Tag Archives: IYI

IYI, Minority Rule, Tawk, Lindy Effect, 21, Academia, Dumb Enemies, Salafism | Facebook

[New Version] 9/16/16
The Intellectual Yet Idiot

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 It is as irrational to reject all conspiracy theories as it is to accept them. 9/13/16

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The classical idea is to build mental capacity, physical strength, and moral fortitude to face the world (Antifragile).

The modern one is to technologically change the world. 9/12/16

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https://medium.com/…/where-you-cannot-generalize-from-knowl… 9/11/16
Where You Cannot Generalize from Knowledge of Parts (continuation of the Minority Rule)

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THREATS THAT ARE NOT JUST TAWK 9/10/16

There is this formidable scene in the Godfather when the Hollywood executive wakes up with a dead horse in his bed. It was a threat, and not an empty threat.

Threats reveal weakness, except when they are real. The method of conveying real threats was perfected by the sect of the Assassins, an 11th-14th C. sect that specialized in political assassination (they always spared civilians and people who were not directly targeted). Just as with the Godfather scene, legend has it that the head of an army moving against them woke up to find a dagger and a message near his head. It was a “recommendation” to stop the war (he promptly took the advice). They could have killed him, but they were too strong for that and proved it. They supposedly did the same with Saladin, informing him that the cake he was about to eat was poisoned… by them.

The Assassins were often associated with the Templars as they fought frequently on the side of the crusaders –they were part of a branch of Shiite Islam that was violently anti-Sunni.

The method of putting skin-in-the-game in political leaders started with the sicarii who used similar method of targeted assassination by means of a dagger (as opposed to the sword which entails battles).

They were exactly the opposite of Salafi terrorists: as I said, they killed leaders, not civilians, hence unlike wars their methods focusing on precision avoid the civilian “colateral damage”. Comparisons with Jihadis get it backward: they were targeted (Salafis are not discriminating, going after anything that moves, even their own). Much of what we read about the Assassins can be smear by their enemies (including their name linked to Hashish).

And the dagger-near-the-pillow scene is signaling at its best: the most effective way to deal with an enemy is to prove to him that you own him. You are so strong that you keep him alive.

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LINDY EFFECT: PLACENAMES ARE STICKY 9/7/16

The New York Municipality has been trying for 70 years to change 6th Avenue to “Avenue of the Americas”, unsuccessfully.

Place names are sticky, we should be able to get back 6000 year old languages… from the names. Or the timing of the settlement. I speculate that the placename is likely to correspond to the time of the first settlement and sticks throughout. Cartagena in Spain was a Carthaginian settlement (itself from Kart-7adash). All villages in the Levant bear either ancient Semitic (Canaanite or Aramaic) or Greek names (“Kfar-something”, “Beit-something”). It is when a new settlement is made, such as Laodikeia (during the Seleucids, 3-4th C BC) that a new name appears, or when one part near a small town is rebuilt as a government center such as Caesarea. When the Romans give a placename, it is usually a corruption of the originial: Berytus to Beirut (small well in Canaanite), Apamea from 7ama (though it is not in the same location), etc.

Now let us speculate. Knossos, the Minoan center, maps most certainly to to a Semitic root (meaning gathering, like Knesseth, Knisse, etc.), so I conjecture whether Linear B=>Canaanite or reverse.

I also speculate that there is a deep connection of pre-Canaanite for my ancestral village Amioun: 3am Yawan “the Ionian people’s settlement” in Canaanite (we have same genes and genetic diseases as Cretans).

And Marseilles, in France, while its inhabitants claim a Phocaean origin (Greeks of Asia Minor), makes me suspect a Phoenician connection, since “Marsa” means port in Canaanite and a nearby hilltop village is called Ramatuelle, from “Ramat El”, Hill of God, which is certainly Phoenician placename.

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The more you use a metric (“metrify”), the more you will compare yourself to others.

The more you compare yourself to others, whether favorably or unfavorably, the worse off you will be.

(This continues the odometer story). 9/4/16

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Someone I know refrained from riding his bicycle because the odometer was broken. He felt that his cycling didn’t count towards his “goal”.

This is what happens with systems that becomes “modernized”. 9/2/16

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By the Lindy Effect, you should know 20 times more about history of the past 2000 years than that of the past 100 years.

In fact, not only most people know more about the past 100 years, but they knew even more about the past 100 days.

Further, history is not geopolitics (who met whom) or wars, but an understanding of what people used, ate, produced, thought, and argued about. 9/1/16

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Found the picture of my 21y old self that I mentioned in the commencement address. 8/28/16

https://medium.com/…/commencement-address-american-universi…

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Academia is (nearly) zero-sum: every position, honor, promotion, rank, and reward is taken from someone else.

Business on the other hand creates business.

That’s the only career advice I feel compelled to give. 8/28/16

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 Anger is privilege for the strong, duty for the righteous, and self-harm for the weak. 8/23/16

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I speculate that the constant internecine and tribal fights in the absence of external dangers made armies stronger. Which is perhaps why the Greek city states were able to fend off the Persian attacks, but Egypt, with its central order, fell apart when Western Asians came down to invade.

This applies to all scales: Sicilians, Maronites, Cretans, and Corsican families, with their culture of vendetta, fight one another when they run out of enemies. 8/19/16

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Dumb enemies are a problem as they can be very hard to predict. 8/19/16

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Those who say “I feel sorry for you” mean “I feel envy”. Those who really feel sorry for you don’t say anything. 8/17/16

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Refine your mind, keep avoiding BS vendors, journos, & statistical noise to the point when logical flaws and nonsense sound like a jarring notes to a musical ear in a middle of a concert. 8/16/16

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The more ritualistic your business life is, the more likely you are to go out of business. Many people just go to the office to go to the office, partake of the rituals of the office, get coffee from the coffee machine, then return home. Some, in order to fill the alloted time, partake of something very structured commonly called a meeting.

So, if you are self employed, the discipline is to be in your office if and only if you have something very, very specific to do. If you are employed, the same works indirectly: the more ritualistic your function, the more probable is your eventual redundancy.

There is another dimension: noise. The shorter the time-scale of information, the more noise you will be getting in the office (or online), relative to the signal. Reducing the physical presence is protective in that sense. 5/15/16

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The Most Intolerant Wins 8/14/16
https://medium.com/…/the-most-intolerant-wins-the-dictators

[Trying a new venue to post chapters. ]

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In every undertaking, the more humans try to be demi-gods, the more they become half-monsters 8/13/16

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THE OLYMPICS 8/13/16

There used to be a distinction between an athlete representing virtus (human-ness*) and ἀρετή (the quality of being what you are made to be) on one hand, and, on the other the circus acrobat selling uniqueness and deformity. Mediterranean ideals, as opposed to the Egypto-Babylonian ones, were about scale and balance: even the Gods were brought down to human scale. (Yet homines sumus, non dei: we are men, not gods)

Today’s Olympics, by dint of specialization and overoptimization, thanks to the media and the huge financing involved, have transformed the athlete into a circus acrobat, a mutant selling deformities.

Let me insist: anything overoptimized, or even barely optimized, is no longer human.

Hominem te esse memento!

* manliness in PC terms.

