Mafia
Article
Mafia is a recurring concept in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 4 times across 4 issues between March 23, 2021 and July 22, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as “The Mafia is antifragile!”; “like Mafia snitch”; “behavior of the Northwest Coast aristocrats resembles that of Mafia dons”. It most often appears alongside Africa, Britain, COVID.
Metadata
- Category: Concepts
- Mention count: 4
- Issue count: 4
- First seen: March 23, 2021
- Last seen: July 22, 2022
Appears In
- Book Review: Antifragile
- Non-Cognitive Skills For Educational Attainment Suggest Benefits Of Mental Illness Genes
- Your Book Review: The Dawn Of Everything
- Your Book Review: The Society Of The Spectacle
Related Pages
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- Africa (2 shared issues)
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- Britain (2 shared issues)
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- COVID (2 shared issues)
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- France (2 shared issues)
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- metis (2 shared issues)
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- Nassim Taleb (2 shared issues)
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- Scott (2 shared issues)
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- Steven Pinker (2 shared issues)
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- Syria (2 shared issues)
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- Trump (2 shared issues)
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- Ukraine (2 shared issues)
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- 2008 crisis (1 shared issues)
External Links
Source Context
Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.
Nassim Taleb doesn't have time to answer your dumb question, because he’s too busy coming up with newer, more exciting examples of antifragility! Taxi drivers are antifragile! The Mafia is antifragile! Lifting weights is antifragile! Seneca was antifragile! Small restaurants are antifragile! Religion is antifragile! Ancient Phoenicia was antifragile!
Suppose you want to study the genetics of intelligence. You probably want a sample size in the six digits, and you can't make a six digit number of people sit down and take IQ tests. Also, whenever you say "genetics" and "intelligence" in the same sentence, an angry mob shows up at your door. One solution is to switch to a more popular / less stressful line of work, like Mafia snitch or al-Qaeda second-in-command. But another solution is to use educational attainment.
The behavior of the Northwest Coast aristocrats resembles that of Mafia dons, with their strict codes of honour and patronage relationships; or what sociologists refer to as ‘court societies’—the sort of arrangement one might expect in, say, feudal Sicily. . .
So we have slave-owning Mafia dons to the north, and meanwhile, ascetics to the south. Despite both being foragers, they ate extremely different diets, with Californian tribes relying on nuts and acorns, while the Northwest Coast societies were sometimes referred to as ‘fisher-kings’ (presumably due to their two loves: aristocracy and fish). As the Davids say,
It doesn’t let up. He riffs on the Mafia, Big Pharma, false flags, faked autopsies… were he alive today, he’d be ranting about banksters and Hollywood elites on a podcast sponsored by Express VPN. But he’s working towards a point: