I've never felt more conflicted over a public person than I am about Nassim Taleb. He's clearly brilliant, and makes bold statements that he stands behind- that takes guts and is to be applauded. On the other hand, he can be an outright prick and I don't understand some of the fights he picks. Dude is polarizing and fascinating.
<i>"The job of the Federal Reserve is to take away the punch bowl just as the party gets going."</i> - William McChesney Martin, head of the Fed in the 1960s.<p>His point was that if you don't want a crash, steps have to be taken to stop a boom before it's too late. Politicians hate that, because it means deliberately stopping a boom. But that's the Fed's job, and it's why they have some independence from administration policy.
Weird interview. He starts out angry that someone insulted risk takers who lose money. Then by the end of the interview he says people should just get jobs and make super conservative investments like gold and short term bonds. Waste of 20 minutes.
I have great respect for Taleb, but the value of his work is pretty much a linear function of closeness to the statistical math he used to get rich trading derivatives. He has extremely interesting things to say about uncertainty, randomness, fat tails, dynamic systems, and more. And he offers theorems to support his assertions.<p>At the other extreme, the limit case so far is when he starts tweeting about anthropology: it's utterly cringe-worthy.
Any discussion about Taleb always leads to questions about why he picks such public fights. I've said this before:<p>The most salient anecdote Taleb tells about himself is the one where he's going onstage to debate an opponent. He asks his publisher if punching the other guy in the face would be against his contract, and his publisher notes that it would be very good for book sales.<p>All Taleb does is punch people in the face nowadays. It's probably very good for book sales. He notes elsewhere, rightly I think, that the goal of anybody seeking PR should be to get the attention of somebody more famous then them: since it's much easier to pick fights than make friendships, and either will do, he picks fights with anybody he thinks has prominence. I believe it's a persona, and he's a very good method actor.
I question that kind of opinion talk, which boils down to (often implicitly) debating the definition of words in a boring way and/or trying to attribute meaningless merits and demerits to whole arbitrary idealized "class" of people.<p>There is so little information and it is so caricatural and simplistic to come and state in a kind of absolute tone that "entrepreneurs" are good and they build "value" (while basically the "others" are all of the inverse?)<p>I do not expect to get any insight from somebody with that kind of point of view. I already know that some people have that kind of point of view, and I already know that some people have radically different one, and the philosophical framework in both cases has some validity, with idealistic components and realistic ones, of which both intuitively and descriptively we should strive to get a balance from.<p>On top of that, postmodern capitalism has taken a turn that very few academics would found merits in (and even fewer have called for), yet it managed to influence the policies in way that are not even widely debated (at least as widely as they should) by the media and the public. So the ever increasing amount of discretionary power that a defacto class (real this time, because having 100000 times more wealth than your "neighbor" is a criteria vastly more useful than being e.g. an Uber driver vs. being salaried in a taxi company) of people already have achieved and are continuing to amass is extremely concerning, even more so given the choice that have been made, the impact that this yield, and the quasi complete lack of action that could show we could have some confidence in their infinite wisdom.<p>I do not buy that the only thing that is needed is some kind of natural regulation by (re-?)allowing "failure". "Risk takers" can still have a shitload amount of money after they loose some.<p>If some attempts of political organization in other forms failed, my guess is that postmodern capitalism in the form of unbridled individualism and deathmatch to grab control and dispend resources will fail harder.<p>And I'm not sold on the concept on "not true capitalism", because of the principle of realism, that I refuses to apply only when it suits my narrative. A far better and hopefully far more actionable way to present things is to state that model X tends to degenerate into concrete situation Y, while model T tends to yield Z. So of course there will be some corrections to give. AND I do not believe we should primarily listen to people who do not recognize some <i>extraordinary</i> value brought by some people in the society (e.g. nurses, they could be on the "sideline collecting their salary"?), to decide of those corrections. I believe that individualism and hubris is a big component in those deviations, regardless of the original ideal.<p>On the other hand, trying to attribute merit or demerit on abstract mythical "entrepreneurship" without the details is an activity I consider having absolutely no meaning: I'll be more happy that some projects fail so I could consider people achieving success in horrible projects even "worse" than people failing at such projects, and on another dimension failures (on both horrible and wonderful projects) can be attributed on their leaders while other on other factors.
I'm wary this might end up aggravating the subset of Taleb adherents on here but from what I've seen of him (segments of some of his books, tweets, essays) he cultivates a pretty brazenly idealistic / ideological (as opposed to materialistic) worldview that he repackages in academic language in order to bolster his authority.<p>To be clear this is not to imply that he isn't in control of his subject matter. Just that to say Ray Dalio is "mistaken" about his largely philosophical/ideological claims about capitalism fits into a pattern I observe from Taleb where he uses a deep and nuanced understanding of the status quo as a weapon to beat down normative arguments that the status quo should be changed. It's very similar to how Sam Harris uses his specialist authority to deliver regressive social critiques that he wraps in academic language.<p>We need to remember that expertise on a subject is a tool, but how you use that tool is always guided by ideologies. I challenge people to think critically about what those like Harris and Taleb's morality and ideological positions are.