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I never imagined that, in 2016, people selfdefined on the “left” would be in favor of repression, censorship, cronyism, Monsantoism, lobbies, elitism, military interventionsim, and … Salafism ! 8/11/16

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That Thing We Call Religion [SKIN IN THE GAME] 8/5/16

The problem of the verbalistic (and the journalistic) is expressed in an aphorism earlier in the Incerto: mathematicians think in (well precisely defined and mapped) objects, philosophers in concepts, jurists in constructs, logicians in operators (…), and idiots in words. We saw that risk and tail risk are mathematically separate objects, conflated by the IYI (intellectual yet idiot) crowd. Two people can be using the same word, meaning different things, yet continue the conversation, which is fine for coffee, but not when making decisions, particularly policy decisions affecting others. But it is easy to trip them, as Socrates did, simply by asking them what they mean by what they said –hence philosophy was born as rigor in discourse and disentanglement of mixed up notions, in precise opposition to the sophist’s promotion of rhetoric. But, since Socrates we have had a long tradition of mathematical science and contract law driven by precision in mapping terms. But we also have had many pronouncements by idiots using labels.

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People rarely mean the same thing when they say “religion”, nor do they realize that they don’t mean the same thing. For early Jews and Muslims, religion was law. Din means law in Hebrew and religion in Arabic. For early Jews, religion was also tribal; for early Muslims, it was universal. For the Romans, religion was social events, rituals, and festivals –the word religio was opposition to superstitio, and while present in the Roman zeitgeist had no equivalent concept in the Greek-Byzantine East . Law was procedurally and mechanically its own thing, and early Christianity, thanks to Saint Augustine, stayed relatively away from the law, and, later, remembering its foundations, had an uneasy relation with it. The difference is marked in that Christian Aramaic uses a different word: din for religion and nomous (from the Greek) for law. Jesus, with his imperative “give to Caesar what belongs to Caesar”, separated the holy and the profane: Christianity was for another domain, “the kingdom to come”, only merged with this one in the eschaton. Neither Islam nor Judaism have a marked separation between holy and profane. And of course Christianity moved away from the solely-spiritual domain to embrace the ceremonial and ritualistic, integrating much of the pagan rites of the Levant and Asia Minor.

For Jews today, religion became ethnocultural, without the law –and for many, a nation. Same for Syriacs, Chaldeans, Armenians, Copts, and Maronites. For Orthodox and Catholic Christians religion is aesthetics, pomp and rituals. For Protestants, religion is belief with no aesthetics, pomp or law. Further East, for Buddhists, Shintoists and Hindus, religion is practical and spiritual philosophy, with a code of ethics (and for some, cosmogony). So when Hindu talk about the Hindu “religion” they don’t mean the same thing to a Pakistani as it would to a Hindu, and certainly something different for a Persian.

When the nation-state idea came about, things got more, much more complicated. When an Arab now says “Jew” he largely means something about a creed; to Arabs, a converted Jew is no longer a Jew. But for a Jew, a Jew is someone whose mother is a Jew. But it somewhat merged into nation-state and now means a nation.

In Serbia-Croatia and Lebanon, religion means something at times of peace, and something quite different at times of war.

When someone discusses the “Christian minority” in the Levant, it doesn’t mean (as Arabs tend to think) promoting a Christian theocracy (full theocracies were very few in Christian history, just Byzantium and a short attempt by Calvin). He just means “secular” or wants a marked separation of church and state. Same for the gnostics (Druids, Druze, Mandeans, Alawis).

The problem with the European Union is that the naive IYI bureaucrats (these idiots who can’t find a coconut on Coconut island) are fooled by the label. They treat Salafism as just a religion –with its houses of “worship”—when in fact it is just an intolerant political system, which promotes (or allows) violence and refuses the institutions of the West –those that allow them to operate. As we saw with the minority rule, the intolerant will run over the tolerant; cancer requires being stopped before it becomes metastatic.

We will see in the next chapter that “belief” can be epistemic, or simply procedural (pisteic) –leading to confusions about what sort of beliefs, are religious beliefs and which ones are not, disentangled through signaling. For, on top of the “religion” problem, there is a problem with belief. Some beliefs are largely decorative , some are functional (they help in survival); others are literal. And to revert to our metastatic Salafi problem: when one of these fundamentalists talks to a Christian, he is convinced that the Christian is literal, while the Christian is convinced that the Salafi has the same oft-metaphorical concepts to be taken seriously but not literally –and, often, not very seriously. Religions, such as Christianity, Judaism, and, to some extent Shiite Islam, evolved (or let their members evolve in developing a sophisticated society) precisely by moving away from the literal –in addition to the functional aspect of the metaphorical, the literal doesn’t leave any room for adaptation .

PS We classicists can invoke Graeco-Roman ethics, that is, virtue ethics, and claim wisdom of the ancestors, or distillation of 3000 years of Mediterranean wisdom and benefit from the Lindy effect. The Salafis are trying the same thing (Salafi means ancestral) –and failing to do anything … actually going backward as we keep advancing. Why? Because Graeco-Roman ethics was never literal, but about principles

 

Macrobullshit, Monsanto, IYI, Metrification, VIOLENCE, GAWKER, The New Artisan | Facebook

The rebellion against the “experts” that we are witnessing can be simplified: experts in some domains like economics, political science, policymaking are not experts. But we know why:

PRINCIPLE: it is easier to macrobullshit than microbullshit.

So your car mechanic, sushi chef, house painter, espresso machine repairperson, plumber, barber, dentist, Apple genius bar attendant, sanitation engineer, translator of Greco-Aramaic texts, guitar player, …, these are, to some degree, experts.

Mixing this with the concept of skin-in-the-game and the idea of complexity, we can build political structures that are immune to expert problems. 7/1/16

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So it looks like Monsanto and peers were behind getting 107 Nobels to sign a petition asking Greenpeace to stop blocking Golden Rice. Obviously, science doesn’t work by authority (particularly when one of them has a Nobel in literature, a few in peace, etc.)

But the problem is that it may be about authority–in reverse. The ONLY one of the august people who ever had anything to do with risk was Robert Merton from the blown up firm LTCM who deemed such risk to be in the order of 1 in many trillions (see my books for his description as perfectly Black Swan blind). They picked the wrong PR firm.

The broader problem is that a typical aged Nobel today is someone who had his formative work in the 60s, 70s, maybe 80s, and (unless he is Murray Gell-Mann) clueless about complexity and the difficulty in interractions. And not one has done a day’s work or engaged in real world activity to have the presence of mind to verify the track record of golden rice, or realize that hunger is a problem of DISTRIBUTION not technology –you don’t advocate risky brain surgery when a good night rest could do –primum non nocere. Likewise better give people rice + vitamin rather than open the Frankenbox to fatten the pockets of Biotech.

We throw away one third of our food. Find a Nobel Prize in food distribution. 7/1/16

107 Nobel Laureate Attack on Greenpeace Traced Back to Biotech PR Operators

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What’s a IYI?

Intellectual Yet Idiot: semi-erudite bureaucrat who thinks he is an erudite; pathologizes others for doing things he doesn’t understand not realizing it is his understanding that may be limited; imparts normative ideas to others: thinks people should act according to their best interests *and* he knows their interests, particularly if they are uneducated “red necks” or English non-crisp-vowel class.

