Taleb made enough money as a trader to write books saying whatever he pleases. Quite a bit of the time, he is just screwing around and having fun at his favorite targets’ expense. He is using “Aristotle” here to skewer investment types who think they have a knowledge-driven model that can’t miss because there is SOOOOOO… much evidence to back it up. (Look up “Long Term Capital Management” for a good example of that). Taleb, by contrast, assumed that models are bollocks and the best thing to do is to make contrarian options bets with consistently small losses, but huge gains on the day they come in. That asymmetry is why he is self-funded to write snarky books.
My only complaint with Taleb’s strategies is to imagine a world in which everyone tries to be Taleb. Bear trades would be overcrowded, too expensive, and the numbers would no longer work. Taleb needed counter-parties on the other side of his trades. This metaphor occurred to me yesterday. Taleb is a “predator”. Mostly, he goes hungry, but when he makes a kill, he gets a real feast. Most ordinary investors are “prey”. They make small regular gains chewing the grass, but when the downside shows up in the form of something that puts them on its menu, the downside is very, very sudden and very, very large. One little problem - what if everyone tries to be a “predator”? Unless someone is willing to chew the grass (i.e. run real businesses to do unexciting, mildly profitable things), there is no “meat” to feast on. Come to think of it, this predator/prey metaphor is very Peter Turchin also, and maybe on a subconscious level, that’s the synthesis I’m going for.
ha,ha. Let’s see about that, you guys are still in the more privileged bracket simply by having the time for such things plus the means to communicate them. Many aren’t.
My main privilege in life has been access to good education. And yes, that’s a head start for sure … But the hardest part of my learning curve was to get enough “street smarts” to unlock the “book smarts”. Taleb invented a character he calls “Fat Tony” to symbolize the street smart-type. Taleb preaches all the virtues of Fat Tony, none of which can be found in college syllabi. Fat Tony always thinks out of the box. He sees angles academics don’t.
My imagined future where the Second Renaissance actually happens involves a lot Fat Tony action to get there. Great theory is not enough. Progress must also be won in the gritty trenches!
Academia has a very specific problem regarding the construction of those boxes. It is not just Fat Tony who is required to think outside of them. I’m not streetwise. The problems I am trying to solve are well understood in academia, but the solutions I am offering aren’t possible for academics, because they involve bringing together problems from different boxes in ways that are prohibited from within those boxes. Cosmologists aren’t allowed to question physicalism, whereas philosophers of mind aren’t allowed not to (to take just one example). Even within philosophy, and within science, there is no significant attempt at joined up thinking. Instead there are power games and vested interests. Each box has its politics. Kuhn was so right.
Progress must also be won in the gritty trenches!
I like grit. Stops the wheels from spinning so much.