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Nassim Nicholas Taleb Profile picture
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10 Jan, 8 tweets, 2 min read
The big secret is that practically ALL competitive sports are unhealthy.
That, in addition to the fact that anything competitive damages your soul.
2) This is the classical problem of naive optimization. You optimize on one dimension, causing hidden side effects in other dimensions.
3) For those slow are getting it, here is the strongest man (of his day), a Soviet Olympic weightlifter. You optimize in one dimension (weights lifted), you lose on another.

And yes, athletes have a lower life expectancy than healthy people who work out moderately.

Generalize.
4) To be a well functioning human being you must be at once a:
+ mediocre runner
+ mediocre weightlifter
+ mediocre hiker/mountaineer
+ mediocre skier[or]/tennis[or]/... player
+ mediocre chess/bridge[or]/ player
+ mediocre [name martial art]
+ mediocre winetaster/squidinkist...
5)
6) For humans, the only single-variable optimization that makes sense is linked to survival .
a- For nature it is reproduction
b- For modern humans and medicine it is life expectancy (under constraints, s.a not being in a vegetative state)
7a) For philistines-trolls, all I am repeating abt competition is the classical way of being, aureas mediocritas, following (not chronol.):

Aristotle (of course) rephr. Seneca [cf INCERTO]
Quran
Sidonius Appolinarius
Horace
Cicero
St Augustine
St Jerome
Ammianus Marcellinus
7b) Martial
Petrarch
John of Salisbury
Pliny-y
Pliny-a
Eustachus
Terence
Quintilian
Clement of Alexandria
Demetrius of Phalerum
Chilon of Sparta (attr.)
Erasmus
Straton of Sardis

• • •

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More from @nntaleb

Nassim Nicholas Taleb Profile picture
11 Jan
Statists (state worshippers) & libertarians are utopians in the same pathological way, sharing a fortune-cookie representation of the world, life, history & the future; w/identical blindness to details & mechanisms. The same applies to academic IYIs, wokes & cryptoutopianists.
2) As they say, science is hard, more difficult from the inside than it is from the outside. The same with probability, decisions, and business. And, of course, the same with governance & public matters.
The problem is abstraction.
3) To see how ill defined "freedom" is by naive libertarians:
Should I be free to drive counterflow ("wrong way") a yuuuge twelve-wheeler truck at its maximum speed on my highway of choice and is it government "coersion" and "power grab" that is preventing us from doing it ?
Read 4 tweets
Nassim Nicholas Taleb Profile picture
3 Jan
Many are still unaware that many blonde women from Texas with names like Carol or Joanna fighting vaccines on Twitter are in reality some fellow called Boris, who, from a drab Soviet era building, runs dozens of such accounts using fake I.P. addresses in North Macedonia.
Disinformation doesn't work with big lies (high noise discredits the source).
Experts manipulate groups then spread memes, like the "cold winter" in 80s (from an illusory "paper" by the KGB who owned German anti-nuclear groups & played media scientist Karl Sagan like a violin).
3) Notes
a- Error: I meant "nuclear winter", not cold winter.
b- And, no North Macedonia has nothing to do with the Soviet Union; it's where the floating IPs are located (as well as, for some reason in Kossovo).
c- Trolls appear to have reading comprehension.(Low-skilled job.)
Read 4 tweets
Nassim Nicholas Taleb Profile picture
6 Dec 21
VACCINE RISK
Even if vaccines have not been around for long, the sample for the Covid vaccines is so yuuuuge that we can already see what risks they don't have & proceed by elimination.
This is not a precise estimation but the framework to work with.
2) Good comment.
Incidentally, for the distribution of the minima, there is little difference between n= 1 billion and n= 5 billion!
Read 7 tweets
Nassim Nicholas Taleb Profile picture
4 Dec 21
A single graph explains the effect of vaccines on mortality. The rest is statistical trickery.

[Unless past infected off by >1 order of magnitude.]

"Dan from Prague" @maircomm arguing w/Jordan Peterson who has the scientific rigor of a drunk astrologist.
2) This does not count the infections that were *avoided* by vaccines (conservatively estimated > 50%).

PS- I blocked Peterson 2 y ago when he invited me to do a podcast & didn't know much abt him. Went to his feed, listened to a podcast, was horrified, and blocked.
Fine print: (Clearly there is a possibility that the virus became suddenly 10x less deadly or that the old miraculously ceased to be infected in favor of the young or that the agencies are paid by Pharma to lie and other ad hoc arguments)
Read 6 tweets
Nassim Nicholas Taleb Profile picture
9 Nov 21
"You'd rather impress your cardiologist than gym rats"

You need to be BOTH strong AND aerobically fit -it's not not either/or.

There are no RCS for both exercises jointly [only separately] but we know that strength training stiffens LV, aerobic reserse-remodels.

@DrDamluji
2) We humans are not made to specialize without costs. Doing "too much" aerobic is worse than the optimal level ["reasonably" fit but without too much hypertrophy], but still better than sedentary.
Being strong is a necessity. But there must be a similar optimum.
3) Rigorous longitudinal RCS: as we age, we need >> than the recommended 150 min/w. Add 90% MHR 1 day plus strength training 1 day, but much less than prof athletes.

Entire bandwidth: Utraslow walks + brisk + stairs/hikes/sprints as no 1 is a substitute.
Read 7 tweets
Nassim Nicholas Taleb Profile picture
30 Oct 21
Friends, *Hyperinflation* seems to exist in the minds of noise-prone pple on Social Media than in the numbers.

1) COMMODITIES: The CRB is lower than it was in 2014 and waaaaay lower (50%) than 2007.

2) SHIPPING: The Baltic Dry Index is 60% *below* 2007.

Jst local disruptions.
2) So what we have to worry about is the asset price inflation resulting from low rates; these historically have collapsed at the first sign of tightening.

Vulnerable (by order): Cryptos, Residential Upper End Real Estate, Stocks, Residential RE, etc.
3) Lumber has been most sensitive because of real estate but it gave back almost ALL gains, at 2018 levels.

Read 4 tweets

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