More socially: subscribes to the New Yorker; never curses on twitter; speaks of “equality of races” and “economic equality” but never went out drinking with a minority cab driver; has considered voting for Tony Blair; has attended more than 1 TEDx talks and watched more than 2 TED talks; will vote for Hillary Monsanto-Malmaison because she seems electable; has The Black Swan on his shelves but mistakes absence of evidence for evidence of absence; is member of a club to get traveling privileges; if social scientist uses statistics without knowing how they are derived; when in the UK goes to literary festivals; drinks red wine with steak (never white); used to believe that fat was harmful and has now completely reversed; takes statins because his doctor told him so; fails to understand ergodicity and when explained forgets about it soon later; doesn’t use Yiddish words; studies grammar before speaking a language; has a cousin who worked with someone who knows the Queen; has never read Frederic Dard, Michael Oakeshot, John Gray, or Joseph De Maistre; has never gotten drunk with Russians and went breaking glasses; doesn’t know the difference between Hecate and Hecuba; doesn’t know that there is no difference between “pseudointellectual” and “intellectual”; has mentioned quantum mechanics at least twice in the past 5 years; knows at any point in time what his words or actions are doing to his reputation.

But a much easier marker: doesn’t deadlift. 6/25/16

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IN ANTIFRAGILE: On How Some IYI Intellectual-Yet-Imbecile in Brussels would try to regulate how people should “unify” metrics.
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Warwick Cairns, a fellow similar to Jane Jacobs, has been fighting in courts to let market farmers in Britain keep selling bananas by the pound, and similar matters as they have resisted the use of the more “rational” kilogram. The idea of metrification was born out of the French Revolution, as part of the utopian mood, which includes changing the names of the winter months to Nivôse, Pluviôse, Ventôse, descriptive of weather, having decimal time, ten-day weeks, and similar naively rational matters. Luckily the project of changing time has failed. However, after re- peated failures, the metric system was implemented there—but the old system has remained refractory in the United States and England. The French writer Edmond About, who visited Greece in 1832, a dozen years after its independence, reports how peasants struggled with the metric system as it was completely unnatural to them and stuck to Ottoman standards instead. (Likewise, the “modernization” of the Arabic alpha- bet from the easy-to-memorize old Semitic sequence made to sound like words, ABJAD, HAWWAZ, to the logical sequence A-B-T-TH has cre- ated a generation of Arabic speakers without the ability to recite their alphabet.)

But few realize that naturally born weights have a logic to them: we use feet, miles, pounds, inches, furlongs, stones (in Britain) because these are remarkably intuitive and we can use them with a minimal expendi- ture of cognitive effort—and all cultures seem to have similar measure- ments with some physical correspondence to the everyday. A meter does not match anything; a foot does. I can imagine the meaning of “thirty feet” with minimal effort. A mile, from the Latin milia passum, is a thousand paces. Likewise a stone (14 pounds) corresponds to . . . well, a stone. An inch (or pouce) corresponds to a thumb. A furlong is the distance one can sprint before running out of breath. A pound, from libra, is what you can imagine holding in your hands. Recall from the story of Thales in Chapter 12 that we used thekel or shekel: these mean “weight” in Canaanite-Semitic languages, something with a physical connotation, similar to the pound. There is a certain nonrandomness to how these units came to be in an ancestral environment—and the digital system itself comes from the correspondence to the ten fingers.

As I am writing these lines, no doubt, some European Union official
of the type who eats 200 grams of well-cooked meat with 200 centiliters’ worth of red wine every day for dinner (the optimal quantity for his health benefits) is concocting plans to promote the “efficiency” of the metric system deep into the countryside of the member countries. 6/25/16

 Nassim Nicholas Taleb's photo.——————————————————————–

THE THESIS ON VIOLENCE

The Nobel Symposium is a 3d retreat that takes place in Norway every 2 years, for the President of the Nobel Peace Prize Committee, the secretary of the Prize, a few out of the 5 committee members and 20 scholars. I presented the paper on violence (the translation into English of our technical paper). Bear Braumoeller presented another one similarly critical of Pinker. After our session, the audience was split into:
1) Those who thought that Pinker was wrong
2) Those who thought that Pinker was not even wrong (i.e. not worth discussing).
And the agreement was to not talk about his thesis any further. Further, the organizer was told by Pinker that he did not wish to rebut our papers.

Our Non-technical paper:
http://www.fooledbyrandomness.com/violencenobelsymposium.pdf

Pinker builds his thesis on works by Richardson in a way that is NOT compatible with the way Richardson [which is compatible with our result] and without showing the derivations. This it turned out is a CRITICAL flaw. Words and words and the central point is pulled out of nowhere.

In our paper: “As we also find out in our data analysis, consistent with Richardson (1960), there is no sufficient evidence to reject the null hypothesis of a homogenous Poisson process, which denies the presence of any trend in the belligerence of humanity. Nevertheless, Pinker refers to some yet-unspecified mathematical model that could also support such a decline in violence, what he calls a “nonstationary” process, even if data look the way they look.” 6/22/16

Nassim Nicholas Taleb's photo.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb's photo.

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ANTIFRAGILE
The marker of the character of a person, detectable from childhood, is whether they generalize from local disagreements to other traits when they get upset. Example from real life (told by a Colombian Jew): children are playing, a small dispute erupts over something, one turns antisemitic: “you are a Jew”, throwing all what he can at the other kid. The kid did not change ethnicity during the dispute; being a Jew was not bothersome to the Catholic kid before; it is just meant for the upset party to use all possible weapons. This is why lurking prejudice is bad because it doesn’t show up on sunny days –when scapegoats are needed.

And one doesn’t have to bring ethnicity; any trait such such as “it is well known that you have a reputation of…”, anything meant to demean the person, an information that was not brought up before, only brought during the dispute.

Which is why it is a good idea to upset people and see how they react before engaging in business (or getting socially dependent) — just to see whether they generalize. You would be surprised at the number of people who don’t. And observe what people tell you about others when they are upset with them.

It would not be ethical for me to call someone a charlatan if we engage in a fight unless I’ve called him a charlatan without a fight, or if the fight is about him being a charlatan. 6/13/16

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Did violence really drop? It the thesis on drop in violence BS?
Translating our technical results into more common language.
Draft of our report to the Nobel Foundation, for comments before we submit it Monday morning. Thanks in advance. 6/4/16

The Decline of Violent Conflicts: What DoThe Data Really Say? (pdf)

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PUTTING SKIN IN THE GAME OF JOURNALISTS
[CITIZENS vs GAWKER and CITIZENS vs JOURNALISM]

Journalists –as any guild, care about their peers and their community more than the general public. Except that we cannot afford to have such a community engage in a conspiracy against the laymen since they represent our interests, us the lay crowd; they are supposed to stand for the general public against inner circles of power. Journalism arose from the need to expose falsehood, take risks in exposing matters detrimental to the public; in short, counter the agency problem of the powerful. But, it is turning out, the journalism model can also work in the opposite manner: members have been effective in escaping having skin in the game –only whistleblowers and war correspondents currently do.

