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> Having skin in the game means reading the Code of Hammurabi. And, because I’ve got skin in the game, I didn’t trust other people’s translations. I took time o
by wand3r 9y ago
> Having skin in the game means reading the Code of Hammurabi. And, because I’ve got skin in the game, I didn’t trust other people’s translations. I took time out to learn the ancient Babylonian script myself. Turns out the translations were pretty accurate after all.
I actually laughed out loud. The thing about Taleb that gets said often is if he just shut the hell up after The Black Swan he would be hailed as a genius.
- OscarTheGrinch 9y agoI enjoyed Black Swan: "Everyone is doing statistics wrong, except me" and was about to read Anti-fragile... Maybe I will quit while he is ahead.
- shaki-dora 9y agoI enjoyed Fooled by Randomness, and, to a lesser degree, Black Swan. But recently Taleb has just taken a dive off the deep end.
- systems 9y agoWhile I did enjoy Fooled by Randomness, it was a needlessly hard to read The reviews Antifragile and Balck Swan makes me think, they will hard the same problem While Nassim Taleb is definitely smart and brings up nice idea, those ideas are better presented in shorter articles
- whitepoplar 9y agoWhat, in particular, about his recent work makes you think he's taken a dive off the deep end?
- WJW 9y agoMostly his blanket dismissal that anyone who is not from his particular background could have anything meaningful to say about risk/statistics/trading. All academics are ivory tower intellectuals, all politicians are corrupt flunkies, everyone else not ruthlessly optimizing for optionality and/or skin in the game is stupid or incompetent or both. What really ruined Antifragility for me was his apparent inability to make his point without insulting the intelligence of some central banker and/or professor literally every other paragraph.
- bko 9y agoHis arguments are sometimes very fragile and overly broad. He has this fetishism about past times. For example, He claims things that stood the test of time have proved their worth. But he just ignores things that have stood the test of time but are loathsome, like sexism and racism. Not only have they stood the test of time but these ideas often co evolved over diverse populations. Much of his examples are extremely cherry picked and I’m really not into his embrace of what basically amounts to grandma wisdom. It has a place but he isn’t nuanced about it and is incredibly arrogant. I do think he has some interesting ideas though but he strikes me as insufferable at times
- millermp12 9y ago"I’m really not into his embrace of what basically amounts to grandma wisdom" So you're sexist _and_ ageist? Very much _not_ Current Year.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- nopinsight 9y agoI think Antifragile is quite useful and a good concept to keep in mind for many things. In fact, it is perhaps more broadly applicable than the Black Swan.
- dalbasal 9y agoI think Taleb is from Hammurabi's general neighborhood, by birth. I wonder if he already knew some dialect of Assyrian/Babylonian/Aramaic already. They're still used, mostly liturgically.
- simonebrunozzi 9y agoI think he has a strong Lebanese background.
- hammock 9y ago<insert comment about the intelligence that led to the invasion of Iraq, or any other thing>
- tim333 9y agoI laughed at the Pinker bit. Taleb does seem to have a bit of an obsession there.