Nassim Nicholas Taleb, idiot

That's my conclusion after reading his latest book, "Skin in the Game."

Skin in the Game: The Hidden Asymmetries in Daily Life by Nassim Nicholas Taleb
My rating: 1 of 5 stars

Taleb, whose politics I did not pay attention to in Black Swan (and I skipped reading Antifragile), come off as a mix of right-neolib, classic liberal and Hayekian libertarian. It’s certainly possible, in addition, that he’s a Trump Train fellow traveler, though not riding the main line himself.

He’s anti-regulatory as part of libertarian part of him. Yes, agencies can suffer regulatory capture, but the libertarian idea espoused by him of regulation through private lawsuit doesn’t work. Most people don’t have the money for lawyers, not even to sue over being forced into arbitration, and contra his classical pseudo-erudition, we’re not classical Athens where one has to defend their own case without lawyers.

Second, he hates academics, and this book was presumably being written before Mary Beard punked him over people of color in Roman Britain. Given all the other things he says that relate to academia and are clearly wrong, such as claiming that the Essenes merged with Christianity, I’d hate academics and academia were I him too, because they clearly point out how fricking wrong he is.

He has the privilege of dual Lebanese-French citizenship at birth and picked up BA and grad degree in Paris. For him to present himself as being on the side of the polloi is hypocritical. Speaking of ...

Hypocrite — says he’s no longer an active trader, thus HAS NO SKIN IN GAME, directly undercutting the main premise of this book.

Hypocrite 2 — says a lot of things don’t scale up or down well, yet seems to wish for the whole world, all nations, to be organized like Swiss cantons

His “good fences good neighbors make” for countries inside the Middle East comes an unspoken awfully close to justifying apartheid. He only mentions Arab states, but Israel-Palestine is surely in the back of his Lebanese Christian mind.

Related to that, his calling all Sunni Muslims barbarians is ridiculous. It might, or might not, be a stretch to make that claim for all Salafists within Sunni, but all Sunnis? And, when he attacks Sunnis, praising Shi’ites while ignoring Iran?

BSes himself about hedge funds having skin in the game. They have some, but not as much as other investors, and the fund manager usually draws a salary plus a percentage.

Seems to be strongly anti-GMO, and claims that Seralini was persecuted by Monsanto. Wrong. He had crappy research. His set of anti-GMO rants throughout this book are not just incredibly wrong, above all about risk factors and testing, but they border on the paranoiac. And he believes in homeopathy.

He’s even more laughable when he claims the US was a low-rentier society until Obama. Dude ….. or duuuuuddeeee, the CDO slice-and-dice world, the housing bubble, and the bursting of the housing bubble all began under Shrub Bush.

Worse yet, Taleb seems to be some degree of fanboy of Trump on economic grounds. You mean, the four-times bankrupt Trump who gamed the American bankruptcy system to keep his skin out of the game? At this point, Taleb is basically becoming a parody of himself.

Also, a kind of one-trick pony, like Robert Wright with non-zero stuff.

Cognitive dissonance is not at all about sour grapes. Possibly the stupidest explanation of cognitive dissonance I’ve ever read.

The intuitional insight of a grandmother is not right 90 percent of the time. I note from my life that wearing hats does NOT make you go bald. And “masturbation makes you go blind” is of course a moral injunction disguised as insight.

Taleb is also wrong about relative economic mobility in the US vs. Old Europe. (Shock me.) San Francisco is the worst, but not the only, counterexample.

To the degree he has anything good to say, I steal from another reviewer: “His ideas are easy to summarize, because they are simplistic: People who commit risk are more interested in outcomes; systems that last longer have undergone more stress tests; and random events affect all plans.”

And, you could find that from somebody else.


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