So one can see how this severe agency problem can explode with the Gawker story. The English tabloid machine came to the U.S. in full force with Gawker, founded by a firm that specializes in dirt on the internet. By dirt I don’t mean a fraudulent transaction abetted by some power: no, the kind of dirt that takes place in bedrooms (and even in bathrooms).

They sell voyeurism, predator voyeurism.

In other words they want to harm citizens by disclosing their private information and posting their videos without their permission in the interest of selling information. And without being accountable for it.
Gawker having posted a video of a celebrity having sex without his permission incurred a monstrous judgment of $140 million. The suit will bankrupt Gawker. Most of all, the judgment revealed that such a predatory business model will not survive, not because it is immoral, but because it has tail risks. For America has tort laws and a legal mechanism by which people harmed by corporations can be compensated for it –a mechanism that flourished thanks to Ralph Nader. It, along with the First Amendment protect citizens by putting skin in the game of the corporations.

Gawker is trying to make a First Amendment argument and unfortunately journos appear to find this justified –while normal citizens are horrified. Liberty in the thoughts of the founding fathers was not about voyeurism, but about public matters.

Gawker argued that because the person committing sex on the video they posted was a public person, that it became a “public” matter exempted from privacy protection. People failed to see that should that argument be true, then next someone spying on any public figure should be allowed to post their bedroom activity (including Hillary Clinton, Obama, anyone)… (Gawker has ruined the lives of 21 year olds posting their sex tapes and their reaction was outrageous; in one instance their lawyer Gaby Darbyshire e-mailed the woman who was in a revenge sex tape, defending the video as “completely newsworthy” and scolding her about how “one’s actions can have unintended consequences.”)

Peter Thiel, a billionaire with a vendetta against Gawker funded a law suit. Revenge motives perhaps, but this is how the market works: Gawker tries to make money therefore they need to live with the risk of someone trying to make money from their demise.
(You make money from the demise of a 21 yo, someone will make money from yours. You make yourself a vehicle for revenge porn; you become the subject of someone’s revenge. You engage in bullying someone financially weaker than you; someone stronger will bully you. There is no reason Gawker should be the only one to use asymmetry given that their very business is asymmetry against weak people–and this is general as the media is asymmetrically strong against citizens, what is commonly called “bullying” ).
I would have personally shorted Gawker (if they were publicly listed) to make money from their collapse. And I am ready to fund lawsuits against journalists who break some intellectual rules and distort people’s positions (strawman arguments).

Any journalist who supports Gawker in the name of the First Amendments fails to understand that they as a community are committing suicide because they are trivializing the reasons behind the First Amendment –and they make it conflict with other fundamental rights. And a corporation trying to warp our sacred values should go bankrupt. And anyone, like Peter Thiel, who accelerates such bankruptcy, should be thanked. 5/31/16

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DISCUSSION: The New Artisan.

Anything you do to optimize your work, cut some corners, squeeze more “efficiency” out of it (and out of your life) will eventually make you hate it.

So let us open the discussion: how do you inch closer to an artisan? First, a new definition of an artisan:
1) does things for existential reasons,
2) has some type of “art” in his/her profession, stays away from most aspects of industrialization, combines art and business in some manner (his decision-making is never fully economic),
3) has some soul in his/her work: would not sell something defective or even of compromised quality because what people think of his work matters more than how much he can make out of it,
4) has sacred taboos, things he would not do even if it markedly increased profitability.

From my side, It is easy to see that a writer is effectively an artisan: book sales are not the end motive, only a secondary target (even then). You preserve some sanctity of the product with taboos (Fay Weldon put ads for Bulgari in her books which led to disgust; we do not like advertisement inside the book). You would not hire a group of writers to enter the process and “help” (some have tried, say Jerzy Kosinsky, none has seen his work survive).

Academics are also artisans. Even those economists who claim that humans are here to maximize their income, express these ideas for free, not seeing the contradiction.

DISCUSSION – Will we revert to an artisan society? Which jobs can be made artisanal? Please comment. 5/25/16

GMOs, Brexit, Brussels Elite, ANTIFRAGILE, Overregulation, Syria, NonStable Power Laws, Kasperov, Life Expectancy, YouGov, IYI | Twitter

@nntaleb The average signatory’s Nobel y: 1997. Av. age at prize:~62. These are in their 80s, many 30-50y behind cutting edgehttps://twitter.com/nntaleb/status/748939971583741955   Permalink 3:33 PM – 1 Jul 2016

@food_democracy Breaking Let Freedom Ring! Vermont’s 1st in the Nation GMO Labeling bill has just gone into effect! Thanks Vermont!pic.twitter.com/KFnMWo1u1i Permalink 9:04 PM – 30 Jun 2016

@nntaleb Syrian rebels call themselves Mujaheddin. Stop the BS, call them by what they are. And learn Arabic.https://twitter.com/EHSANI22/status/748988061426544640   Permalink 2:55 PM – 1 Jul 2016

@nntaleb Not always. Only if economist/journo AND BS vendor like @Noahpinionhttps://twitter.com/rneppalli/status/748971060641533953   Permalink 1:20 PM – 1 Jul 2016

@brunoboni Nero di seppia con bottarga #nerodiseppia @nntalebpic.twitter.com/RLkRCqMiKw Permalink 11:28 AM – 1 Jul 2016

@nntaleb 107 Nobel winners ag Golden Rice, aged pple who did their work before complexity theory… https://www.facebook.com/nntaleb/posts/10153946452908375  pic.twitter.com/6Ic2z7nJg2 Permalink 11:02 AM – 1 Jul 2016

@nntaleb It was not Elinor Ostrom who said “give us our fishing waters back”;it was Nigel Farrage. Time for bureaucrats to learn complexity/localism Permalink 10:20 AM – 1 Jul 2016

@nntaleb Philip as the UberStatistician & a fierless leader you should join us in an expanded project on GMOs http://www.fooledbyrandomness.com/PrecautionaryPrinciple.html   @philipbstark Permalink 9:42 AM – 1 Jul 2016

@nntaleb I will never discuss a friend in public no matter the situation. Only in private. Even with ex- friends @philipbstark Permalink 8:43 AM – 1 Jul 2016

@nntaleb The EU, something built 1950s-style, without understanding of complex systems.http://www.express.co.uk/news/politics/685286/EU-referendum-Brexit-Black-Swan-Nassim-Taleb-Brussels-elite?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+daily-express-news-showbiz+%28Daily+Express+%3A%3A+News+%2F+Showbiz+Feed%29   Permalink 6:45 AM – 1 Jul 2016

@nntaleb Find the inconsistency, or how “average” probability isn’t a robust construct. [Quiz abt empty suit @JustinWolfers]pic.twitter.com/dd2dYsJu4Y Permalink 6:09 AM – 1 Jul 2016

@nntaleb Noboby noticed: only “Nobel” of 107 who “knows” abt risk is Robert Merton who blew up w/ LTCM “1 in trillion” risk.https://twitter.com/BioSRP/status/748858953937846273   Permalink 6:01 AM – 1 Jul 2016

@nntaleb Announcement: RWRI-3 Real World Risk fall workshop date has been changed to Oct 3-7 [We found great quarters in NYC] http://realworldrisk.com   Permalink 5:56 AM – 1 Jul 2016

