Astral Codex Ten

Taleb

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Taleb

Article

Taleb is a recurring person in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 5 times across 5 issues between February 18, 2021 and August 17, 2023. The archive places it in contexts such as “Meta answer: I think Taleb is right that IQ doesn’t predict as much as is popularly assumed”; “Taleb’s intellectual opponents”; “Taleb gives the parable of John and George”. It most often appears alongside American, Antifragile, Apple.

Metadata

  • Category: People
  • Mention count: 5
  • Issue count: 5
  • First seen: February 18, 2021
  • Last seen: August 17, 2023

Appears In

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.

Highlights From The Comments On Cult Of Smart
February 18, 2021 · Original source
5) Meta answer: I think Taleb is right that IQ doesn’t predict as much as is popularly assumed if you take out clinical populations and look at non-narrowly nerdy problems. IQ may gate understanding of quantum physics or Hegel or whatever the fuck but just be a lot less predictive of things like navigating collective social situations, finding friends, object-level moral reasoning, refusing to stand down for a good cause, and so on, which is most politics that matters. I believe that people that others would down on as dull, that I myself would at least instinctually look down on as dull, are capable of insight and creativity that surprises arrogant nerds like me and most of the other commenters here, especially when it comes to practical, non-nerd shit.
Book Review: Antifragile
March 23, 2021 · Original source
Nassim Taleb summarizes the thesis of Antifragile as:
Inline links: Antifragile
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!
Other times it's harder. To choose an example close to my own heart, is it really true - as asserted without argument on page 422 - that Spartan hoplites are antifragile but bloggers are fragile? Spartan hoplites are good at war, which is a sort of disorder (though it's not clear they exactly benefit from it). But in other ways they seem quite fragile. Even slight deviations from their ideal conditions (flat open ground, with a slow enemy lumbering toward them from the front) would knock them off balance. A single break in the ranks would doom them. If a flood or avalanche hit, being stuck in unwieldy armor would assure them a swift death. As for bloggers, during all the greatest crises of the past few years - Trump's election, the BLM protests, coronavirus - my hit count skyrocketed, as people looked for writing that would help them make sense of the situation. What could be a purer example of gaining from volatility? So think of this less as a sober attempt to quantify antifragility, and more as an adventure through Taleb's intellectual milieu. I can't possibly think of a linear way to summarize it, but here are some highlights.
More Antifragile, Diversity Libertarianism, And Corporate Censorship
March 25, 2021 · Original source
In yesterday's review of Antifragile, I tried to stick to something close to Taleb's own words. But here's how I eventually found myself understanding an important kind of antifragility.
Inline links: review of
I feel bad about this, because Taleb hates bell curves and tells people to stop using them as examples, but sorry, this is what I’ve got. Suppose that Distribution 1 represents nuclear plants. It has low variance, so all the plants are pretty similar. Plant A is slightly older and less fancy than Plant B, but it still works about the same.
Your Book Review: The Laws of Trading
July 21, 2023 · Original source
The book actively used by traders is perhaps the driest thing that Nassim Taleb has ever written: Dynamic Hedging: Managing Vanilla and Exotic Options.
Tales of Icarus flying too close to the sun, where readers revel in schadenfreude, e.g., When Genius Failed. With The Laws of Trading, Agustin Lebron has written something different: part love letter to trading, part philosophical treatise on epistemology and modeling the world around us, and part guide to applied decision-making. Lebron’s Laws are Laws of the Jungle, not Laws of Nature. He views financial markets as the most competitive Darwinian environment on Earth, where participants must adapt or die. According to Lebron, the book is for people working in finance and trading, as well as anyone in the business of making rational decisions. This explicitly rationalist bent is similar to Julia Galef’s The Scout Mindset or Annie Duke’s Thinking in Bets. Where The Laws of Trading sets itself apart is with the best description of financial market dynamics that I’ve ever seen while diving deep into philosophical concepts. Why trust Lebron? He is an engineer, worked as a quantitative trader and researcher at Jane Street, and has a deep understanding of trading. He has what Taleb would describe as skin in the game. You and I may read Astral Codex Ten in our spare time, post on LessWrong, and navel gaze about our epistemic certainty, but at the end of the day most of us are pursuing rationality for fun, as a hobby. Traders like Lebron pursue rationality as a profession: Their livelihood depends on having a better model of the world than their competition. There are lessons to learn from them that apply to our daily lives. 1: Motivation Know why you are doing a trade before you trade. “What is trading about? Fundamentally, it’s about the relationship between you and the rest of the world.” Right now, you’re making a trade. You’re trading your time to read this book review. You have a cost: you could be spending time with your loved ones, exercising, working, sleeping. You might be hoping to learn something, to take away lessons that you can apply to your life, or simply to entertain yourself. Here, off the bat, are two key insights: We are all making trades, all of the time.
Inline links: The Laws of Trading
Bride Of Bay Area House Party
August 17, 2023 · Original source
“That’s what I’d heard,” Ramchandra says. “If you kill Lindyman, you’ve proven yourself lindy-er, which makes you the new Lindyman. That’s how Skallas got it - he killed Taleb. Of course, Taleb was too antifragile to die - killing him just makes him stronger. That was his plan all along. He passed the Lindyman curse on to Skallas. Now Skallas is stuck. Too cringe to live, too lindy to die, he wanders the earth, plagiarizing and offending people in the futile hope that one of them will take his life and grant him the peace of oblivion. It’s sad, really.”