Got some news from the author Jamie Whyte who wrote to say he repents & “felt shitty”. I will not relent. Why? Think of all these helpless authors. Because of the principle of symmetry reviewers should go down with their review. Authors are terrorized by reviewers; he will account for the sins he inflicted on other authors (who limit themselves to just whining). And this guy certainly deserves it.

Something to report: Nader endorses the idea to “make captains go down with ships; all captains & all ships” –as the central problem in society is “asymmetry” & we need to remove it in complex systems. As a consumer advocate, he has a complete organization to enforce it.

In the wake of wikileaks, I wonder if hackers can partake of a revolution since nerds are (with rare, very rare exceptions), just like academics, devoid of physical courage.

No readers of The Black Swan, Fooled By Randomness or any of Taleb’s academic writings about economics, probability, risk, fragility, philosophy of statistics, applied epistemology, etc, will question whether he is qualified to dish out wisdom. And none will be surprised that Taleb, unlike the inspirational writer he calls “my compatriot from a neighbouring (and warring) village in northern Lebanon, Kahlil Gibran, author of The Prophet,” can be blistering. His observations concern superiority, wealth, suckerdom, academia, modernity, technology and the all-purpose, ignorant “they” who dare to doubt him.

Mother nature cares about life, not the living.
[Life is antifragile at the expense of the living; economic systems are antifragile by making single entities break. etc.]