Posts tagged Nassim Nicholas Taleb
when we look at religion and, to some extent ancestral superstitions, we should consider what purpose they serve, rather than focusing on the notion of “belief”, epistemic belief in its strict scientific definition. In science, belief is literal belief; it is right or wrong, never metaphorical. In real life, belief is an instrument to do things, not the end product. This is similar to vision: the purpose of your eyes is to orient you in the best possible way, and get you out of trouble when needed, or help you find a prey at distance. Your eyes are not sensors aimed at getting the electromagnetic spectrum of reality. Their job description is not to produce the most accurate scientific representation of reality; rather the most useful one for survival.
via https://medium.com/incerto/how-to-be-rational-about-rationality–432e96dd4d1a
Society likes saints and moral heroes to be celibate so they do not have family pressures and be forced into dilemmas of needing to compromise their sense of ethics to feed their children. The entire human race, something rather abstract, becomes their family. Some martyrs, such as Socrates, had young children (although he was in his seventies), and overcame the dilemma at their expense. Many can’t.
via https://medium.com/incerto/the-skin-of-others-in-your-game–3f51d8ccc3fb
History is largely peace punctuated by wars, rather than wars punctuated by peace. When you read historical accounts, you are under the illusion that history is mostly wars, that states like to fight as a default condition, whenever they have the chance, and that the only coordination between entities takes place when two countries have a “strategic” alliance against a common danger.[…] We will be fed by tomes of histories of wars. […] Reading a history book offers a similar bias to reading an account of life in New York seen from an emergency room employee at Bellevue Hospital.
via https://medium.com/incerto/peace-neither-ink-nor-blood–4657956c82ac
You do not create dynamic equality just by raising the level of those at the bottom, but rather by making the rich rotate –or by forcing people to incur the possibility of creating an opening. The way to make society more equal is by forcing (through skin in the game) the rich to be subjected to the risk of exiting from the one percent
Dynamic equality assumes Markov chain with no absorbing states
Our condition here is stronger than mere income mobility. Mobility means that someone can become rich. The no absorbing barrier condition means that someone who is rich should never be certain to stay rich.
Dynamic equality is what restores ergodicity, making time and ensemble probabilities substitutable
via https://medium.com/@nntaleb/inequality-and-skin-in-the-game-d8f00bc0cb46