I just bought Tom Holland’s book on the rise of Islam for the sole reason that he was attacked by Glen Bowesock, the most prominent living scholar of the Roman Levant. Tom Holland is a popularizer and I would not have taken him seriously otherwise.

A heuristic to estimate the quality of research is the caliber of the highest detractor, or the caliber of the lowest detractor whom the author answers–whichever is lower.

via I just bought Tom… | Facebook.

The exam was a philosophy essay: “What is Risk?”. Someone handed a nearly blank sheet, on which was written a single sentence “This is risk”.

via The exam was a… | Facebook.

Final cover and pub date

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1400067820/ref=as_li_tf_tl?ie=UTF8&tag=test12-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=1400067820

via Final cover and pub… | Facebook.
Canada too! Thanks Paul

Manche Systeme seien zerbrechlicher, andere weniger. „Wenn Sie ein Wasserglas tausend Mal aus fünf Millimeter Höhe auf den Boden fallen lassen, wird es dies mit großer Wahrscheinlichkeit überstehen“, sagte Taleb am Mittwochabend bei einem Vortrag vor dem Diskussionskreis für alternative Investments „Hedgework“ in Frankfurt. „Aber wenn Sie es ein Mal aus 5 Metern Höhe fallen lassen, wird es wahrscheinlich zerbrechen.“

[Some systems are more fragile than others. "If you leave a glass of water a thousand times the amount of five millimeters falling on the ground, it will survive this with great probability," Taleb said on Wednesday evening with a presentation to the group discussion for alternative investments "Hedgework" in Frankfurt. "But if you dropped it once from 5 meters high, it will probably break."]

via Bestseller-Autor Nassim Taleb: Aus kleinen Fehlern lernen – Fonds & Mehr – FAZ.

Jon points out that it’s also available for pre-order in the U.S.

Hungry Donkeys
So far we argued that preventing randomness in an antifragile system is not always a good idea. Let us now look at the situation in which adding randomness has been a standard operating method, as the needed fuel for an antifragile system permanently hungry for it.A donkey equally hungry and thirsty caught at equal distance between food and water would unavoidably die of either hunger or thirst. But he can be saved thanks to a random nudge, one way or another. This metaphor is named Buridan’s donkey after the medieval philosopher Jean de Buridan who —among other, very complicated things —introduced the thought experiment. When some systems are caught in a dangerous impasse randomness and only randomness can unlock them away from it. You can see here that absence of randomness equals guaranteed death…

via Hungry Donkeys So… | Facebook.

It’s natural for us to reduce the complexity of our rationality into convenient bite-sized ideas. As the trader turned epistemologist Nassim Taleb says: “We humans, facing limits of knowledge, and things we do not observe, the unseen and the unknown, resolve the tension by squeezing life and the world into crisp commoditized ideas.” But readers of popular psychology books on rationality must recognize that there’s a lot they don’t know, and they must be beware of how seductive stories are. The popular literature on cognitive biases is enlightening, but let’s be irrational about irrationality; exposure to X is not knowledge and control of X. Reading about cognitive biases, after all, does not free anybody from their nasty epistemological pitfalls.

via The Irrationality of Irrationality: The Paradox of Popular Psychology | Guest Blog, Scientific American Blog Network.

(same chapter on Modernity)

… all manner of violations of humanism under the banner of secular humanism seemed to have an intellectual justification —the redoing of all the ills of religion without its tricks and heuristics. The state was now like a corporate balance sheet: one does not care of what happens outside of it, politicians are like corporate managers. Close to a decade ago, during the early 2000s, my eye caught at the health-club a TV advertisement by Democrats attacking George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq by stating that close to four thousand people died there. Was the number that low? Then I realized that they meant U.S. soldiers. They omitted to mention the hundreds of thousands of Iraqis –lest the Republicans question their patriotism. These foreign casualties do not seem to count because the nation-state establishes clean income statements: countries are only responsible for their own citizens. For all the criticism one can levy at it, and all its denial of the “other”, the Catholic church would have never, done that –they believed in the fraternity of races. The state creates the “I and thou”, with a virtual redrawing of family trees.

via (same chapter on… | Facebook.

The messy multi-ethnic empire, the so-called Austro-Hungarian empire, vanished after the great war, along with the Ottoman neighbor and rival, and, to a large extent, sibling don’t tell them —to be replaced with the crisp and clean nation state of Austria. This would be the equivalent of moving New York City to central Texas, and still call it New York. Stefan Zweig, the Viennese Jewish novelist, then considered the most influential author in the world, expressed his pain in the poignant memoir, The Snows of Yesteryear. Vienna joined the league of multicultural cities such as Alexandria, Smyrna, Aleppo, Prague, Thessaloniki, Constantinople now Istanbul, Trieste, now squeezed into the Procrustean bed of the nation-state, with its citizens left into the grip of intergenerational nostalgia. Unable to handle the loss, he later committed suicide in Brazil.
(Chapter on Nation State)

via The messy… | Facebook.

We seem to sensationalize petty crime and ignore gigantic ones. To get things in perspective the most evil mobster, John Gotti, only extracted ~$14 million from the public 6% of what Robert Rubin got, or 1% of Sandy Weill’s and, almost only harmed other mafiosi.

via We seem to… | Facebook.