Nassim Taleb is Retarded

Happy New Year folks, welcome to the 8th (!) year of Bloody Shovel. Let me start this sure to be eventful year with one of these posts which just need writing. A quick internet search didn't come out with any article with this title; so if I'm lucky this post will at some point become viral on Google. You think Taleb is retarded? You heard this exact phrasing here first.

What am I talking about? Most of you should know who Nassim Taleb is; a finance man turned maverick public intellectual by virtue of a book, called the Black Swan, which basically saved all the western financial establishment from blame about the great financial crisis of 2008. If you read Steve Sailer you very much knew that all those Mexicans buying real estate with no down payments were going to unleash a subprime mortage crisis at some point. Not so! Said Taleb: that was a Black Swan.

A what? Some completely unpredictable scenario, a massive statistical outlier, he meant. He then colored the theory with a lot of fancy math. All those financial traders in Wall Street then could finally look themselves at the mirror again and not feel like evil failures. "It wasn't our fault! It was unpredictable! Look at all that fancy math in the book. Only a genius like Taleb could understand that stuff". It helped that Taleb is a Brown Man; hence a genius by default in our modern culture.

I know nothing of Taleb's theories; although people who I respect intellectually, such as Eric Falkenstein, have written at length that they aren't buying them. On the other side I see thousands upon thousands of bugmen and cucks who have nothing but praise for the swarthy bearded brown dude who likes to talk like an Italian mafioso because he's convinced himself that being born close to the Mediterranean makes one white.

I could be wrong and the guy is actually a genius. But the geniuses I respect have a habit of not saying retarded things; at least not in public and when sober. That is not something that applies to Taleb anymore. One could read with some interest his stuff about finance math or "antifragility", but now Taleb has come out as a full-fledged retard by saying what amounts (in my book) to the most retarded claim anyone can claim.

Taleb went on a Twitter rant (then about how IQ is a "pseudoscientific swindle"). His observation was based on his experience with "quants", high-IQ math people who work for financial firms. He found them to be good at numbers but lacking at other skills, e.g. LARPing like a New York downtown mafioso or taking instagram pics doing low-weight deadlifts.

Now, to be fair to the guy; he's right there. IQ explains some things. But it doesn't explain personality, drive, extraversion, focus, dominance; a lot of stuff. But it doesn't have to. Quants are quants. If he found them to be bad at making money in Wall Street; well maybe making money in Wall Street is not just about IQ. Big deal.

But IQ is real all the same. All else equal, a higher IQ is a desirable trait in any living thing. A high IQ may not guarantee success at any particular endeavor, but a low IQ absolutely guarantees failure at pretty much any advanced skill.

But of course everybody knows that. Which is why nobody really finds IQ to be controversial in normal life. Yes, it's better to be smart than to be not smart. But to be smart, but a pussy, or a coward, or annoying, or just weird in personality is a bad thing. Nobody contests that.

IQ and psychometrics in general are only controversial, only a topic of discussion when applied to groups. Most importantly, to racial groups. That's the only one reason why anybody objected to IQ research. To be put it even more clearly, the only reason IQ is controversial is that black people test low in IQ tests. And that's why Taleb *had* to come out and say, oh, saying black people have low IQ on average is *insensitive*. After all, northern Europeans weren't rich until after 1600.

Letting alone the point that the Chartres Cathedral was up by 1220; the very simple point that Taleb here is ignoring is this thing called genetics. Surely those "Meds" he feels so proud of (after all, the concept allows him to claim the glory of the Roman Empire, instead of accepting that the Levant has been a complete backwater for 2500 years) are genetically quite close to those Northern Europeans who, besides beating Roman legions pretty much all the time, were indeed not living in societies as complex as those of Southern Europe or the Middle East. Germanic and Celtic tribes even spoke closely related languages to Greece and Rome.

Not something that Africans can say; they're the most distant race to Caucasians (and Asians) that lives on earth. And late last year we found very very interesting data on their genetic make up.

We estimate that individuals in two African populations have 6 − 8% ancestry through admixture from an unidentified archaic population that diverged from the ancestors of modern humans 500 thousand year ago.

Does Taleb know about this? Does he know about anything? Of course not. He makes a living by selling books to the soul-less bugmen in the finance industry; and he won't be able to be able to keep being called to TV if he can't claim to be part of the Bioleninism racket by hating on white people at regular intervals. He may not like being brown (half his waking hours are spent in loud reminders that he's not an Arab), but he surely enjoys the privilege of not looking white.

