Nassim N. Taleb: Everything these idiots, frauds, and assholes don't understand
Nassim Taleb, what a mensch. He's got the confidence of a bull in a china shop that has just bought a lycra muscle-shirt and knows it looks great on him.Our guru this week has surveyed the fields of statistics, economics, psychology, actually all of the social sciences, and finds them populated by a gaggle of pale, thin wristed, pocket-protector wearing wimps. Although, he's equally scathing towards COVID-sceptical libertarians, and Matt and Chris (in a totally unbiased manner) find him pretty funny and accurate there.More seriously, Taleb is a smart guy and quite fun to read and listen to. But he's also an infinite singularity of arrogance and hyperbole. Matt and Chris can't help but notice how convenient this pose is, when confronted with difficult-to-handle rebuttals. Taleb is a fun mixed bag of solid and dubious claims. But it's worth thinking about the degree to which those solid ideas were already well... solid. Many seem to have been known for decades even by all the 'morons, frauds and assholes' that Taleb hates. To what degree does Taleb's reputation rest on hyperbole and intuitive-sounding hot-takes? Will he ever un-block the co-hosts on twitter? Should Matt, a statistician and psychologist, re-train in a field where he can actually contribute something useful to the world?All of these questions, and more, will remain unanswered in this fresh new DTG episode!LinksThe Antidote to Chaos interview discussed in the episodeThe original Bloomberg interview that was deemed too reasonable for the episodeSam Harris' amusing take on Taleb
Welcome to Decoding the Gurus, the podcast where an anthropologist and a psychologist listen to the greatest minds the world has to offer, and we try our very best to understand what they're talking about.
I'm Professor Matt Brown, and with me is Dr. Chris Kavanagh.
And I should say, I'm also a doctor, but in addition to being a doctor, I'm also a professor, which Chris is not.
Hi, Chris.
Is that true?
Aren't they a professor?
I'm like an associate professor.
Oh, damn.
All right.
Just to be clear, which is better, professor or associate professor?
Better, Matt.
It's all...
You don't need to be so competitive, but yeah.
The whole academic hierarchy always confuses me because I shouldn't use the title prof. I should not do that.
It's doctor.
But somebody is using the title of prof. Yes, it is confusing.
I think you can call yourself anything you like on social media and in an email.
I think that's the rule.
I was abbreviated to ASPRO.
That's how it gets abbreviated.
ASPRO?
Yeah, ASPRO.
ASPRO.
Not ASPRO.
Oh, ASPRO, right.
Assistant Professor.
Got it.
Yeah, that's how it gets abbreviated here, which is, you know.
Anyway, so we're going to be reviewing a wonderful man, Nassim Nicholas.
But before we do, we're not going to do too much in terms of introductions.
We're going to get straight to the point.
But, Chris, I think you wanted to do a bit of a response to some feedback we got on the last episode.
That's right.
We're changing things up a bit.
We're going to try and avoid our lengthy 40-hour introduction segment, cut it down a little bit.
We'll stick in the Patreon shout-outs and any discussion of relevant...
We appreciate all the nice and negative reviews that we've got, but we'll probably not cover them in every episode just if there's something notable or funny.
But despite saying that, we did get an extremely long review on iTunes that was all about the Murray episode.
It would have been better as an email because it was like, I think it's over, you know, a thousand words longer or so, but it raises a lot of issues.
With the way that we covered Douglas Murray, and I thought it might be good to talk about him because I think some points are legitimate, some not.
So like kind of a post-mortem of the Douglas Murray episode.
And I'm not going to read the whole review, but one of the points that it made is by us focusing on his presentation style and his background, like upper class English and the guffaws and those kind of things, that...
Essentially, it's an ad hominem and that we aren't grappling with the substance of his arguments.
So, to start with you, Matt, what do you think about that point?
I can understand why somebody would say that and it would probably feel irritating if you felt that the arguments getting put forward were good.
We didn't think they were in that episode for the most part, but we did, it's true, focus on the presentation style because that's kind of what we do with Decoding the Gurus.
When the style seems to be an important part of the product, then we tend to focus on it,
I think it's okay.
What about you?
I think it is the case that we...
Respond to people's arguments often, like fairly often.
We are looking at the logic that they're presenting and saying where we think it holds up and doesn't.
But alongside that is the style of presentation and the accoutrements of the person's character and identity.
Because...
That is often used by gurus to buttress their fairly mundane points.
And I thought that we made clear on the episode that a lot of the arguments that Douglas Murray is making are made stronger simply because of the fact that he presents it with an upper class accent and superficial references to classic literature and so on.
So focusing on those elements...
It isn't an irrelevance because it's part of what adds to his gravitas.
So to me, those are not irrelevant factors to consider.
They're core to why he's given more attention than others.
If he didn't have the accent, if he didn't have the range of references that he does, the points would not seem so important.
Yeah, and I think that particular episode is very light on arguments.
They generally give their opinions very much like they're self-evidently true.
In other content we cover, they actually do provide some reasoning to sort of back up their opinions.
But in that particular one, it was heavy on sweeping opinions, but there really wasn't much argumentation to grapple with anyway.
Yeah, I think the reviewer's point, though, is that there were arguments and we didn't address them clearly enough.
But he also made the point that by Finding the section where Murray can't remember a name for an extended period of time.
That's kind of mean.
Everyone forgets names and that just shows that we dislike the person.
But again, I think that misses the point that the whole reason we were highlighting that is that shortly before, Murray had waxed lyrical about how people looking up names using technology was a...
character flaw and it was showing the decline of personal interactions.
And then almost immediately after, there was a circumstance where it highlighted how useful technology could be just to remind you of a name.
So it was the contradiction rather than just, oh, Murray forgets things like every other human does.
Yeah, I thought that was obvious from...
What we said in the context.
And I think I even said explicitly that I'll be the last person to make fun of someone simply for having a bad memory because I have the absolute worst one.
So anyway.
I just don't think that dealing with stylistic features and parts of the person's biography or the Baggage that they bring along with them is irrelevant.
The intellectual dark web often present this argument that it's ad hominem to consider anything beyond the pure argument that someone's presenting.
But oftentimes the context around the argument, it is relevant when you're looking at somebody as a whole picture.
Agreed.
Agreed.
Now, I think the other thing, we're not going to do a full update on various gurus, but I think you did have a little bit of commentary on stuff that's been going on with Jordan Peterson at the moment?
Yeah, so Jordan Peterson agreed to an extended interview with The Times and they published a quite critical article, but they also released the full unedited audio, which was three and a half hours.
Jordan Peterson posted to his website a post-mortem of his participation and how he felt he'd been unfairly treated and the content of the interview was not represented correctly.
But the interview itself, or the article about the interview, it was strongly focused on his daughter Michaela and her role in Advocating for alternative treatments for his,
what's the name of those drugs that, benzos, that he got addicted to.
And going through all of the various trials and tribulations that he'd been through.
And yeah, to me, the interview spent quite a bit of time discussing the experience of dealing with Michaela.
And she comes across in the description of the interviewer as very familiar, Alternative health pseudoscientific guru, reeling off technical terms and stuff about drugs, and she advocates her own alternative diet system,
all-meat diet, and attributes things to a bad reaction to cider.
So the whole thing is a bit, I don't know, a bit of a mess.
But it does sound like she is not doing him.
I haven't listened to the whole three and a half hour audio yet.
But even just listening to the first 20 minutes, Jordan Peterson breaks down and cries about twice in the first 20 minutes.
And, you know, he doesn't sound stable.
The whole thing just seems like super messy.
The reason I wanted to mention it in part was when I read his response article or his post on his website, there was this recurrent theme that we see amongst The guru set, where they feel they're being unfairly represented and treated in the mainstream media.
They're constantly feeling that they're being persecuted and claimed to be controversial when they're not, or associated with the alt-right, or these kind of things.
But reading it, it struck me as painfully naive.
In a way, because he basically said, and he shared the email that the Times had sent to set up the interview, right?
And they had wrote a nice email, you know, saying they want to cover his life and career and written in a sympathetic tone about his trials and tribulations.
And he was saying, you know, he wasn't prepared for this venomous attack that could have been written by his worst enemy.
But I'd imagine all journalists, when they reach out to you, Do so in positive tones.
Try to frame what they're doing in a positive way.
Even if they were going to write a hit piece, they would do that.
And secondly, from what the journalists described, they had a lot of issues with the way Michaela was handling things and deflecting things outside of the actual recording of the interview.
They just had a very unusual experience.
And then, you know, him breaking down multiple times in the interview, references of...
Diagnosis of schizophrenia, which they disagreed with, and so on.
It sounds like a circus.
So it would be very strange, given those circumstances, if you didn't get an article at the end of it that mentioned them.
Yeah, I hear what you're saying about, seems to be an instance of more of the grievance narrative that's so common amongst gurus.
