prose is refreshing. I'm not sold on the transformation of his metaphors of the macro into micro (pertaining to the individual), e.g., economical musings of statistical anomalies, ethical and moral (should-be) limitations of capitalism, big banking, etc., and all of the other things Taleb mentions about how economy and society ought to get along. My only issue, which I suppose is a non-issue and more of a question... Is Taleb's entire corpus centered around bickering against the slimy crooks who benefit from the system (egregiously -- taking value and creating none) without taking on an adequate amount of accountability/responsibility?

Has he made a dent in the way economics is thought about? Or is it a pseud nightmare? Is there a central theme or should I just enjoy his humourous rants?

> Ctrl + F 'Taleb'
> No results found
IMBECILES!

>>16557924
IMBECILE!

The Incerto by Nassim Nicholas Taleb.

Read Taleb. Economics is for IYIs and Imbeciles!

Where should I begin?

IMBECILE!

is taleb the greatest of our time?

>>16412232
>we're not ancient mediterraneans
Speak for yourself.

How did he do it?

>>16335217
IMBECILE!

>>16276299
IMBECILE!

Joyce. Let's start by looking at his oeuvre. His ouevre is bad.

>For years, as I routinely crossed that park, the same APlatonic depressing idea haunted me upon seeing the lovers embracing & cuddling each other on the benches, the idea of the transitory aspect of such intensity, and its potential reversal. The more intensely enthralled two being are with each other the harder they will try to hurt each other upon separation. They seemed to want to unite with each other, care about each other, protect each other, minister the smallest need in the other, cure the other of the small wounds, but, at some point in the future they might be inflicting the most scathing injury to the other. The nonlovers might be less close, but, in all likelihood, they should unconditionally stay friends, or, at least they are not expected to inflict harm on the other. I realized that there was an element in this treacherous thing called love that was not for philosophers.
New confirmation that philosophy is a cope. I might also add that Taleb here resembles (it can hardly be missed) a one Lysias, whom as we know Socrates derided and harshly mocked in the Phaedrus, for being a blowhard and a hypocrite. So much for the pseudo-Chad Taleb and his Muse-less, un-manic "flaneuring," which we now know he engaged in only to accidentally pass by couples in the park and ruminate upon the "transitoriness" of love, only to write about it later that evening in his diary, whilst sipping wine by himself (Satie playing pathetically in the background, probably, and so on). If only he had studied his Plato a bit more, took Stacy to prom, etc.

>picrelated
Taleb watching the couples pass by on a Saturday morning at the park, before he returns home to larp as a Mediterranean scholar, check his Twitter likes, etc.

>>16118061
Intelligence is not a normal distribution brainlet.

>>16108669
>I will always remember my encounter with the writer and cultural icon Susan Sontag, largely because it was on the same day that I met the great Benoit Mandelbrot. I took place in 2001, two months after the terrorist event, in a radio station in New York. Sontag who was being interviewed, was pricked by the idea of a fellow who “studies randomness” and came to engage me. When she discovered that I was a trader, she blurted out that she was “against the market system” and turned her back to me as I was in mid-sentence, just to humiliate me (note here that courtesy is an application of the Silver rule), while her female assistant gave me the look, as if I had been convicted of child killing. I sort of justified her behavior in order to forget the incident, imagining that she lived in some rural commune, grew her own vegetables, wrote on pencil and paper, engaged in barter transactions, that type of stuff.

>No, she did not grow her own vegetables, it turned out. Two years later, I accidentally found her obituary (I waited a decade and a half before writing about the incident to avoid speaking ill of the departed). People in publishing were complaining about her rapacity; she had to squeeze her publisher, Farrar Strauss and Giroud of what would be several million dollars today for a book advance. She shared, with a girlfriend, a mansion in New York City, one that was later sold for $28 million dollars. Sontag probably felt that insulting people with money inducted her into some unimpeachable sainthood, exempting her from having skin in the game.

>It is immoral to be in opposition of the market system and not live (like the Unabomber) in a hut isolated from it

Who are some other scholars writing books for a general audience like Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Thomas Sowell, Noam Chomsky, etc.?

>>16013498
IMBECILE!

I am reading his Incerto right now as I am interested in quantitative finance. However, it seems outside of finance and statistics he is quite polarizing.

>>15721556
You really have an obsession with Jews, huh Rebbe?