>If you read Steve Sailer you very much knew that all those Mexicans buying real estate with no down payments were going to unleash a subprime mortage crisis at some point. Not so! Said Taleb: that was a Black Swan. While I do think Taleb is making a fool of himself, this isn't a fair reading. That something bad happened to Fannie Mae was entire expected because the whole enterprise was founded on nothing going wrong. Taleb's point is that things go wrong all the time but nerds don't realize this because they think they know things. But you can't know the unexpected because then it would be expected. The smart thing to do is to have lots of options when things inevitably go wrong so you can come out ahead. There's a mathematical statement of this as a power law distribution as opposed to a bell curve. Applied to something like IQ, you would see more profoundly gifted people in the long tails. I think this is actually true. It's true that bugmen love him, but given how he spends four books railing against nerds, this seems to be fueled by the same masochistic tendencies behind Ta Nehisi-Coates. It must make them feel good to have a deadlifting brown man telling them they're all idiot cucks.

NNT seems intelligent, in part, because he stumbled on a very effective heuristic for dealing with public intellectuals on Twitter: Just call them imbeciles. You won’t be wrong often enough to matter, until you bump into a smart dissident like Sailer. In general his one insight seems to be to search for dumb heuristics that allow lazy, arrogant, impatient people to get away with their laziness and impatience. I have a lot of sympathy with that approach to life.

>he won’t be able to be able to keep being called to TV if he can’t claim to be part of the Bioleninism racket by hating on white people at regular intervals. He may not like being brown (half his waking hours are spent in loud reminders that he’s not an Arab), but he surely enjoys the privilege of not looking white. I don't think that's true at all. He had a positive opinion of Trump during the election, the most unhandshakeworthy of positions. He's also been a champion for fractal localism or local fractalism, or whatever, which would be in accordance not just with tight borders, but an outright ethno-state. If you implement his political values, you'd arrive at the same end sought by many on the right. His failure in this tweetstorms stems from confining intelligence to the ability to earn money on wall st. and not blow up. Everything else is IYI to Taleb. That's the reason for the retardation.

Defining and measuring "IQ" is complex and a certain amount of subjectivity is unavoidable. IQ doesn't mean nothing and it doesn't mean everything either. I'm more concerned about hearing about Mr Taleb calling the 2008 debacle a "Black Swan." Black Swan my ass!!! Any bird brained nit wit could have seen it coming. Millions of people incurring loans they could not afford at a risk level they could not withstand is not a Black Swan. The guy is not stupid, though. Believe me when I tell you, there is no doubt that he is working for The Banksters. He is a sock puppet of the Globalists. His job is to baffle as many gullible dipshits with his bullshit as he can.

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But IQ is real all the same. All else equal, a higher IQ is a desirable trait in any living thing. A high IQ may not guarantee success at any particular endeavor, but a low IQ absolutely guarantees failure at pretty much any advanced skill.

That this doesn't occur to him is astonishing. He argues that "street smarts" are more important than IQ. This is off in crazy land - he compares "Fat Tony" to "Dr John" but the right comparison is "Fat Tony the successful mob boss" to "Jimmy who's doing 10 years for breaking into cars and stealing car stereos". The key is that Fat Tony is also high IQ compared to men who are as street smart. This really isn't that complicated. That he digs up math to adorn his awful reasoning points more in the direction of him using intentional deception rather than sincere confusion. Here's NNT-perfect natural experiment. Northern Italy vs Southern Italy. Southern Italy is better on every metric that Talib cares about - they're lower trust (more "street smart") and lower IQ - by his reasoning southern Italy should be the developed center and northern Italy the provincial backwater. How does this prediction hold up?

I think Spandrell is making the same sort of mistake Taleb is making: Making judgments across fields. Taleb’s understanding of statistics and its application to the market is solid. Being an expert in your field gives some experts carte blanche to make their opinions across fields public, portraying them as knowledge from an expert (though most people neglect that the expert is from a different field than the discussion topic). Spandrell is an expert but not a finance expert. Taleb’s books have never been dismissals of the financial institution for 2008. Instead, his books criticize institutions – banks included – for not understanding statistical distributions. To prepare for a worst-case situation, institutions look to the largest disaster in the past, completely ignoring the future probability space. They essentially cut the statistical distribution (which is usually erroneously modeled as a Gaussian distribution) off at an arbitrary extreme, make preparations for that extreme, and thereby confine themselves to working in a bubble. They are blind to kurtosis. I am not here to defend Taleb. I think Spandrell is correct on everything he has said here outside his comments on Taleb’s field of expertise, which is statistical finance and statistical finance exclusively. Spandrell’s article today is a bit of a disappointment in the same way an article on an actor’s political opinions or a politician’s movie criticism would be. Let’s confine criticism within our fields.