And the other thing, too, is that point that we discussed with T about how the dynamic of gurus in terms of their engagement, With the media and the attention and the spotlight is one that often seems to be an unhealthy one where they can be subject to things like audience capture or just be attracted to things that gain them ever more attention.
So it seems like Jordan Peterson has succumbed.
It seemed like he was succumbing to that before his breakdown and that seemed to have contributed to it.
And it seems to be, once again, His engagement in the public eye is not particularly healthy for him.
No.
And there was a lot of references both in the interview and even in his response about how many times his videos have been viewed and reframing.
Like the Cathy Newman interview that he did was famously hostile.
But he also did an interview with Helen Lewis for CQ, I think.
It was combative.
But I remember at the time that a lot of his followers were saying it was one of the best critical interviews of him because it gave him time to speak and she raised counter-arguments and they had a back and forth.
But he frames that as also ridiculously hostile.
And it just seems there's a very low tolerance for pushback or criticism that isn't within a very narrow frame.
Like he mentions Dave Rubin.
And Joe Rogan as media or friends that he can expect fair treatment from.
But those are also people who are famed for being complete pushovers with the people that they agree with.
So, yeah, it's just a dynamic that we see a lot of.
And it's kind of surprising, given how much he has been in the public eye and how combative.
He comes across in interviews or material.
It instead seems that there is a real fragility in a lot of the gurus we look at for criticism.
Yeah, I mean, well, fairly or unfairly, he's a controversial figure and we'd be quite naive to approach an interview without some expectation of pushback.
Essentially...
There are interviews where they interview scientists, for instance, who might be talking about discovering a black hole or some sort of thing where there's no political aspect to it and you can expect a very friendly softball kind of interview.
But for a politician or a public figure, when they're interviewed, they expect that the gloves are going to be off and that's just how interviews normally go for them.
So Jordan Peterson is definitely in the second category.
And as you say, It would be quite naive for him to come to an interview, unless it was a special friend, without expecting that.
But anyway, c 'est la vie.
Yeah, it's an ongoing development in the guru sphere.
And speaking of ongoing developments in the guru sphere, another just quick thing I want to mention, Matt, is have you heard about Clubhouse?
No.
It rings a bell, but I can't remember what it's about.
Tell me.
So this is a new social media.
Outlet, like a new platform, which is still in closed beta, I think.
You know, it's invite only, so it's still like a walled garden.
And basically, its hook is that it's audio-based.
So people set up rooms, I think, I don't know what they're called, like maybe it's clubhouses, and people can come in and talk, and then other people can ask questions.
It's a bit like a Discord server, but a social network version of it.
And it's becoming popular.
And I've noticed a lot of the guru set displaying an interest in it.
And in particular, our favorite guru, Eric Weinstein, has embraced it heartily and gained a big following there already.
And I was thinking that that platform might be the ideal platform for some of our gurus.
Or gurus in general, and pseudoscientists and conspiracy theorists, because we've already seen with long-form podcasts that they give people the ability to speak for extended periods and with little oversight on topics,
right?
And there's an element of intimacy that the audio podcast format generates, and I think that will translate really well to Clubhouse.
And will potentially allow for various guru figures to do extended audio takes about topics and build following through these audio lectures?
I just think it's a platform that's going to be really potentially lucrative for gurus.
Yeah, I think you're right about that.
As soon as you said that it's an audio-based social network.
I thought myself how it just seems like the perfect platform for gurus.
I've said this to you before offline that in some ways these gurus are like the 21st century incarnation of the traditional shock jock or talk radio host who, you know, they've added some interesting layers to it.
In many respects, it's a similar kind of thing.
And this interactive audio would bring them even closer to a high-tech version of a shock jock.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Well, so something to keep an eye on.
Shall we turn to the man of the hour?
We're covering Nassim Celeb this week, and he's had a storied career, so we can't really do it justice to stay on time.
But suffice to say...
He's an essayist and someone whose expertise lies in probability and statistics, arguably more probability.
He's the author of some very well-selling books, including The Black Swan and Anti-Fragile.
I bet many of our listeners have read one or more of those.
And he's also quite famous for accounting for the great financial...
And he was one of those people who had hedged against it and did very well out of it.
And that kind of behaviour is very much in keeping with the sorts of philosophies he expounds in his books.
Yes.
And I would also just note that he's themed as well for being pugilistic on Twitter and before that in his public appearances and interactions as well.
Like part of his theme is that he's famously combative and openly critical about the people he doesn't like.
Like the number of people he has blocked on Twitter is astonishing.
He's blocked me.
He's blocked me.
Yeah, yeah.
Full disclosure, everyone.
We have been blocked by Taleb.
Yeah, it's not hard to achieve.
If you say something critical of item, it's likely that you'll be blocked.
Yeah, so he has called me an idiot for sure.
But that kind of thing is not going to affect our review in any way, shape or form.
In some sense, that endeared me to him a little bit more because he's just very straightforward and he gets criticism, he blocks.
Yeah, I mean, in a way, it's refreshing.
And, you know, full credit to him to have such a strong following while being such an abrasive person.
Yeah, yeah.
Although, you know, people like that in the modern era.
So I've heard.
So I've heard.
Abrasive personalities do well.
So as you mentioned, the content.
That we were looking at this week.
So one thing to say is that we initially were going to look at a talk where he was mainly focusing on the coronavirus and also investment topics.
That was one of the talks that popped up on YouTube.
And it was Black Swan investor Nassim Taleb on COVID misconceptions, Fed policy and inflation.
But that talk turned out to be actually...
Pretty good.
But more so to be not really very guru-ish.
It was more finance-y focused.
And there wasn't a ton of stuff to sink our teeth into.
So we looked at another talk, which was more about his philosophy and view about wider topics.
And that was the Antidote for Chaos, an interview he did with...
Something called Cavalaria.com.
And the interviewer was a Romanian presenter who's an expert in technology and cars.
I forget his name, Matt.
Do you have it handy there?
The interview is with George Benici.
Benici, yeah.
And look, I got you to pronounce it.
So he's quite a good interviewer.
So that's the content that we are...
Focusing on mainly here.
So sorry if you watched the other one.
Yeah, apologies for that.
I posted that announcement and prepared for that interview.
But Chris clicked this one and a bit of a miscommunication.
And Chris is very sorry.
You did go through this interview and sent me various summaries of all the things that were annoying you.
So I know that you have watched this and been upset by it.
This was our second choice, right?
The last thing I want to say is that I did like the other interview, the one that we posted.
I found very little to object to.
I think it's worth emphasizing that clearly not all of his material is like the thing that we are covering today.
He clearly can talk sensibly as well.
It's just that we're not going to be covering that.
Yeah, no, but I actually think that's...
An important point to make and it also shows up in the content for this material that we're covering because he is a mixture of very reasonable, sensible and in some cases quite insightful takes alongside super hot takes and personal abrasiveness.
So I think that's a good point to note that unlike some of the other gurus that we've dealt with who seem to be almost entirely You know, self-aggrandizing and full of empty calories when it comes to their intellectual substance.
I feel that Taleb is a bit of a mixed bag, not just in each interview, but internally within interviews.
And he does have things of substance to say, I feel.
Yeah, no, I think, look, we're going to have fun with this.
And I agree.
It's always more interesting when it's a mixed bag and that it's not completely one thing or the other.
So yeah, let's get into it.
Okay. So I think this was a nice starter of the interviewer warning his viewers in advance about
Taleb might seem rude or harsh, but he's actually blunt and honest.
Yeah.
So, if you have to put that disclaimer at the very start of the interview, I think it speaks to the character and his reputation.
That's right.
So, look, we're going to try not to fixate too much on his bluntness, shall we say.
But in some cases, it is relevant, I think, for instance, when he's talking about other experts.
But let's hear some more from him.
It's an honor to talk to a person, a guy that's been called the philosopher of the 21st century.
Are you okay with that?
No, because I'm not a philosopher.
I'm not.
I mean, like labels.
I don't like labels.
Yeah.
So, I quite enjoyed the, you know, that's the first thing to get the interview off.
Like, how do you feel about that label?
Like, I don't like it.
Yeah, so it can be endearing.
Yeah, and he also outlines why he doesn't like it.
And it was quite interesting.
So this is like the next bit after that, where he explains his reasoning.
Aphorism, as it explains it, in my mind, being someone that self-identified was something, typically that person is a fraud.
And that was created by Lees before.
You identify it was a problem you're currently working on.
That seems a little bit sweeping, doesn't it?
Anyone who identifies as anything is a fraud.
I guess the other thing is that we'll return to this, but I might dispute slightly his rejection of the philosopher label.
He likes to think of himself as very much someone who was applying his technical skills.
But, yeah, we'll return to this question, I think, of whether or not he's a philosopher later on.
Yeah, and I also think he says that anybody who identifies as anything is a fraud, right?
Which, again, like you say, you know, super sweeping.
But he's identified with a couple of concepts, and he kind of separates that out, right?
It's like, oh, it's okay to focus on your concept to be, like, associated with a given problem.
But I'm not sure it's a huge difference.