@MarcosCarreira @nntaleb Jensen’s inequality and sensitivity to variance in plantshttps://twitter.com/CurrentBiology/status/748604696739340288   Permalink 5:05 AM – 1 Jul 2016

@nntaleb Thought they were desperate to add a nobel in literature but…they added Robert Merton, Mr LTCM. Guaranteed Blowup!https://twitter.com/nntaleb/status/748525227852849153   Permalink 4:53 PM – 30 Jun 2016

@nntaleb Donald Trump via trial and error looking for what people want. Know your customer rule.http://cnb.cx/29bzpMM   Permalink 2:11 PM – 30 Jun 2016

@nntaleb Voters tired of an elite that can’t find coconuts on Coconut Islandhttp://video.cnbc.com/gallery/?video=3000530650   Permalink 2:06 PM – 30 Jun 2016

@nntaleb Indeed: variance helps them! @Chris_arnade Permalink 2:02 PM – 30 Jun 2016

@nntaleb Alternative Test: what’s is the probability that @JustinWolfers a representayive member of the IYI class deadlifts? Permalink 8:39 AM – 30 Jun 2016

@nntaleb The only empirical association between Risk/Safety & Nobel Prize is LTCM. Try again, hire a more informed PR firm.https://twitter.com/MichaelRStrain/status/748319864595439616   Permalink 7:34 AM – 30 Jun 2016

@nntaleb Turned out Pinker’s words & references do not match. Asking him for backup, not words. 800 page thesis … no backuppic.twitter.com/kKRb0U6fwk Permalink 7:11 AM – 30 Jun 2016

@nntaleb Impressive: saw that Silver Rule (#Skininthegame) ⇔decision-making under incompleteness. He is MD &Deadlifts>600lbs!https://twitter.com/MDiPaolaMD/status/748493696052629504   Permalink 5:53 AM – 30 Jun 2016

@nntaleb Nassim Taleb Slams The World’s “Intellectual-Yet-Idiot” Class | Zero Hedge http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-06-26/nassim-taleb-slams-worlds-intellectual-yet-idiot-class   Permalink 5:39 AM – 30 Jun 2016

@nntaleb 3 millennia of *wisdom=action under incomplete information* from King Solomon to Popper to Simon undid by that idiothttps://twitter.com/neiltyson/status/748157273789300736   Permalink 4:57 AM – 30 Jun 2016

@nntaleb Finally completed my ANTIFRAGILE application to Medicine. https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/50282823/medicine.pdf   Permalink 4:52 AM – 30 Jun 2016

@nntaleb Phil forgot 1 Nobel prize for literature. https://twitter.com/nntaleb/status/748471063521169408   Permalink 4:51 AM – 30 Jun 2016

@hamlet911 If you can piss off econs, IYIs, academia and most of the twitterverse – all at the same time, you are pretty much right. Kudos @nntaleb Permalink 6:37 PM – 29 Jun 2016

@nntaleb “If a tractor used on a farm has a windshield, its wipers must have a speed of 25 cycles per minute.” Brussels…pic.twitter.com/a8Ywc63eka Permalink 6:49 PM – 29 Jun 2016

@nntaleb The envious will perceive you as always arrogant.https://twitter.com/ban_kanj/status/748328386343354368   Permalink 6:34 PM – 29 Jun 2016

@nntaleb Overregulation by EU:length of a banana, volume per toilet flush, speed of agricultural tractor’s windshield wipers https://www.contribuables.org/2014/05/europe-trop-de-normes-pas-assez-de-liberte/   Permalink 6:28 PM – 29 Jun 2016

@nntaleb It takes 16 times longer to incorporate and run a bizness in Milan than Londra @Twitpiero Permalink 2:21 PM – 29 Jun 2016

@nntaleb Move a German to Paris or a French person to Frkfrt. No way. Both would move to LDN.https://twitter.com/fartelengelbert/status/748252528685518848   Permalink 1:34 PM – 29 Jun 2016

@nntaleb Another, #NonfakeRationalia, w/no BS vendors like Tyson: based on orthodox statistics & presence-absence of evidencehttps://twitter.com/neiltyson/status/748157273789300736   Permalink 1:18 PM – 29 Jun 2016

@nntaleb From my experience, London is attractive for banks as it has labor laws similar to US/pool of talent. Paris and Frankfurt tried & failed. Permalink 1:14 PM – 29 Jun 2016

@nntaleb Economist @JustinWolfers strikes me as the type w/no math, no erudition & no skin-in-the game. Does he deadlift? Permalink 12:11 PM – 29 Jun 2016

@mikeharrisNY @nntaleb @AdroitInvestor @econbuttonwood Chart updated. Woa.#brexit looks like a non-event. Thanks prof.pic.twitter.com/3tA9d4wOyK Permalink 10:25 AM – 29 Jun 2016

@nntaleb #skininthegame: Unless one has P/L it is hard to assess the “significance” of a move. Journos/Tawkers can’t get it!https://twitter.com/mikeharrisNY/status/748203429843996673   Permalink 10:19 AM – 29 Jun 2016

@nntaleb GBP/USD 1year deviation is within significance band: nothing reflects such “gravity” of an event. Kapish? @AdroitInvestor @econbuttonwood Permalink 10:13 AM – 29 Jun 2016

@nntaleb UK stocks up from #Brexit vote. Ignore any word written by a journo except for street crime reporters.pic.twitter.com/GO55oGidAM Permalink 9:53 AM – 29 Jun 2016

@nntaleb From reading his work, Mr Wolfers has *some* challenges with probability theory. More, later. @jimmyybill @JustinWolfers Permalink 7:35 AM – 29 Jun 2016

@nntaleb A more advanced class is based on my book SILENT RISK and the papers here http://www.fooledbyrandomness.com/FatTails.html   Permalink 6:58 AM – 29 Jun 2016

@nntaleb BTW this is my syllabus for the introductory class (7 lectures) https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/50282823/Lecture%20Syllabus.pdf   Permalink 6:53 AM – 29 Jun 2016

@nntaleb My first lecture: this is the clueless way to look at data. Histograms don’t give information for fattails.https://twitter.com/JustinWolfers/status/747839522965098496   Permalink 6:37 AM – 29 Jun 2016

@nntaleb No, the Pound move was not a Black Swan, & not a statistical outlier.pic.twitter.com/7mwey4GGRi Permalink 6:17 AM – 29 Jun 2016

@nntaleb Simplicity and skin in the game: Those who tawk propose more complicated models than those who do. http://www.nasdaq.com/article/nassim-taleb-on-simplicity-and-skin-in-the-game-cm642323   Permalink 2:20 PM – 28 Jun 2016

@nntaleb Minority rule in action http://www.fooledbyrandomness.com/minority.pdf  https://twitter.com/NonGMOProject/status/747898686852608001   Permalink 2:06 PM – 28 Jun 2016

@nntaleb European Union, definition: Something designed by someone who doesn’t understand complex systems. Permalink 9:10 AM – 28 Jun 2016