"Now, to be fair to the guy; he’s right there. IQ explains some things. But it doesn’t explain personality, drive, extraversion, focus, dominance; a lot of stuff. But it doesn’t have to. Quants are quants. If he found them to be bad at making money in Wall Street; well maybe making money in Wall Street is not just about IQ. Big deal." When I read that part of the tweetstorm I couldn't help but think of the asinine observation at the beginning of Guns, Germs, and Steel; roughly: "All peoples are obviously equally intelligent, so I'll waste no ink on that subject in this book. Having said that, the tribesmen of New Guinea are clearly more intelligent than Westerners. I can tell because I've noticed they are clever and resourceful at dealing with life in the rainforests of New Guinea, and Wall Street quants would probably die if they had to fend for themselves there for more than a week."

It's embarrassingly obvious that Taleb's hostility to IQ roots in him being from a racial/ethnic background that leans him towards lower intelligence than actual Whites. Taleb has what's called on anthropological/race realism forums as OWD (Off-White Dilemma) where he insults other MENAs in the hopes that the White Man will accept him. Levantines like him having much lower IQs than Western to Northern Euros is offensive to his image of himself, so he goes on the warpath against IQ (denying it, asserting that it "isn't really important").

Yes.

Does Taleb think that his tweet about ancient Nordics is supposed to be an impressive own? Ancient Egyptians or what have you would have been completely justified in calling ancient Nordics stupid. Then they stopped fucking their cousins and introduced manoralism. Things change, my genetically Arab brother.

I'm sure it's just a coincidence I've been reading about how chimps are smarter than humans because humans waste so much brain power processing abstractions like language. And this story tells us that dogs are yet smarter than chimps. https://nypost.com/2017/03/03/your-dog-is-actually-smarter-than-a-chimpanzee/ Mr Taleb is not making his point very well, but the fact remains that what we think of as "intelligence" is about as complex a subject as they come. This is why I go with what Forest Gump's mother said about it, "Stupid is as stupid does."

Mr Taleb is out, standing in his field.

There's also the point that lands like Egypt and Sumeria are significantly genetic different today than millenniums ago. Egypt has West and East African mixture it didn't have in the days of Egypt's founding combined with extra inbreeding. Sumeria has extra inbreeding and Arabian blood courtesy of needing to repopulate the region after the Mongol's slaughters.

Old Kingdom sculptures. None of their looks are reliably Negroid or Semitic.

>"Taleb went on a Twitter rant (then about how IQ is a 'pseudoscientific swindle'). His observation was based on his experience with 'quants', high-IQ math people who work for financial firms. He found them to be good at numbers but lacking at other skills" IQ is a general score, right? Someone can have high arithmetic IQ; but low communication, creativity, and whatever IQ. Taleb's observation implies high arithmetic IQ is insufficient and not that IQ is worthless. His observation is basically the classic one of the high IQ Northeast-Asian society with low creativity, inventiveness, and high conformity.

>"After all, northern Europeans weren’t rich until after 1600... [who] were indeed not living in societies as complex as those of Southern Europe or the Middle East..." This is a common "Dark Ages" myth. It usually goes like this: "Northern Europeans were unwashed barbarians who smelled funny and lived in mud huts. Meanwhile the Arabs/Chinese were having an enlightened super golden age and basically we wuz inventors!!" This is stuff from outdated documentaries or dumb YouTube popscience/popeducation channels. It's only repeated ad nauseum as a coping mechanism or for political purposes.

On iPhone, so I’ll keep it brief: - you don’t understand what black swan is about - you don’t seem to know any people who actually work in finance - Taleb identifies as non - white - he is a curmudgeon, so he has a need to be against everything and everyone - he is saying stupid things about IQ and race, I agree. Not clear what he actually believes.

I’ve heard Greg Cochran argue that MENA Christians are much closer genetically to the ancient populations, with significantly higher IQs. Thus it could be said that Taleb’s exercise in setting himself apart from Arab Muslims is not really erroneous. Though I agree with others he does appear to have an insecurity about it.