He's known as the black swan guy and the anti-fragile guy.
And he identifies with those.
That's valid, but somebody identifying with a profession is not.
It feels that there's some self-serving issues with what it's okay to identify with in play there.
Yeah, yeah, that's right.
I think that's in keeping with his general theme, which is that everybody is an idiot and a fraud except for him.
But we should let him speak a little bit more.
Yeah, and so there's a good...
Part, I think, at the start, which reflects an issue that I think comes up repeatedly.
That when COVID came, you can work with scientific papers and say, you know, statistically, this is not converging or something, and then therefore your sample size doesn't fit the claim you're making.
Or you can use it.
So everything is based on statistics and probability, everything with information based on that.
Okay, so that was him saying that everything in...
The coronavirus is related to statistics, and that gives his expertise relevance, right?
That's why he was able to do it, just treat it as a statistics issue.
But immediately after, the interviewer raises this.
In your books, you're talking against taking decisions simply based on statistics.
Exactly.
But there's an asymmetry.
Sometimes you do take based on statistics.
So there is a fundamental asymmetry.
If you use it right, you know when not to use it, you see?
Yeah, so using statistics and data crunching is fine when he decides it's fine, and it's not when he decides it's not.
Yeah, and I don't think there's much more to it than that, right?
He is capable of recognizing the limitations of a statistical perspective, but others are not because they're idiots.
And if it feels that we are being unfair to suggest that he is describing everyone else as idiots, It's not, because he very often explicitly talks to them being idiots,
and I'm referencing them as idiots.
So I can give some examples of that.
So it has more scientific significance than some paper written by psychologists telling you this move is logical, not logical, rational, not rational, acceptable, not acceptable.
And therefore, all these psychologists call them idiots to their names.
Hopefully, I don't know what term you would use in Romania to call these guys.
It's okay.
Idiots, yes.
I'm a double idiot being a psychologist and a statistician.
But in that, of course, he's referring to the advantage of ancient wisdom or tradition over some...
Expert or technocrat doing some kind of technical analysis or nubber crunching coming up with recommendations.
So there's a lot to be said about that, but maybe we should hear some more from him.
So if you look at how we deal with uncertainty, we've survived hundreds of millions of years, so we've got to have the right reactions.
You see, that's exactly probabilistically.
You had reactions.
And sometimes, without understanding why, because it's violent to us to have these reactions.
So we must have a fitness to the risk environment through our intuition, through our paranoia, through our extreme risk conversion in some circumstances.
And that mechanism is a mechanism that has been...
We're refined by, of course, hundreds of millions of years, maybe.
That's a pretty bad argument.
What he's arguing for is that the sheer fact that people have survived and that we're still here as evolved organisms that have then created civilizations that have lasted for thousands of years, and we're still here.
So that illustrates that intuitive knowledge that's embedded within our culture, the tradition or the wisdom of the ancients, as he says, is probably a good way to go.
I feel like his argument there is tremendously bad because it's certainly true that humanity as a whole has done things like survive the Black Death, but that doesn't mean that we did it well.
You could point to limitless examples of how traditional approaches to crises or problems have just been absolutely terrible.
So it comes back to this problem of deciding, well, when...
It's a bit like before when you say, oh, well, you know, sometimes you should use statistics, but other times you shouldn't.
And he's the one who decides when's the right time to use it.
Well, clearly there are many, many times where taking a traditional response to a problem is not a good idea.
Anyone who's read history knows that.
So how do you tell when one should follow tradition or when one should not?
I think we'll get to this a bit more when we...
He's echoing an argument which is very familiar in the gurus that we've looked at and also actually quite current in academic research on cultural evolution, which is that traditional systems and social taboos or informal norms can transmit information without it being explicitly...
Encoded in the rationale, which is important.
Jordan Peterson is very clear on this point that we should be very careful before we discard institutions as outdated and irrelevant because we don't have a full picture of their value and that they have centuries of knowledge built into them which might have value that isn't immediately apparent to us.
And there's Jordan Peterson arguing that, but there's also people within academia like Joseph Henrich, who has done very interesting work on these kind of adaptiveness of taboos related to food consumption in certain societies and so on.
But I think there's definitely stuff there that's worth talking about.
People can be too dismissive about traditions and norms and...
There is a danger of simply regarding those as follies that we can do well without, that we've surpassed the need for any traditional system.
But I would say that's a pretty extreme view.
Most people do realize that traditions have elements of functional importance to societies.
And also...
I think that view runs the risk, though, of falling into the naturalistic fallacy, where if something has existed for ages and is seen as a natural or evolved thing, that it necessarily is functional and good.
And there's tons of counter examples, right?
You talked about some of them, but another one which springs to mind is bleeding people when they're ill.
Now, there are specific circumstances where...
Taking blood out of someone could be helpful.
But the range of ailments that it was applied to throughout history for hundreds of centuries and millennia is the treatment does not help in most of those cases.
In fact, it weakens people and makes them more likely to succumb.
But it was a traditional treatment which reappeared in many cultures independently and was preserved for centuries.
So there are clear cases where traditional knowledge is not necessarily beneficial to the people receiving or even the societies that preserve them.
So like you say, we do have to come down to assessing things in individual cases and not just relying on the heuristic that something old is good or something evolved isn't necessarily beneficial.
Yeah, yeah, I agree 100%.
There's a bit where he elaborates on this.
If you bang on your computer, it breaks.
And the attributes of engineering is that, for example, take a watch, okay?
There's no partial watch.
If something breaks, it stops.
If the computer breaks, it stops.
Whereas in nature, human body, we have things that love auxiliary mechanism.
It's a lot richer.
And the complex system is based on interaction.
So once you do more advanced mathematics than the ones used by these, let's call them idiots, then you realize from the more advanced mathematics that effectively your grandmother or grandfather or great-grandfather or great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-aunt actually had the right decision-making framework.
The thing that I might pull out here is Is the contradiction inherent in what he's saying?
So once you do the advanced mathematics, you find out that the traditional ways of doing things were right all along.
When he does it, it's advanced mathematics, but when other people do it, it's just the activity of fools.
The second point I'll make is that it does remind me of a guru-ish trope, which is to provide...
A highly technical or sophisticated rationalisation of something that people want to believe in the first place.
Yeah.
Yeah, this is a common thread.
And that just did jump out at me a little bit that people like traditional things, right?
It's just in our nature too, to have a preference for them.
And I suspect to some degree his appeal is to providing a rationalisation.
For those traditional conservative beliefs that people find intuitively resonates with them.
Yeah, it often feels like he's kind of justifying whichever take he wants to advocate for.
And sometimes they are reasonable and sometimes they're not.
But in all cases, it's that advanced mathematics and probability supports whatever he believes.
I mean, he also has famously been very skeptical of the safety of GMOs and argued for it using his understanding of probability and mathematics and risk, which is counter.
to all mainstream scientific research on the topic.
But like you say, the point I wanted to highlight there was a bit different because he focuses on this analogy that watches and computers are in a binary state.
They're either working or they're broke.
Whereas humans and traditions are more like complex systems that there's varying degrees of things that are right and not and there's auxiliary backup stuff.
And I listened to that description and was just like, what?
A watch can be running slow, but still basically functioning.
A computer, famously, can be a system that has a virus which infects one part of it, but still functions.
And it just was like a really weird, dichotomous comparison that he wanted to draw.
You know, it reminded me of when creationists are like, half a wing is not useful to anyone.
It is.
The context here is that he wants to portray technocratic, top-down systems as being inherently fragile and contrast them with a decentralized, more organic, traditional, conservative way of doing things.
That's kind of an interesting thing to think about, contrasting these sort of more rigid bureaucratic systems with more organic ones.
But I really do feel like he's strawmanning the technocratic.
thing terribly.
To stick to his topic talking a lot about COVID at the moment, he would represent the governmental approaches to COVID as being highly rigid and fixated.
In their approach, essentially having some prior idea about what should be the right way to do things and then just barreling through and not adjusting to handle changing circumstances or as new information comes to hand.
Now, when I think about the array of different responses that are deployed in Australia, and there's a wide variety of them, and they have evolved and changed in response to the information that's come up, and they have I really wouldn't describe it as rigid.
There's a whole range of things, from track and trace to stopping international travel, temporary lockdowns on affected areas.
The list goes on, and it is dynamic and changing.
So I think he's doing a straw man argument here.
Yeah, I think that would be a good time to play one of the clips related to his...
Views on localism, which highlight the motifs that you're pulling out.
Because, again, they're not skin-in-the-game type bureaucrats.
And to discredit them and favor localism, because the mails are small towns, not have these intellectuals trying to mess with their lives, you see?
You've got to remember one thing.
Intellectuals have always been wrong.
Okay, about risky things, always.
I mean, the wrong course about communism, the wrong about this, the wrong about religion, the wrong.
That's who's wrong.
And as you heard, we should listen to mayors and so on.
Well, localism.
Localism has a stronger municipal base.