@GMWatch URGENT: Act Now to Save #GMO Labeling, Before It’s Too Late! https://action.organicconsumers.org/o/50865/p/dia/action3/common/public/?action_KEY=18302&track=moFRN&tag=FRN#sthash.aPx1sX5D.dpuf  pic.twitter.com/QtRvlAPqcB Permalink 8:59 AM – 28 Jun 2016

@nntaleb Does not deadlift. (@MDiPaolaMD)https://twitter.com/DavidBCollum/status/747616032928464900   Permalink 8:55 AM – 28 Jun 2016

@BogeJan @nntaleb @yaneerbaryam Balkanisation is failed centralization. Helvetization is successful decentralization Permalink 7:07 AM – 28 Jun 2016

@nntaleb People say “Balkanization”, why not”Helvetization”? @yaneerbaryam has ideas for Syria http://necsi.edu/research/social/peace_PLoS_f.pdf  https://twitter.com/aNatureTech/status/747790776353067010   Permalink 6:59 AM – 28 Jun 2016

@nntaleb Stop bloodshe! Only solution for Syria is partition. Fences make better neighbors. Or strong decentralization.https://twitter.com/bitgit/status/747781027502915584   Permalink 6:22 AM – 28 Jun 2016

@nntaleb An illustration of the ludic fallacy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ludic_fallacy   (People who derive reputation/authority from games…)pic.twitter.com/CvnuQGm4qd Permalink 6:11 AM – 28 Jun 2016

@nntaleb Before theorizing abt Assad, have skin in the game & live w/rebels. Those you support would behead you @Kasparov63http://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-36637378   Permalink 5:51 AM – 28 Jun 2016

@nntaleb I have to *write* the paper! @MAvellaneda55 Permalink 3:48 PM – 27 Jun 2016

@nntaleb Grandmaster Marco Avellaneda @MAvellaneda55 is giving a flash talk in 15 min. He was last seen in Mexico. Permalink 3:05 PM – 27 Jun 2016

@KeaneBhatt Protesters of US ‘inaction’ in Syria should re-read two paragraphs, written in present-tense http://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/27/world/middleeast/cia-arms-for-syrian-rebels-supplied-black-market-officials-say.html  pic.twitter.com/D7YVMYKCCW Permalink 12:44 PM – 27 Jun 2016

@nntaleb I have seen the two @silva and @stevehiltonx tease one another: Interesting pair.http://www.standard.co.uk/lifestyle/london-life/if-rohan-silva-can-hug-brexit-campaigner-steve-hilton-theres-hope-for-us-all-a3281781.html   Permalink 2:03 PM – 27 Jun 2016

@nntaleb New Version of today’s flash talk: Behavior of Sums of NonStable Power Laws. Convergence < Sqrt[log(log(n))) https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/50282823/BBGJune2016.pptx.pdf   Permalink 11:32 AM – 27 Jun 2016

@nntaleb You should go live in Lybia when making comments like these. I live 20 m from Syria & don’t need Black-Swan blind neocons BS @Kasparov63 Permalink 8:14 AM – 27 Jun 2016

@nntaleb Even more bullshit. In real life, as in chess, a move has consequence and you study consequences before moving. Kapish? @Kasparov63 Permalink 8:07 AM – 27 Jun 2016

@nntaleb You are spouting neocon Bullshit, theorizing from afar. I was not happy with Gadafi/Saddam, but I am less happy with AlQaeda @Kasparov63 Permalink 8:03 AM – 27 Jun 2016

@nntaleb You want to turn Syria (hence Lebanon) into Iraq/Lybia just to spite Putin? Kill minorities for “geopolitical” BS?https://twitter.com/Kasparov63/status/747440635381092353   Permalink 7:48 AM – 27 Jun 2016

@nntaleb Presenting a flash talk tonite: Behavior of Sum of NonStable Power Laws http://go.bloomberg.com/promo/invite/bloomberg-quant-seminar-series-5/   My paper: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/50282823/BBGJune2016.pptx.pdf   Permalink 6:23 AM – 27 Jun 2016

@vtrighttoknow Thank you @SenSanders. We need more leaders like you!https://twitter.com/CFSTrueFood/status/746421448340811776   Permalink 6:26 PM – 24 Jun 2016

@nntaleb A GOLDEN RULE in ETHICS Take a moment to figure out whether you’d rather be praiseworthy but not praised, or praised but not praiseworthy. Permalink 10:57 AM – 26 Jun 2016

@GadSaad There you go. NNT forgot to mention that the Leave voters will all “xenophobic, hateful, illiterate racists.”https://twitter.com/nntaleb/status/747116746843295744   Permalink 10:20 AM – 26 Jun 2016

@nntaleb When people vote the way of the IYI elite, it is “democracy”. Otherwise it is misguided, irrational, swayed by populism & lack of education. Permalink 10:18 AM – 26 Jun 2016

@nntaleb These imbeciles pathologizing people who did not vote the way the IYI (Intellectual-Yet-Idiots) elite wants them to. https://twitter.com/healthpsycenter/status/747100256001630208   Permalink 9:28 AM – 26 Jun 2016

@nntaleb Finance based medicinehttps://twitter.com/HeatherM211/status/745562147715874816   Permalink 3:33 AM – 26 Jun 2016

@nntaleb The IYI class: Intellectual-Yet-Idiot Doesn’t deadlift & is scared that #Brexit started a revolution by the unwashedpic.twitter.com/26YykU2kx0 Permalink 6:35 PM – 25 Jun 2016

@nntaleb Intellectual Yet Idiot; Semierudite Bureaucrat;Normative;Pathologizes others for doing things he doesn’t understand.https://twitter.com/mapale77/status/746865636211556352   Permalink 5:46 PM – 25 Jun 2016

@nntaleb 4 y ago, I resolved to do math >90m/day. I stuck to it, diligently, except for Jun 24, 2016 w/news of stage 1 of anti-IYI revolution #Brexit Permalink 5:37 PM – 25 Jun 2016

@lukasnaugle “Friendship that ends was never one; there was at least one sucker in it.” @nntalebpic.twitter.com/uVZVA6bs1h Permalink 5:28 PM – 25 Jun 2016

@nntaleb To understand conditional life expect, see Social Security Admin: total expect increases with age. #rigorisneeded https://www.ssa.gov/oact/STATS/table4c6.html   Permalink 5:09 PM – 25 Jun 2016

@nntaleb Also YouGov’s numbers about the youth mean turnout bias: the main info is youth don’t care.https://twitter.com/mylifemysay/status/746740337331343360   Permalink 9:52 AM – 25 Jun 2016

@nntaleb Where the term “Intellectual Yet Imbecile” is born to describe a journo-bureaucrat – read a lot but not enough. https://www.facebook.com/nntaleb/posts/10153932393103375   Permalink 9:35 AM – 25 Jun 2016

@nntaleb In Antifragile: problem of some IYT intellectual-yet-imbecile in Brussels trying to make measures”rational” #Brexitpic.twitter.com/UUKnslcl6T Permalink 9:04 AM – 25 Jun 2016

@republicofmath My take on @nntaleb: just because we have skewed data doesn’t mean we should engage in skewed thinkingpic.twitter.com/ZzpQ0WnIFA Permalink 8:34 AM – 25 Jun 2016

