Nassim Nicholas Taleb Profile picture
Feb 26, 2022 5 tweets 1 min read Read on X
HOW TO ANSWER KREMLIN SHILLS

I- Ukraine & Russia are the same people.

Answer 1: Assuming it's true (it's not), do Swiss Germans need to join Germany ? Austrians ? Shd the US invade Canada ?

Answer 2: The argument was used by Imperial Russia to subjugate Poland. & All Slavs.
II- "It's a NATO/EU aggression against Russia".

Answ 1: Ukranians are free to decide. For some reason they prefer democracy & freedom to autocracy.
Polls show a majority want to be part of EU, protected by NATO (now explainable).

Answ 2: How many want to move to Cuba ?
III- You can detect a Kremlin shill (or useful idiot) with the argument that the Ukranian regime is "Nazi" or that the 2014 revolution was a Western "coup".

(You can't both say that Ukranians Nationalists are Nazi racists & Ukr and Russ are same pple).
IV- Putin just PROVED to the Ukranians that they need to join #NATO.

Not a very smart move.
V- FALSE EQUIVALENCE

Finally Kremlin's artists & useful idiots try to indoctrinate you by comparing NATO to Russia, an elementary fallacy.
NATO is an organization for democratic states w/voluntary membership. Russia's group, as you can see, has a different mechanism for joining.

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More from @nntaleb

Jun 14
Medical data alert. There is no evidence-based backing to such Attia-like recommendation of > .8 g (see @EricTopol). Too much protein hinders, among other things autophagy; episodic protein deprivation is present in many protocols (e.g. Valter Longo's).
@alexbakus 3) The Orthodox Church dictates a vegan diet roughly 60% of the year, with splurging during holy periods. A high variance in consumption of meat was part of Mediterranean mores. See #Antifragile
Read 4 tweets
Feb 5
Agha Khan: Is it me or something about the heads of a 15 million sect living the unscholarly lives of Western playboys, horse collectors, & hanging around European royalty while taxing their poor followers in Central/South Asia?
Not a word on that grift in the press.
2/ The Agha Khan's family fortune of $13 billion didn't come from his diligent savings, but from DONATIONS, a near-mandatory tithe.

3/ The Founder of the movement, Hasan al-Sabbah (the Old Man of the Mountain) "was known for his ascetic and austere religious lifestyle. At his modest living quarters in the Alamut Castle, he spent most of his time reading, writing, & administering."

"During his 45 y of residence, he apparently left his quarters only twice to ascend the rooftop."
Read 4 tweets
Dec 4, 2024
The classical city state model radiates from the city like blood vessels from the heart; as you more away, the fuzzier the demarcation & the smaller the interest by polities.
The nation state starts w/the border, its demarcation almost always defined by war & conflict.
2/ Ancient Cities had walls, hence gates: Puerta del Sol, Porta Maggiore, Porte Maillot, Bab Touma (Damascus), Bab Edris, Bab Tebbeneh, Bishopsgate, Moorgate... Some for military reasons, most for taxation: Paris kept "octroi" custom officers (douaniers) until 1943.
Clearly cities outgrew their gates, but many walls were torn down to prevent rebellions, particularly in the 19th C.
3/Where the idea came from: fractal self similarity.

Image
Read 4 tweets
Nov 18, 2024
I am not convinced that jumping without a parachute is bad. What's the most clear and comprehensive study demonstrating their harm?
2) The asymmetry: it is when you go against time that you must prove reliability, not the reverse. Why? Because nature & time have near infinite stat significance.
There is NO study showing LT health effects of consuming chemically extracted deodorized lubricants.
Follow the $$$
3) BTW the same thing I am saying abt the uncertainty of using seed oil applied to smoking at the time when people saw no evidence of harm.
You need separate cohorts for a long time to extract risk factors. Unlike smoking we can't control consumption of seed oil in modern life.
Read 4 tweets
Jul 7, 2024
Advice to a university president.
In ~40 years in finance I've never see anyone hire an economist. We hire electrical engineers, quants, physicists...
The MD heals patients, the engineer builds bridges, the economist writes papers (used by other economists to write papers).
2/ Economists are usually employed by the public sectors: regulators & central banks where they hire one another.
Their knowledge is too weak for the real world.
3/ Economists, while being known to be totally useless in the private sector, proved great marketing skills in securing for themselves the highest academic salaries.
Read 7 tweets
Jul 1, 2024
France: the unsustainable & unavoidable mutation of a standard industrial welfare state into a low-growth-high-debt museum welfare state with a medieval economy focused on handbags, cheese & wine, regardless of the "rightist" or "leftist"outcome.
2/ France: One reason the xenophobic statist group called the "right" is gaining is that poor immigrants are incompatible w/the new French museum state -ignoring that the high ratio of Asian tourists to population also harms the marketing oriented character of that new state.
3/ For those who still don't get the Pareto distr:
4/5 of largest French corps in capitalization, LVHM, LOréal, Hermès, & Dior are into #Lindy Medieval products.
(LVHM has > 3x the capitalization of Airbus which is not even formally French, 8x Dassault's, etc.)
Read 4 tweets

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