Okay. You pay taxes to your municipality.
Okay. Like Switzerland, or to some extent the United States.
And this is why we're turning to city mayors for rapid response in case anything happens.
City mayors or small towns, even better, okay?
So you go back to how Italy was throughout its history, through how the world was throughout the Roman Empire, and both of us were in both the Roman Empire and the Ottoman Empire.
It seems very strange to praise America's federalist model in response to the coronavirus, given what's happened there.
Like, I haven't noticed that local authorities are much better at dealing with the crisis than national bodies.
Like, it seems there's been equal incompetence across wherever you look.
So I'm not sure that localism is the answer, but the other...
The point was just that the presentation that technocrats, and presumably, you know, he's referencing Brussels and stuff, that they don't have any skin in the game.
They don't really care.
They're just, you know, advising things.
And whereas, like, people are actually affected.
I don't get that entirely because they're also living through a global pandemic, right?
The World Health Organization and stuff, they are affected by this.
Yeah.
Yeah, well, I guess if you talk about skin in the game, it would seem to me that, say, the Prime Minister of Australia, for instance, does have a lot of skin in the game because they are blamed, rightly or wrongly, for how well we do.
I guess I have a natural sympathy for his preference for devolution and decentralisation and network systems generally.
On a conceptual level, I'm quite sympathetic to it and I'm sure it can be more sophisticated.
Arguments put forward towards it.
But I think that the sweeping way that he argues for it seems quite wrong to me.
You simply don't always have better outcomes just because the decision-making is happening on a local level.
An example that springs to mind is in our local, like we have three tiers of government here in Australia and in our town at a local level.
Some time ago, they stopped fluoridating the water because they thought it was poisoning people.
And we have quite bad dental performance in the area as a result.
And that wouldn't have happened at a national level.
That only happened because it's a backwater kind of town and the mayor was kind of crazy and not very well qualified.
Whereas those people tend to get filtered out at higher levels.
So maybe when big organisations fail or at the higher echelons, when they fail, it's more obvious, makes more of a splash.
But I think they fail a hell of a lot.
At local levels as well, even if it's not so dramatic in terms of people's news feeds.
Yeah, I think this gets to a dichotomy that we often come across, which is if you interpret the gurus very charitably and you don't pay that much attention to their hyperbolic statements, and instead look at the underlying principles they're advocating for.
There can often be reasonable points.
And Taleb, like you say, is saying that reliance on local authorities that understand the circumstances in a given area better than international bodies.
I think that's a perfectly legitimate point that few people would dispute.
But that's not why he's famous.
He's famous because...
He'll refer to everybody in the WHO as an idiot who got everything wrong and that we need to give up on, you know, these international idiots who are trying to run everything.
And I'll give an illustration of that kind of rhetoric.
To destroy the administrative bureaucratic establishment.
To destroy the bureaucratic establishment.
That's a very, very bold statement.
What do you mean by that?
I mean, like something like World Health Organization, more harm with the pandemic than help.
In the beginning, it said there's no reason to wear masks.
Well, you tell them, okay, what are we going to lose wearing a mask?
I mean, look at, we know pictures in history of people wearing masks, okay?
So he joins the august procession of gurus who make a very big deal over the mask thing.
Yeah, again.
I mean, he's much better on the coronavirus than any of the other people we've covered because we'll get to some of the clips later where he's advocating very reasonable points and he's making good arguments about the severity of coronavirus.
He is not completely a hot take anti-establishment machine.
But he still slips into these hyperbolic statements very easily.
And the notion that the entirety of the World Health Organization's contribution...
To fighting the coronavirus pandemic is summed up by the delay in advocating widespread mask wearing for the public.
It strikes me as extremely myopic.
And to not have a real grasp of what the World Health Organization is doing day in and day out.
The majority of their advice was good and remains good.
And it is just stuff like, you know, social distancing, good hygiene practices, not gathering in large groups.
Stuff that, yes, you can take issue with how long it took them to switch to advocate widespread mask wearing for the public.
But in the grand scheme of things, that's a criticism, but it doesn't undo all of the messages that they've been pumping out constantly.
You know, trying to make people aware that this is a serious event and that we should take it seriously and we should work together to try and coordinate responses to it.
Yeah, I think what you're sensitive to is that Martin Bailey dynamic that many gurus seem to have, which is that if you take the reasonable version of what they're saying, it's perfectly fine, but it's also rather platitudinous.
So, for example, if the reasonable version is...
That, oh, there is traditions exist for a reason and we should be cautious before throwing them away and replacing it with something new.
Now, that's perfectly, I think you'd struggle to find anyone who wouldn't agree with that.
It's perfectly fine.
It's a platitude.
But as you said, they don't get famous for that version of it.
They get famous for the broad sweeping thing of all experts are idiots.
Don't bother with any statistics.
You know, just refer to my books where I talk vaguely about fractal modeling and advanced mathematics of why the traditional way of doing things is always right.
That's the version that wins hearts and minds.
And that's the silly version.
Yeah.
And, you know, you mentioned the masks echoing a common refrain we hear amongst our gurus.
I noticed another one which reminded me of...
One of our very favorite past gurus.
So I'll play it for you and let's see if you can identify which guru it's reminiscent of.
Okay.
This is not democracy.
Democracy is if you are in control of the environment in which you live.
You don't have coercion by a certain class.
It's not democracy.
It's much more vicious than democracy.
There's no democratic process when unelected bureaucrats start running your life poorly.
Oh, well, that's tricky because which one?
I can think of three.
Well, for me, it just sounded like Scott Adams completely.
Well, that was going to be my first choice, but then I was thinking about JPCs.
Yeah, this is him talking about, again, the reasonable point that bureaucrats imposing on people's lives is something that we should have some issue with.
But it almost strikes us like, Brexiteer rhetoric?
Who's he referring to?
There is democracy.
Even the US system is a representative democracy.
It's the hyperbolic claims that it just rankles to me that that kind of go-to anti-institutionalism, turning everything up to 11 in a statement, it's...
Yeah, I feel it's potentially poisonous to discourse.
Yeah, I think poisonous is the right word because it's a bit like the criticisms of academia, that there's the sort of crazy unreasonable ones, that it's all entirely corrupt and nothing means anything and it's all conditioning people to become woke Marxists or something.
But then, you know, there's a bunch, that's not to say there aren't good criticisms of academia.
There are lots of them, and we could rattle them off.
But that kind of rhetoric is very satisfying, but it completely misses the point.
So the same thing applies to corruption and bureaucracies and so on in democratic states.
Yes, there are serious issues.
For instance, the role that political financial donations and lobbyists play in influencing policy.
Like, that's a serious...
But the way it's framed by gurus, and in this case, it's no seem to live doing it, is a poisonous way of framing it, which leads people to do things like storm the Capitol building.
That's kind of where it leads.
So, yeah, I think it is quite dangerous.
Yeah, although you're not placing that responsibility at his feet.
Hi.
No, no, no, no.
I'm saying it's that kind of rhetoric.
No, I'm not blaming Nassim for that.
Yeah.
And, you know, a point you've made as well in previous episodes is that there's this tendency for people to focus on the hits that they make, right?
Like when you introduced Taleb, you mentioned that he's quite well known.
For at least being interpreted as warning about the financial collapse and making money from betting on that.
But yeah, here is him making what I would consider a huge hot take about what's going to happen after the coronavirus.
And I'm curious to see, you know, are these the kind of things that...
Also get remembered?
Because it feels to me like this is the kind of stuff that someone can say and it just disappears under the carpet.
Coming from the outside.
Stores and people from Texas coming, you know, to shop in stores.
So we have changed the habits of the consumers enough that the small difference, New York was super leveraged on its success story and even then not financially sound.
But it's the same with all big cities.
After all pandemics, big cities contract for some years.
Not necessarily for some years.
I mean, it could be permanent.
It might not have been super clear there, Matt, but what he was talking about was New York and his take is that New York has completely collapsed in the coronavirus crisis and that it won't recover.
And that this will be the fate of potentially all big cities.
And, you know, this is in line with his view about retreating into localism.
And that because, you know, now we're shopping online and now that we know that teleworking is important, that the big cities are basically going to lose the role that they previously played.
And that strikes me as like, on the weak version I agree with, right, that telecommuting or teleworking kind of things, Zoom conferences are going to be more common.
Remote work in general.
But the notion that New York, London, Paris are going to no longer be important centres after the coronavirus, it's just bad shit, right?
Yeah, that's right.
The reasonable version is kind of interesting.
it may be that we see more decentralization just because it may speed up a process that was already latent, which is the internet basically making geographic restrictions far less important.
Matt, just on a note, I know you've done some work in global health and addiction patterns and so on, so you might have more insight into this than me,
but is that true that there's a tendency in the modern era for Decentralization, moving away from urban centers.
Because I don't think that's true.
No, no, no.
I didn't mean to imply that.
I was just saying that it's what he is predicting might possibly come to pass, right?