@nntaleb Math: E[X|X>K2] >=E[X|X>K1] for all K2>K1 @MAvellaneda55 Permalink 8:18 AM – 25 Jun 2016

@nntaleb Under ANY unimodal distribution, life expectancy increases BY MORE than 1 year for every surviving year. @MAvellaneda55 @EloyGamaS Permalink 8:13 AM – 25 Jun 2016

@nntaleb If uncond. life expectancy is 80 & you are already 80, your life expectancy is ~+9 y. If you are 100, it is ~+2y @MAvellaneda55 @EloyGamaS Permalink 8:11 AM – 25 Jun 2016

@nntaleb Life expectancy (remaining years to live) increases with age. @EloyGamaS @MAvellaneda55 Permalink 8:05 AM – 25 Jun 2016

@nntaleb 2/2 simply if your life expectancy is 89 and you are 95, they thing you have -7 years to go! YouGov is ridiculously incompetent. Permalink 8:04 AM – 25 Jun 2016

@nntaleb BSduJour: YouGov is incompetent in polling & missed Brexit by 6 pts; here:confused life expectancy w/conditional exphttps://twitter.com/tancredipalmeri/status/746115846624403457   Permalink 8:03 AM – 25 Jun 2016

@nntaleb Antikirilganlik! Güzel bir sürpriz Türkçe bulmak için. Ve güzel bir yol Türkçe kelimeleri öğrenmek için.pic.twitter.com/YbU64GYXN3 Permalink 5:54 AM – 25 Jun 2016

@nntaleb Heuristic from #RWRI: have cash in bills on you or in in a stash next to you.https://twitter.com/dermot_lyons/status/746519787694489600   Permalink 5:06 AM – 25 Jun 2016

@nntaleb I asked: “Who are your natural partners, people from India or those from Poland?” Brexit is giving us an answer.https://twitter.com/rorysutherland/status/746665738014986240   Permalink 4:54 AM – 25 Jun 2016

@nntaleb People listen to “intellectual class” abt Brexit but for 70 y they’ve been wrong on anything: Stalinism, Maoism, Freudianism,Urban planning Permalink 11:54 AM – 24 Jun 2016

@nntaleb People are brainwashed to think that Levantine derives from Arabic. Some influence, that’s all. http://www.fooledbyrandomness.com/notebook.htm   @alielyassir Permalink 11:19 AM – 24 Jun 2016

@nntaleb At the lunch table #riskmathics in Mexico City, 4/9 persons were of Lebanese origin. Permalink 8:49 AM – 24 Jun 2016

@nntaleb In one word: pollers are incompetent -and those who pay attention even more so. It is a bias-variance problem.https://twitter.com/pauld1981/status/746366393226977284   Permalink 8:44 AM – 24 Jun 2016

@nntaleb It seems impossible for people to talk about markets w/o BS unless one is a trader/investor, with #skininthegame .https://twitter.com/harris4491/status/746350655418281984   Permalink 7:37 AM – 24 Jun 2016

@nntaleb So the GBP is about were it was in February. Too many people talk about markets …pic.twitter.com/8OS505NhA3 Permalink 7:28 AM – 24 Jun 2016

@SenSanders I am going to do everything I can to defeat this GMO labeling legislation, which preempts Vermont’s law.http://1.usa.gov/28QN4pQ   Permalink 2:17 PM – 23 Jun 2016

@nntaleb From 2012; NASSIM NICHOLAS TALEB: ‘The European Union Is A Horrible, Stupid Project’http://read.bi/RiSRHT   Permalink 4:26 AM – 24 Jun 2016

@nntaleb Today, the United States have acquired 4 new shadow states: England, London (sic), Wales, and possibly Scotland. Permalink 4:20 AM – 24 Jun 2016

@nntaleb Brookings needs to be… diminished, purged, and debullshitvendorified @MaxAbrahms Permalink 9:58 PM – 23 Jun 2016

@nntaleb Whatever legal disclaimer: I own gold in some forms. Permalink 9:56 PM – 23 Jun 2016

@nntaleb Gold! In any form. Permalink 9:52 PM – 23 Jun 2016

@nntaleb Brexit results after a lot of Mexican wine.pic.twitter.com/l4GA2UsWYv Permalink 8:10 PM – 23 Jun 2016

@nntaleb Voila the problem on airplane solved by the master in higher dimensions!https://twitter.com/MAvellaneda55/status/745963733093015552   Permalink 2:42 PM – 23 Jun 2016

@ProbFact “Modernity corresponds to the systematic extraction of humans from their randomness-laden ecology.” — @nntaleb http://bit.ly/28UC0ea   Permalink 9:45 AM – 23 Jun 2016

@nntaleb BTW I am long some GBP so I can talk about markets tonite to satistfy #Skininthegame @will_moriarty Permalink 9:36 AM – 23 Jun 2016

@nntaleb Does it include control by Norwegian universities that *during the same period* did not take a cut? #causalityishardhttps://twitter.com/MaxCRoser/status/739852044010434560   Permalink 9:34 AM – 23 Jun 2016

@nntaleb In Mexico,debate w/Rob Engel & Ed Altman on Brexit effects.There no scheduled volatility, Prices SCORN ideas/clichéspic.twitter.com/NnW7YRWYcK Permalink 8:54 AM – 23 Jun 2016

@ScottAdamsSays @AG2Pearl @fireclan55 If you understood business, you’d know counting the failures is a fool’s analysis. I have about 30, and I’m rich. Permalink 6:35 AM – 23 Jun 2016

@nntaleb Also note that the semi-intellectual empty suits tend to engage in entry-level scientism with promotion of GMOshttps://twitter.com/nntaleb/status/715862574059937793   Permalink 5:12 AM – 23 Jun 2016

@nntaleb You are not getting expert pbm. Grandmother’s jdgmnt doesn’t mean she is a Dr, only how to trust a doctor and for what gravity. @trombosit Permalink 5:04 AM – 23 Jun 2016

@nntaleb Bjorn Lomborg is by any metric a charlatan. The fact that bureaucrats don’t like him doesn’t make him scientific. @NickdeCusa Permalink 4:26 AM – 23 Jun 2016

@nntaleb Reminder: the crowds are now rebelling against empty suits & “intellectuals” https://www.facebook.com/nntaleb/posts/10153658794008375  pic.twitter.com/wdCTVcfNWT Permalink 4:20 AM – 23 Jun 2016

@MAvellaneda55 Made it to Mexico with @nntaleb discussing probability #brexit & #mathematics. On to #riskmathics conference!pic.twitter.com/ZxZz5pDUIe Permalink 1:21 PM – 22 Jun 2016

@nntaleb Yes! If th ~ Uniform[0,Pi], Tan[th]~ Cauchy & if radius from center random, still Cauchy as Sum of Cauchy = Cauchy @asknbid @MAvellaneda55 Permalink 10:41 AM – 22 Jun 2016

@nntaleb Quiz given by @MAvellaneda55. A drunk person throws balls randomly in all directions. What is the proba distrib of the distance betw balls? Permalink 10:25 AM – 22 Jun 2016

@nntaleb Betting odds are demonstrably similar to option implied probabilities, except unhedgeable (no underlying).https://twitter.com/MAvellaneda55/status/745659184956465152   Permalink 9:53 AM – 22 Jun 2016

