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This might be a different tack, but what if you take Mr. Taleb's "nature" to be human nature [1]? People don't tend to eat poison mushrooms as a rule. In that
by bgilroy26 14y ago
This might be a different tack, but what if you take Mr. Taleb's "nature" to be human nature [1]? People don't tend to eat poison mushrooms as a rule.
In that case, his rule would be a good one. If you drift in to a new area of human endevour, the people who follow you out there are taking a risk until the area is well-traveled
[1] In the Aristotelian sense: human nature is the proportionate sum of all human activity. We mostly eat, drink, sleep, walk, talk, etc. so that makes up the bulk of our nature. Cannibalism and incest are acted out much, much less often, so that is a much, much smaller part of our nature, though it is tucked in there.
- FooBarWidget 14y agoYou define nature as activities that people perform most? By that reasoning the culture with the largest population is representative of typical human nature. That just seems wrong. There are almost 2 billion Chinese. They love to eat chicken paws and cow intestines. So that is human's natural diet?
- vidarh 14y agoChicken feet and cow intestines taste great. I'm not Chinese. My favorite dish when visiting Beijing a few years back was spicy duck intestines. Looked like noodles.
- bgilroy26 14y agoYep, I'm saying if you generalize about all of us, that's how you'd do it. Your point is dead on: if you make a generalization that broad, you lose a lot of information.
- yuvadam 14y agoNot sure what makes chicken breast better than paws and cow rump better than intestines. All are animal parts.