Just because we do have very good internet, so working from home, telecommuting, basing operations in...
Smaller centres is more of a technical possibility now.
So arguably we're all still living in big cities just because we're kind of used to it and there's this inertia.
And it's possible that a shock like the COVID might prompt or speed up slightly something like that.
But no, to be clear, as far as I know, there is no decentralisation.
There is no exodus from the cities happening yet, quite the opposite.
Well, this is, you know, I'm aware that there are people claiming that.
There's articles saying, you know, the tech center is being abandoned as the elites in Silicon Valley, you know, rushed to leave buying up property in New Zealand and whatnot.
But I always feel that a lot of that feels like they're looking at a very specific segment and a very small segment of the population and then extrapolating out.
hugely from there.
And, you know, the notion that remote working will become more common as our technology develops and that there'll be new industries.
Yeah, of course.
But the harder take that major cities will fade and collapse, that's the part that I find people focus on the reasonable part and they kind of just glide over.
Them predicting the collapse of major cities.
And this is something which other gurus have said in their content.
And I just feel that there's a failure to hold people account when they make huge swings.
But if they get a hit, people very much fixate on, well, look, you know, they said that.
And it's just a frustration.
Yeah.
No, no, I completely agree with you there.
I think, you know, playing these clips is really highlighted for me.
The real contrast between this interview here with the other interview we listened to and posted, which didn't have anything like this level of hot takery.
So it makes me think that Talib's got two speeds.
So in the other episode, he was having a much calmer and far more reasonable conversation where he was almost devoid of hot takes.
But in this one, he's in big hand-waving mode.
So, yeah, he's an interesting character because he does both.
He does both styles.
Yeah, and that's actually something that I've seen in response to his public lectures and articles, that when he's making sweeping claims about statistics, like one of his major things is that statisticians rely...
On normal distributions and parametric tests, and that these have unrealistic assumptions for many things which we would care about in the real world.
Everything is not normally distributed.
And one, I think that's something that all statisticians already would agree with, fundamentally.
But when he is making the criticisms in a more measured way...
To say that you shouldn't overly rely on parametric tests.
Should acknowledge that there can be unexpected events that cannot be modeled well in systems if they're rare.
That few people take issue with that.
They take issue with his more extreme take and claim that everybody else is an idiot who's never thought about it and he's the first person that's realizing this.
And often the response I see when people see a talk and he's more measured, they're like, he makes very good points if you just ignore the rhetoric.
The other side of it is that he's making points that often aren't as revolutionary as he's portraying them.
They're points which actually have been widely acknowledged by people for, in some cases, decades.
Yeah, I mean, a good example is, as you said, criticizing the normal Augustian distribution, which doesn't capture a lot of real-world data.
Now, that's perfectly true, but the problem...
With that, it's not very interesting.
It's something that's widely understood by statisticians and competent statisticians do not apply the Gaussian distribution where they shouldn't.
If he claims that relying on that and ignoring the tails will lead to major financial crashes or not accounting for that risk, then again, that's completely true.
But also, people do take into account those tails.
And then he'll go on to...
We should use advanced mathematics, like using Mandelbrot's ideas of fractal modelling in understanding these complex systems.
And it's all very vague.
And then he'll say, well, this is just a philosophy book, so I don't have to present the details of that.
So, you know, it's a mixture of pretty anodyne statements that are totally true, but well appreciated and well understood, combined with some Yeah.
So, well, maybe this is a good time to focus a little bit on some of his better takes and illustrate that he can give reasonable points and is often arguing for reasonable positions.
And a lot of his good points related to the coronavirus, actually.
Yes.
The coronavirus should be considered a serious problem.
So the problem is that we have these idiots, and let me call them idiots because they are idiots, and in January, COVID had killed maybe by February a thousand people.
Yes.
A thousand people.
And they give you numbers of people who drown in their swimming pool.
The number of the people who drowned in a swimming pool in the past is very representative of how many people will drown in a swimming pool in the future.
It's very stable because that's what I call mediocre statistics.
That's where the bell curve works.
But if someone is foolish enough to drown in her or his swimming pool...
It doesn't cause a neighbor to drown first.
But if I have COVID, I'll give it to the neighbor.
So there's a multiplicative effect that doesn't exist with car accidents, all these sources of risk.
It only exists for pandemics.
And we have only 72 in recorded history.
So that's an excellent take there, that when you talk about epidemiology and you talk about responses to what may seem like a relatively small problem, because at the moment there may be relatively few people infected, you have to take into account the exponential nature of that threat.
And this is something that I think was poorly understood by a lot of politicians early on with COVID, who I think...
It was their natural instinct to look for a compromised solution.
But with some things, it's true of wildfires and it's true of epidemics, there isn't really a middle ground.
You have to stamp it out or let it run free.
Yeah, and he discusses the trade-offs and how people are misunderstanding them in general and draws this analogy to...
The amount of money that companies invest in airline safety.
And I thought it was a nice comparison point.
So maybe we can hear that.
Whenever a plane crashes, people switch to driving.
Yes. And then you have more people dying on the roads.
Exactly. But there's a huge cost on airlines to avoid crashes.
So we're spending trillions to prevent crashes to have the lowest possible air rate on the airlines.
It's great to me.
I like to fly.
But it is not...
It's burdensome.
So it's completely illogical to say how much we're spending against the pandemic under these circumstances.
Yeah, thanks, Chris.
So that's another good example of a good and reasonable take.
Other people have said the same thing, that there's a false dichotomy between choosing between public health and the economy, because the fact is people are concerned about The parents or grandparents dying from this disease,
just like they are scared about plane crashes.
So the government can say it's going to prioritize the economy all they like, but people will still do things like stay away from restaurants.
So I'm happy to be finding points that are perfectly sane and rational things that he's saying.
Yeah, and he echoes almost exactly the point that you're making quite nicely about the organic contraction of the...
That it isn't a trade-off because, well, let's hear him explain.
But let me tell you one thing about the behavior of consumers.
The minute a firm is tainted, you see, or they discover a McDonald's or something, a small little defect, people don't go anymore.
The minute they hear about it.
With COVID, most of the contraction and economic activity came from companies that did not want to be sued by their employees.
And then he goes on to talk about restaurants trying to avoid being sued or being the source of an outbreak.
So it's a good point and it's valid that it's a false dichotomy to make.
So yeah, I think it's just good to note that he isn't just a source of endless, terrible hot takes.
Yeah, yeah, exactly.
And you said this before we started recording, that he really is quite different from some of these other gurus who just seem to be just purely about hot takes and seem to have no substance to them.
I think Talib does have substance, but I think his substance is more in his...
Yes, it's informed by his technical fields, but, you know, he may not like this, but his...
His ideas mainly are philosophical ideas.
It's more like a standpoint and an approach, and we may not agree with all of them, but it's quite legitimate, for instance, to be arguing for devolution and decentralisation.
Some of his takes about COVID are excellent, but it does seem like he's got two speeds.
He's got the really broad, pugnacious, you know, I'm the smartest man in the world and I have the keys to the universe and everyone else is an idiot, but he's certainly no fool.
Shows a little bit of restraint.
He can talk extremely sensibly about things.
There's a part where he basically says that if we are doing overactive testing, lots of tests, and everyone's wearing masks, we can just do business as usual.
Now, going forward, the solution is dual.
Overactive testing and masks.
And do business as usual.
And that doesn't gel with what I've heard from virologists and other epidemiologists.
Like, I'm sure he would say it doesn't matter.
But that strikes me as the kind of thing that is maybe stating things too strongly.
But even still, those are both reasonable recommendations that we should be doing more testing and mask wearing should be mandated and there should be a culture that's encouraging mask wearing.
And he specifically makes that point.
That we need to make use of traditional shame culture tendencies in order to help change the norms around mask wearing.
Like in America, if you show up in Costco without a mask, you have people taking a picture and it goes online.
Okay.
Which in fact may be unfair for the person, but at the same time, all we need to do is build a culture to bring down the pandemic.
Yeah, so I guess the general drift that he's got there is about the traditional norms and things fostering collective action, which is obviously an important thing when it comes to managing an epidemic.
Yeah, and actually that leads nicely to his take on religion.
But before we get there, I also have to mention that when he is attacking people that you don't like, or not necessarily people you don't like, but people...
That you might take issues with, for one, cut down the size.
I can see why his style is enjoyable.
Yes.
This is him.
And again, this sort of echoes Scott Adams, but in a more reasonable way.
This is him talking about his views about Bitcoin.
I have to separate Bitcoin as a good idea that may work from these weirdos, you know, who cluster around Bitcoin and the federal thing.
It's a solution to the world's problem.
And they only eat meat.
Only this.
They read Hayek and they don't understand Hayek.
So there's a crowd of people who have to separate Bitcoin from Bitcointers.
The Bitcoiners are like some cranks and lunatics and conspiracy theorists, which is nice to have in a society, but you want to keep them far away from your landscape.