@nntaleb On plane Prof Marco @MAvellaneda55 agrees with derivations showing betting 1/x has tail. https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/50282823/LongShot.nb.pdf   Permalink 9:42 AM – 22 Jun 2016

@lukasnaugle “If you know, in the morning, what your day looks like with any precision, you are a little bit dead…” @nntalebpic.twitter.com/xTPzcjImNf Permalink 5:28 PM – 21 Jun 2016

@nntaleb Marco my math mentor/th advisor for 22.5 years adjusting probabilities for Dutch Book effect. Neat!https://twitter.com/mavellaneda55/status/745591147251240960   Permalink 5:19 AM – 22 Jun 2016

@nntaleb 2/2 In other words Egyptian scribes had been using Semitic languages, incl Aramaic as lingua franca for 2000 years before the Arab invasion. Permalink 4:46 AM – 22 Jun 2016

@nntaleb Aramaic du jour: Egyptian use of Semitic lang. predates the Achaemenid inv, The Amarna letters were in Akkadian.( Aramaic in Egypt dialect.) Permalink 4:45 AM – 22 Jun 2016

@nntaleb I can’t see any backing to the idea: Brexit => Economy will tank It’s by the same economists who wouldn’t find sand in Saudi Arabia. Permalink 2:24 PM – 21 Jun 2016

@nntaleb Where I explain that “large” projects rarely start as “large” projects, but fractally grown https://www.facebook.com/nntaleb/posts/10153701042473375   Permalink 5:23 AM – 21 Jun 2016

@nntaleb Voila! Organic funding is the way: VCs are about cosmetic businesses to sell to the greater fool.https://twitter.com/stephenfleming/status/745225288720711681   Permalink 5:03 AM – 21 Jun 2016

@nntaleb A general question. Is is true that tears in rotator cuff “never” fully self repair? Lit is not clear on that; @cdipaola62 @DataScienceDork Permalink 3:13 PM – 20 Jun 2016

@StopponiMario @nntaleb in Italy the change is happening bottom-up as you said, cities independent from central gov as Renaissancepic.twitter.com/d7ihNEAvBL Permalink 2:53 PM – 20 Jun 2016

@nntaleb For comments, my first scientific article in Medicine; on Convex responses and Antifragility. Almost done. https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/50282823/medicine.pdf   Permalink 1:21 PM – 20 Jun 2016

@nntaleb Birth of superstate: Frederick Forsyth on how UNELECTED Brussels bureaucrats SEIZED powerhttp://shr.gs/GNd7LlN   Permalink 1:16 PM – 20 Jun 2016

@nntaleb No, I do not lecture in Saudi Arabia, & those lecturing there are academics-for-purchase.pic.twitter.com/7IV46YGVFx Permalink 5:20 AM – 20 Jun 2016

@nntaleb It is easy to find out the Monsanto shills: people who defend BOTH glyphosate and GMOs & attack glysphokeptics.https://twitter.com/philipbstark/status/744858609671090177   Permalink 4:47 AM – 20 Jun 2016

@nntaleb Read the NYTimes after long time (jetlag): can detect that newsmedia are afraid of their readers. When I write I don’t care abt readers. Permalink 4:07 AM – 20 Jun 2016

@nntaleb Byzantine mass in a small church in my ancestral village: Greco-Arabic @byzantinepowerpic.twitter.com/BYRNQ0lqQz Permalink 2:59 AM – 20 Jun 2016

@nntaleb Our paper on violence translated for nonstatisticians http://www.fooledbyrandomness.com/violencenobelsymposium.pdf   @QuarrelAU Permalink 8:25 AM – 19 Jun 2016

@nntaleb The Nobel Symposium: 3 full days. We stopped discussing Pinker’s thesis as dismissed after 1st session.pic.twitter.com/03m9mUyNQq Permalink 8:06 AM – 19 Jun 2016

@nntaleb Aramaic root for Levantine du jour: Shl7 شلح comes from SHLH: undress, now fleece (-> Tshli7, Shla7 tyebak…)pic.twitter.com/zsICwu92WQ Permalink 3:05 AM – 19 Jun 2016

@nntaleb Trying to explain the Mediterranean temperament to Slavs: Meds know how to have fun without necessarily getting drunk. Permalink 11:33 AM – 18 Jun 2016

@nntaleb In their private lives, some people seek union, others seek frequent intersection. Permalink 4:54 AM – 18 Jun 2016

@nntaleb Here it is https://arxiv.org/pdf/1603.07532.pdf  https://twitter.com/DataScienceDork/status/743991476594610176   Permalink 2:28 AM – 18 Jun 2016

@nntaleb .@PeterCorless @EHSANI22 We have evidence that many of these civilians were killed by Islamists, pictures financed by Saudi PR firms. Permalink 8:18 AM – 17 Jun 2016

@EHSANI22 When you read think tankers arguing for removing Assad by force or bombing syria, ask them who funds their operations and salaries. Permalink 7:33 AM – 17 Jun 2016

@nntaleb The only way one can measure intertemporal inequality is within SAME cohort. Brookings ignorant BSvendors.https://twitter.com/EconTalker/status/743476144813522944   Permalink 9:23 AM – 16 Jun 2016

@nntaleb History is periods of peace punctuated by war rather than periods of war puctuated by peace. (Bergen Symposium) Permalink 5:58 AM – 16 Jun 2016

@nntaleb Wrong! P of .05 values don’t work… https://arxiv.org/pdf/1603.07532.pdf  https://twitter.com/AcademicsSay/status/743413767904559104   Permalink 5:22 AM – 16 Jun 2016

@nntaleb Western Norway: mountainous, craggy, pristine, like Switzerland without the Swiss. Presenting paper on violence.pic.twitter.com/qMJiLB8AVN Permalink 6:23 PM – 15 Jun 2016

@nntaleb Trump doesn’t put his name on steaks for the money, rather for the ego. @AdamB1438 @John_Hempton @realmarkcuban Permalink 7:17 AM – 15 Jun 2016

@nntaleb Area for the exception. Thrilling to visualize inequalities in higher dimensions. @alxpr1c3 @CutTheKnotMathpic.twitter.com/gCgvAVZ0mk Permalink 7:16 AM – 15 Jun 2016

@nntaleb 2/ Talking class paternalists don’t get it: Only way to hurt Trump is to show him crying while reading Anna Kareninahttps://twitter.com/naomiaklein/status/742746821718618112   Permalink 5:06 AM – 15 Jun 2016

@nntaleb Comments like these by the “intellectual class” will get TheDonaldo elected.https://twitter.com/naomiaklein/status/742746821718618112   Permalink 5:27 PM – 14 Jun 2016

@nntaleb How many years of consecutive “peace” in a random Poisson process? Methodology. @DrCirillopic.twitter.com/jxY77d4ost Permalink 1:42 PM – 14 Jun 2016

@nntaleb Finalmente, 4 years after antifragile, the discourse is improving!https://twitter.com/emanuelderman/status/742723822378438656   Permalink 12:11 PM – 14 Jun 2016

@nntaleb Most humans either harm or are harmed by words. The rest is a small minority. Permalink 12:05 PM – 14 Jun 2016