Yeah, so it's just reminiscent to me of a little bit Scott Adams' dichotomy between scientists and science, right?
But in a much more legitimate version.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, no.
And look, I don't understand Bitcoin very well, but to the extent that I do, I certainly share skepticism.
There's a lot of cooks and weirdo claims and huge overhyping in that arena.
So yeah, I agree.
And another target of his IR, Is libertarians.
Let me make one statement about a pandemic.
There are idiots who are bureaucratic idiots for a central state.
And there's also idiots who are libertarian psychopaths.
Let's talk about a second category.
All these people tell you, well, the shutdown is costing the economy.
As if the virus was not around costing the economy.
The virus is dangerous for the economy.
And this refers, I think, to a point that we've called out in previous episodes about this kind of hyper-individualism in modern conservatism.
And he makes some interesting points about it.
So I've got two clips about that.
So maybe I'll play them both and then see what you think.
And when some guy was arguing, look at Tony, this is an open Hayek.
And on this page, he explains to you that government is unnecessary for pandemics and wars.
And natural catastrophes.
We need government.
That's a function of the government.
Okay, so first of all, he's got a reasonable recognition that there are some functions of which governments can be useful for.
And then there is also one mechanism that you don't understand about the libertarianism is that you have to avoid harming others.
It's called a non-arming principle.
By not wearing a mask, I am harming others.
Yeah, so it's interesting to think about Nassim Taleb's sort of general political outlook, which is conservative, but he's conservative in a way that's a little bit similar to Jordan Peterson in a way, but he's probably a bit more down to worth.
I read somewhere that his intellectual godparents are people like Locke and Hume.
Coming out of an English tradition of small government, that kind of thing, and reliance on tradition and that sort of social capital that evolves at the local level.
So, in a way, he's, as a guru in a political sense, he's at least a little bit refreshing because he's not espousing the kind of ultra-skeptical, ultra-libertarian...
American version, sorry I don't mean to be mean to Americans, but it seems to be a postmodern thing associated with the American
Yeah, and I think this fits in with his take on religion, which I wanted to get to because he talks about that here and he's talked about it in other talks and
famously has There is no way you can transmit intergenerational experiences with ideas.
You transmit them.
With customs, interdicts, and habits.
You're saying that religion is a store of wisdom?
It's a Darwinistic idea.
Those who have the right ideas survive.
Not necessarily because the idea is, but because using it.
Okay, that's first of all the ground that he's providing, right?
That it isn't enough to just have intellectual systems.
That won't be enough in order to transmit culture.
You need things like rituals and creeds and stuff which ascribes values to higher orders or supernatural beings even.
And I think there's definitely something to that, that a purely rational secular worldview...
It can often seem less compelling, or at least fail to capture the various irrational aspects of society, which are often very important, like the inauguration ritual, which recently happened.
And if you look at that in purely mechanistic terms, it's just a ceremony to signify that there's a change in government.
One, it has to happen.
It has to follow these formalistic patterns, and it has to involve the stating of very specific words in order to be performed correctly.
But secondly, when there was the issues with the transfer of power this time, because of Trump and the various conspiracy theories he pushed, it took on a much more symbolic importance.
And I think those kind of things exist all throughout society, not just in religion, but in all aspects of culture.
Yeah, I think you're right.
I'm actually quite attracted to some of the assumptions underlying that line of thinking too.
For instance, if we think of the ultra-rationalist, ultra-progressive way of doing things, then we make policy decisions and we do things to maximise economic wealth or we could be trying to maximise health and wellbeing.
Or maximize happiness in some way.
But I take his point that the danger with that kind of approach is that it neglects the sort of need that people have for more than just the purely material things or for hedonism or maximizing pleasure.
But people need to feel that...
Life has some sort of meaning, some sort of goal.
And I think that's true at a societal level as well as an individual level.
So, you know, in ancient Egypt, they were building pyramids.
You know, all cultures have had their grand projects.
And much more recently, we put people on the moon.
We spend a lot of money to do things like study black holes.
And I think those are wonderful enterprises.
And, you know, we might set ourselves other enterprises such as restoring the ecology of the planet.
Not for any hedonistic or material benefit for people, but just because it's a good goal and something to strive towards.
So I guess I'm with him in the sense that his point of view sort of overlaps a little bit with that society should be about providing something more than just technocratic optimization.
Yeah.
So there is a part when he's discussing religion where he's arguing that a lot of the Especially the kind of new atheist takes on religion are too fixated on the doctrines and supernatural beliefs and ideologies that religions instantiate.
And that to fixate on that feature just doesn't actually grasp what religions actually do for most people and what their function is.
So here's him talking a little bit about what he sees the function of religion.
Treating religion as something what I call epistemic.
By saying, well, that story, it means you're taking the story literally.
Science is literal and epistemic.
Religion is aesthetic.
I'm sure you're familiar, Matt, with the concept of NOMA, non-overlapping magisteria, popularized by Stephen Jay Gould.
And that sounded very reminiscent of that point to me.
And like with Gould, I think it's like, Core point that simply focusing on theological doctrinal beliefs doesn't tell you everything you need to understand about religion or what religious identity is about.
But I think he's wrong.
And in the same way that Jordan Peterson is wrong, when he acts as if religion is just about that, it isn't about positing reality, right?
About describing an actual Alternative system of physical reality or what happens when you die.
Because I think it is.
It's both things.
It can be metaphorical at times and to many people it's treated as such.
But it absolutely does in the world posit systems that conflict with modern interpretations or science.
And to act as if that's a misinterpretation of what religion is, that relies on...
A version of religion that is highly metaphorical and which people don't take as a literal truth is the default view of religion.
I don't think that position holds up either.
Yeah.
No, look, I completely agree with you there.
But let's just take that meaning-providing component.
Now, I would agree with Talib as far as saying that that is something that's important on a social and civilizational level.
Provided for.
But I personally disagree with him that it is a good idea to look to religion to provide that.
I would advance an alternative, which is to look for secular projects and secular sources of meaning.
Sort of a Carl Sagan-esque kind of way of looking at the world.
I'm just wondering what your take on that.
Okay, I'm going to play one clip, then I'll get on to this point.
But this is him talking about that he follows The Jewish Orthodox system about meals and how to eat meals, which involves fasting on certain days and various restrictions.
And this is part of his rationale for why that's a good idea.
They discovered that those who eat together, you see, band together.
So you have to eat, you know, with other Jewish people.
So it creates networks of communities throughout the Mediterranean and Europe.
Where you can have trade.
Okay, so that's taking that kind of very cultural evolutionary perspective on the functions of collective meals and religious prohibitions and taboos.
But to return to your question, what he seems to discount there is that lots of things in the modern secular world have replaced those functions.
There are now systems that are not reliant on shared religious identity, which tie people in together to systems that enable trust.
There are various mechanisms in societies which avoid the need for, say, supernatural punishment to be the thing that is compelling you not to cheat people.
We have secular systems of law.
We have various...
Electronic mechanisms that prevent people being cheated and so on.
And research looking about trust and religion and how these various things function psychologically tend to show that actually invoking secular institutions produce very similar results to invoking religious ones for modern people.
I'm not discounting that there are adaptive aspects To religious traditions, which maybe the New Atheists have overlooked.
But I agree with you that viewing religion as the sole source for those kind of trust networks, or even just traditions and norms, that we need to be looking back into the past in order to find those kind of systems.
I think that's fetishizing.
Older systems as being better, which isn't necessarily true.
Yeah.
Like you, I accept that many traditional or religious practices have some functional purpose.
But when you actually look at them, you see that, sure, they may have been functional, but that may have been in a clannish kind of society where that may have been helpful.
And they may well...
Not fit the modern world very well.
Furthermore, they may well be awfully suboptimal approaches to things.
I mean, just take one example of religious approaches to marriage and the prohibition of divorce, arranged marriages, all the rest.
Now, it's pretty easy to see that there are a lot of downsides to the traditional approach to handling marriage and relationships, and it's not self-evidently true that it was even that wonderful for people.
then, even if it was functional, and certainly not preferable to the more secular approach
So, like you, I accept the very weak point that there's some method to the madness of religious practices, but I reject the idea that it's the only source of good practices,
and modernity has embraced the idea that We can have secular solutions to the same problems.
When you are constructing these internal trust networks based around religious identities, that's often good for the people who are part of those religious identities, often very bad for the people who are excluded.
And it can also foster very impermeable in-group, out-group identities.
And similarly...
Following the orthodox restrictions on diet, it's fine for Talib to talk about how this is beneficial in communal meals and so on.
But like you mentioned, as far as I'm aware, there's a hell of a lot of restrictions in orthodox Judaism about what women can do and what they're allowed to handle and who they're allowed to be with.
And were Talibah a woman, I wonder if he would voluntarily be following the restrictions and would find them, you know, beneficial for increasing his trust networks.
Thanks.
Well, exactly.
And that goes to the point that I made at the beginning of the episode, which is that it's all very well and good to say that there's ancient wisdom in these practices.
But it's self-evidently true that even if some of those practices are a good idea, a hell of a lot of them are really quite bad ideas.
And Talib would have to admit that.
You're left with the problem of, well, how do you tell which is which?
Talib would probably gesticulate towards some advanced mathematics which shows that the evidence-based approach actually confirms what he thought, but it's really rather trite to say that it's a mixed bag because he doesn't give you a recipe for figuring out what's good and what's bad.
Like you said, a lot of those religious practices might have been kind of okay if you were the priest and a guy, but maybe not so good if you're a young woman.
When he's trying to make this point about religion being about trust and not about belief, he talks to the Romanian interviewer about the word for religion in Romanian.
So I think it's fun to hear that little exchange.
Now, for example, what does the word credo mean in Romanian?
I believe.
Credo.
Not really.
It means I trust.
I trust.
Okay.
If you see the credo, the credere, it means I trust.
Yeah, so the answer, the Romanian interviewer gave, was the opposite of what he wanted.
So he's like, no, no, no, no, no.
It means trust.
Oh, okay.
Yeah, no, you could still have the self-confidence to correct a native speaker on their own language.
I don't know.
Who knows?
He could be right.
Maybe it's got a dual meaning and he just wandered.
Yeah.
Yeah.
All right.
So we're going to move off his localism, traditionalism stuff in a minute, but I will say it ties into a bit like Rutger Bregman's utopian view of pre-modern history he has.
So let me just play a clip where he's highlighting the past versus the present.
What happened in China had a big rise, okay, because of, you know, decentralized, you know, mechanism.
And then they had the Mandarin tried to run it.
A bunch of people, the government, same thing is happening now in Europe.
And same thing happened in Upper Egypt.
The nation-state, centralized nation-state, is way inferior to a system of empire, empire, with collection of city-states.
Yeah, so that just struck me as strange because what I know about Chinese history is that centralization was a huge process throughout Chinese history across the dynasties.
And of course, there are city-states, but whatever he wants to categorize something successful as, he'll just expand the criteria to what suits his argument and anything that...
that he doesn't like falls into the categories of things that are illegitimate and bad.
And those categories often don't have that much resemblance to
He seems to be saying that things that are old are good because historically civilizations were more decentralized because of technological limitations.
That doesn't necessarily seem to imply to me that they were better.
It's hard to see under that description that these ancient empires were good, right?
Like the Habsburgs and the Roman Empire, whatever.
But the EU is bad because it has centralized things, but it has countries that are completely independent running on local laws and so on.
So it just feels like whichever category he wants to put things in, he can.
Okay, Matt.
So for me, the last...
Point I want to hit on is this recurrent feature he has of setting up these binaries of things which Taleb considers legitimate, which are good, and things which he considers illegitimate, which are only pursued by idiots and morons.
And that how there's a stark divide between these two things.
So let me give an example of that.
Physics is fine.
But what these assholes do is they tell you because a physicist is an expert at physics, an economist is an expert on economy.
No.
Because an expert, we should classify schools in two categories.
Schools that are schools where you learn things.
And you can guess that the second is like...
Schools where you don't learn anything.
And so economists are within the second school, but also are psychologists and basically anybody in social science.
And also included are epidemiologists.
So here's him talking about them.
Because you see the results.
If you have an incompetent dentist, you will see it.
If you have an incompetent mathematician, you will see it.
If you have an incompetent epidemiologist...
Yeah, so I'm not sure that's completely accurate, because I'm pretty sure there's been plenty of people that have revealed themselves as incompetent epidemiologists in the current pandemic.
But it's this really stark dichotomy, and it tends to be the hard science and mathematicians who are reasonable, and everyone else who is not.
And possibly investors, maybe investors, people who make money.
Yes, yes.
This is Talibati's most self-serving and irritating.
Like, he discounts the entire field of statistics, for instance.
And that is just so absolutely absurd.
He believes that because he has got training in mathematics and in probability, then he already knows everything he needs to know.
We don't want to get into the technical details here, but I've seen the evidence that he is missing a fair bit of knowledge.
But his ignorance is almost like a superpower because he can straw man what he's criticising terribly.
For instance, claiming that all statisticians just use the normal distribution for everything and don't have any understanding of over-dispersion or strange distributions.
That's been studied since the 1920s.
So he's straw man partly because he's just ignorant.
He's not aware of what modern statistics actually looks like.
So he's criticising a naive 1950s statistics and I think probably misbetraying even that.
The other aspect of it too is assuming that because you've got training in the sort of more fundamental, if you like, discipline.
Then that automatically qualifies you in the subsequent disciplines.
So we see this in the overconfidence of physicists sometimes to believe that they're qualified to apply on almost anything because it's all downstream of physics, right?
But actually, no.
To do chemistry, you actually need to learn extra things.
It's not just applied physics.
And if you want to do biology...
Then you have to do extra things.
It's not just applied chemistry.
And the same is true in terms of the relationship between probability and statistics.
I'll stop whinging now about him criticizing the field.
I think you're right about it being a kind of superpower to be clearly intelligent, to know mathematics, and to be supremely arrogant.
Because it means that when you think that you've spotted an error in reasoning, that it's hard not to question yourself because like, Would somebody who's so competent in mathematics and knows such complex mathematical formula really be able to make such basic mistakes,
right, or over-extrapolations?
And it's reasonable people should have doubt in, you know, when they're contradicting a mathematician about statistics or that kind of thing.
That's right.
And because he's got that background in mathematics, just like Eric Weinstein, he is able to reply to any criticism by throwing around some mathematical terms, just like Eric Weinstein might do with physics terms.
And, you know, it's natural for people, even experts, to give the other person the benefit of the doubt and go, well, I don't see the connection between these abstract terms and what we were just talking about.
If you're willing to be disagreeable enough, then it's really quite an effective tactic for just basically winning any argument.
But the thing that irritates me is that the problem is that he's always implying that he has a very mathematically rigorous solution that the statisticians don't see.
But like Eric Weinstein, he fails to deliver.
So, for instance, he correctly describes financial markets as being chaotic and being a chaotic system.
But then he talks about using fractal models for describing the unexpected drops and long tails in markets.
But at no point does he ever provide Any mathematical detail about how one would actually apply chaos theory and fractal theory to actually doing something useful with this kind of data.
So I don't mind his philosophical outlook.
It's quite fine.
And when he admits that he's talking politics or just talking sort of general principles or philosophy, then I can find lots of things to agree with him about.
But I do find it really irritating when somebody is claiming the mantle of the ultra-rigorous, ultra-mathematical, And criticising a field like computational statistics, which is extremely technical and actually does pony up the methods in terms of statistical toolbox and methods to apply.
And there's a huge literature on rigorously evaluating that stuff.
It is a bit irritating when somebody just dismisses all of that and points, gesticulates vaguely towards fractals and chaos theory.
And then does it provide any details of it?
Yeah.
I also think he's failing to appreciate that some of the harshest critics of social sciences, including psychology, the replication crisis has mostly been documented by psychologists.
And criticisms of overuse of parametric assumptions and whatnot have been discussed by statisticians for decades.
He seems to have a remarkable knack of presenting things which are actually well known and are important with a catchy term like skin in the game or black swan event and then presenting it as if he's discovered that as opposed to that is a well known thing which most people acknowledge.
As like an important thing to factor into considerations.
And to speak to your point about the overconfidence with which he speaks, I'll play one last clip of him talking about the difference between modern risks and historical risks.
This is him applying his understanding of risks and probability to a specific problem.
If you make a mistake in today's environment, like say the casino, It may be a mistake, all right?
But overall, overall, they're not costly.
Depends on how much money you're bringing to the table.
Typically, they're not costly because, plus, there is a correct mechanism.
Those who make these mistakes, if they're really mistakes, they exit the system.
This is such a terrible analogy.
He's referring to a gambling fallacy.
It is an extremely costly mistake to go to a casino armed with the gambling fallacy.
Although it's true that no strategy that you can reasonably implement is going to enable you to do any better.
You know, I just think that that's...
A good example about bespoke definitions and idiosyncratic interpretations because the notion that people don't make costly mistakes in casinos.
And I think in this case, he will be defining costly as in like lose their life.
But people do lose their lives and their livelihoods and their marriage, right?
So if you want to put it in evolutionary terms, they definitely cost themselves fitness advantages.
By making costly mistakes in gambling.
But I think he wants to contrast that with you misjudge a tiger being in the bush and you're eating.
But that seems way too simplistic.
Basically strikes me as like, that's a bad argument.
It doesn't matter how well versed you are in probability.
And mathematics.
You're just making a bad argument by saying that mistakes in modern gambling are not costly.
But I'm sure if I was there in the room, he would completely crush me with mathematical formula and deeply cutting insults to my manhood.
To show why I'm just completely naive and wrong.
But actually, no, he's just making a point which is too hyperbolic and too simplistic.
And it's okay, even though he is much better than me at maths.
The thing that he's arguing for is that our intuitions and gut feelings that come from our heuristics, that come from either an evolved culture or biological evolution.
What he wants to argue is that we can put our faith in that and that we shouldn't detach from that and try to adopt a very scientific, objective, statistical approach, with some exceptions, whenever he says that you should, but they're not well specified.
So that's his argument that he's pushing.
And you can see why he's arguing for that, because it fits very nicely with his political worldview, traditional kind of worldview.
But it's really quite wrong.
You know, it's very bad.
Like, the idea that you can rely on heuristics and intuitions to deal with modern problems or, for that matter, to make any decisions about gambling is just tremendously wrong-headed.
Yeah, agreed.
So, with that tremendously wrong-headed bookend, shall we give our concluding thoughts on old Nassim?
Good old Nassim.
Yeah, I feel like we haven't done it justice because he's produced so much in terms of his books and his ideas and hot takes and good takes and bad takes and all the rest.
So he's done so much and I feel like we've only covered a very small percentage of it in this episode.
That's our modus operandum.
I mean, I think it too about a lot of the people that we cover.
But I will say when I've watched like a couple other clips with Taleb after watching this one and kind of breaking it down.
I noticed a lot of the same things cropping up.
So he definitely does have other things that he can talk about.
And I think he is not someone that should just be dismissed out of hand.
But I do think that a lot of the things that we highlight here infect all of his other output.
As I said before, he's got these two modes.
He's got quite an interesting, considered, good take mode.
And then he's got the really broad, hyperbolic...
Very bold and also abusive sort of style.
And it's often when he's relating stuff back to gut feelings and intuitions and traditions and things which I can appreciate people find appealing.
So I could very much understand why he writes very popular books because he does combine those things quite well.
There's a substrate of accurate observations.
For instance, the stock market doesn't behave nicely in a nice normal distribution of changes.
But those bits sometimes are in danger of falling into the category of truisms and being pretty much standard stuff that everyone knows.
And then he lays on top of that some hyperbole and hot takery.
And when you combine the two, then I can see you've got the makings of an excellent book.
Yeah, I think if we'd reviewed a different interview, for instance, the one that we actually posted and told people we were going to cover, I really wouldn't have anything to criticise him for because he was very measured and considered in that and made a bunch of very good takes.
But in this particular episode, he's in hot take mode and...
It's very guru-like.
So it'll be interesting to do the gurometer with Taleb, I think.
Yeah, and I'll just add to that his tendency to be belligerent and insulting of people and to talk about his weightlifting practices and so on.
I think that is a significant part of his appeal and probably why he's more of a guru than...
Other people who might also have economic, like their own hot takes on economics and statistics.
His colorful personality is a big part of why he appeals.
And his tendency to get down and dirty with people on Twitter is a significant part of his appeal.
And I think it's actually to his detriment because that intends to inculcate amongst his followers the ones that like that.
You know, a kind of hero worship aspect of him.
Whereas when he is being more reasonable and less insulting, he can be making anodine points, but things that are often worth talking about.
So part of it is just your preference for the type of character or whatever.
But I think when he doesn't lean into the hyperbolic shit and when he isn't presenting himself as the smartest man in the room, which he almost constantly is.
It comes across much better.
And yeah, it's just a shame because I think those characteristics are fundamental to who he is.
I think they are fundamental as well as being appealing to the kind of person that's attracted to that masculine, no-nonsense, muscular approach.
It's also very convenient because he never is forced to deal with any criticism because he can't just call you an idiot and tell you to piss off.
It's quite convenient when you pour all of his good points.
There are gaping holes in some of his more popular ideas.
So it is kind of convenient that you're able to adopt that personality in order to avoid any criticism of it.
So I think it's fair to say overall, we have maybe, um, more mixed, uh, perspective on Taleb than some of the gurus that we've had very negative reactions to.
He didn't leave the bad taste in the mouth that Scott Adams or JP Sears or even Douglas Murray to a certain extent did.
I thank him for that.
Good stuff.
Wonderful.
That's enough of that big giant idiot.
I don't think he's an idiot.
I just wanted to do that.
Yeah, he calls everyone else idiots.
Somebody somewhere should be calling him an idiot.
Yeah.
Okay, so earlier, Matt, you mentioned the Garometer.
And given we've scored the other gurus on the Patreon, and we know that going through the 10 criteria takes some time, you know, we're usually very concise people, but it's just the nature of the Garometer that makes it long-winded.
What we're thinking of doing moving forward is on the Patreon, after the episode's release, we'll do a little breakdown of the scores for the Gurometer that we'll post up there, a relatively short video scoring them.
And then once we have a collection of Gurus, like we have now 10 of them, we'll do special episodes to discuss who's the champion in each of the categories that we have.
So now that we have 10 gurus, you can look forward to that special episode coming soon in the future.
But if you want to hear the nitty-gritty of Scoring Taleb, you can join the Patreon.
And our next guru is...
Ibrahim X. Kendi.
What do you think of that, Chris?
Yeah, well, this is something that people have been bothering us to do online.
And I think we're due a kind of lefty guru type.
We haven't walked down that road in a while.
So it'll be interesting to see how far he confirms to the stereotypical guru model or does not.
Yeah, it will be interesting.
I think he's transitioned towards the popular writing and achieved a level of...
Of fame, I suppose.
And also a little bit of controversy, I suppose, is fair to say as well.
So, yeah, we'll see.
I know very little about him, but we will look into it.
I know he annoys people online and is prone to potential hot kicks.
That's about the extent of my familiarity as well.
And actually, when I looked up on YouTube before, he doesn't really have that much.
Talks and stuff available.
But, well, we'll find something out and have a look.
So look forward to that.
And we'll be burnishing our, our furnishing is the word, our credentials as not just an anti-IDW podcast.
That's just our side gig.
Absolutely.
Well, yeah, we'll see.
Watch out, Ibrahim.
We're coming for you.
You're going to get critiqued.
We're joining the Quilettosphere.
Now, the final thing, Matt, is that we should give our shout-outs to our lovely Patreons, who we have been inundating with long-winded rants about gurus, so we really should be apologizing to them,
but yes.
So, first up is Jess Ables, who is a conspiracy hypothesizer.
Every great idea starts with a minority of one.
We are not going to advance conspiracy theories.
We will advance conspiracy hypotheses.
Excellent.
Thank you very much, Jess.
Yes, I should not have cut you off there.
I just got, ah, instead.
I see that Jess and I are mutuals on Twitter, which is always nice.
Me too, I believe.
And next is Ondridge, who is a revolutionary genius.
Maybe you can...
Spit out that hydrogenated thinking and let yourself feed off of your own thinking.
What you really are is an unbelievable thinker and researcher, a thinker that the world doesn't know.
Yes.
Very good.
Thank you, Andres.
The name on this one is Can't Share Name Due to Woke Corporate Culture.
But they didn't request another shout-out, so I think they deserve it because they are a galaxy-breeing guru and dealing with woke corporate culture as well.
So here we go.
You're sitting on one of the great scientific stories that I've ever heard, and you're so polite.
And, hey, wait a minute.
Am I an expert?
I kind of am.
Yeah.
I don't trust people at all.
Oh.
So they got the special treatment with the chuckle.
They did.
And also, I'm kind of wondering, would being a patron for us make you anti-woke?
Yeah.
I was suspecting that could be ironic, but I'm not sure.
I get irony.
I understand, Matt.
That's fine.
No, no, I'm not saying...
It's not obviously ironic.
I'm just suspecting it.
It's obviously ironic.
I got it, Matt, okay?
We don't need to talk about it.
I got the...
I didn't miss anything, okay?
Next on the list, and last for this week, is Daniel Thompson, who is a conspiracy hypothesizer, because of course he is.
Every great idea starts with a minority of one.
We are not going to advance conspiracy theories.
We will advance conspiracy hypotheses.
Yes.
And I mentioned to you...
Oh, sorry.
And thank you, Daniel.
By the way, sorry.
I was about to launch into something else.
But thank you to Daniel and to everyone else that contributes to the Patreon.
It is very helpful.
And I wanted to say that I'm thinking, Matt, I might make...
Little bumpers for each episode, like new ones, just clipping from the guru for that week.
We'll see how much work that involves.
But yeah, just to mix things up, just to get rid of the Scott Adams chuckle once in a while.
And who knows?
I might bring it back on special occasions.
The one thing, the one clip I really want in there is the, let's fucking do it!
The Eric Weinstein special.
Yes.
Well, Matt, that's it for this week.
Another job well done.
Yeah, I feel you acquitted yourself well.
It's been a delight and a pleasure, Chris.
Thank you so much.
I can't even do the full polite thing.
So, yeah, thanks, Matt.
Okay, over and out.
Bye!
And you can...
Follow us on Twitter at guruspod for the show account or at R4CDent for Matt and I'm at C underscore Kavna or send us an email at decodingthegurus at gmail.com Any reviews on iTunes or other podcasting software is greatly appreciated.
