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Nassim Nicholas Taleb Profile picture
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
@nntaleb
Flaneur: probability (philosophy), probability (mathematics), probability (real life),Phoenician wine, deadlifts & dead languages. Greco-Levantine.Canaan. #RWRI
597 subscribers
Feb 5 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
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.

Dec 4, 2024 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
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.
Nov 18, 2024 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
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 $$$
Jul 7, 2024 • 7 tweets • 2 min read
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.
Jul 1, 2024 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
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.
Apr 27, 2024 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
There are physiological benefits from both a moderate amount of vigorous exercise & an immoderate amount of moderate exercise.
The cardiac risks come from moderate amount of moderate exercise & immoderate amount of vigorous exercise.
The logN matches the distributions in nature. Image In their criticism of Attia in the New Yorker, both Emanuel and Dhruv did not seem to understand the data (nor its properties above).
½ hour/day of moderate exercise is INSUFFICIENT,
Data shows NO J curve for low-mod. ex., w/ continous drops in relative risk to at least 15h/w.Image
Dec 28, 2023 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
Turns out that the claim by Christians in Jerusalem that religious Jews spit on them is true. It is "tradition". I did not believe it (not good marketing to get support from America), but it turned out to be true.
My god. 2) My nightmare. Because I argued it was fake news like the fake protocol.

Sep 8, 2023 • 5 tweets • 1 min read
If a chatbot writes a complete essay from a short prompt, the entropy of the essay must be exactly that of the initial prompt, no matter the length of the final product. If the entropy of the output > prompt, you have no control over your essay.
Aug 8, 2023 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
Ignorant Dawkins doesn't get it that such breeding works ONLY for a SINGLE task. Like making high volume breast-milk producing persons or 100m. swimmers. Humans have a lot of dimensions by definition AND the environment changes unpredictably! 2/My point is that it is not just immoral to breed humans; it is ineffective principally because humans are not just animals!
It is a deeper version of central planning.
May 28, 2023 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
Why Strava is not good for training & health, since it shows your average speed (publicly) & causes the wrong type of emulation.
Most people who show their heart rate there appear to be in Zones 3-4, the "junk miles". twitter.com/i/web/status/1… The only metric I focus on: Total hours spent in the saddle. Nothing else. Everything becomes easier.
As @Alan_Couzens said: if your cycling computer looks like a NASA screen, you have a problem.
May 5, 2023 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
Roma Image Image
Apr 1, 2023 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
Let me be blunt. Those who are afraid of AI feel deep down that they are impostors & have no edge. If you have a 1) clear mind, 2) a deep, not just cosmetic, undertanding of your specialty, 3) and/or are original enough to reinvent yourself when needed, AI will be your friend. 2) Many in the responses invoked a "threat to society" by AI. That's a separate problem; but for now do not self-servingly invoke a "threat to society" when what's under threat is your little franchise and rent seeking.
Mar 24, 2023 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
ENTROPY DU JOUR
The ideal Mediterranean food is minimum entropy for maximal taste, that is, the smallest number of (fresh) ingredients possible, usually 3-6.
Salad bars are a modern abomination. The Poké bowl had ~20 ingredients (salad +rice "base", 4 "protein", 5 "mixed ins", 5… twitter.com/i/web/status/1… Artificial "meat" has about 50-100 ingredients compared to 4 -5 for hummus
Jan 22, 2023 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
Finally settled on the title, and now it seems obvious. Image I am using entropy in a broader sense, focusing on ignorance.
The beauty of the term is that it encompasses both probability and disorder. Also covers (mis)information and BS busting.
fooledbyrandomness.com/blog/index.php…
Jan 11, 2023 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
MISINFORMATION
If you put money in a real bank (money market), an interest bearing account, not a "piggy bank", your earning power would have been preserved between 1960 and 2008.
Only talk about finance if you know something about finance. Misinformation: propagandists present a partial piece of information, factually correct, as a general attribute of the system.
Here to sell cryptos to innocent youths.
This case: nobody puts more than a few $$ in piggy banks or cash accts, salaries & investment are indexed.
Jan 1, 2023 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
If you don't get why, between 2019 and 2022, I turned down exactly 10 requests to be on his podcast, this will provide a succinct explanation. twitter.com/i/web/status/1… BTW, if you want more cues, Mr Lex Fridman does not seem to be part of the faculty at MIT. "Research Scientist" could be an unpaid external status that allows library access.
Dec 14, 2022 • 6 tweets • 3 min read
YEAR IN REVIEW 2022, 1
Taught a class (in person)"Static and Dynamic Hedging" owing to the passing of Peter Carr; incorporated my lecture notes into the 1st draft of a book --more technical reformulations of my Dynamic Hedging (1997). ImageImage YEAR IN REVIEW 2022, 2
Picked up bicycle training after 20y, ~2000 km in 4 months. Had stopped after a near miss. 1) Improved trails & bike infrastructure, 2) drivers aware of cyclists, 3) flashing lights.
If you live in hilly areas, whole HR spectrum.
Hope to do 6000 km in 2023. ImageImage
Dec 4, 2022 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
POPPER'S METHOD:
What I did with @bigfatsurprise (I didn't know she os a prpgandist) was make her show me the MOST convincing study: working with HER CHERRYPICKING. The one with "67K", "ignored by mainstream media".

Popper started by clarigying with the most convincing argument. EPILOGUE One of the most deviously charlatanic persons you can encounter is the shill Nina Teicholz @bigfatsurprise: when unable to grasp a statistical point, she loops & loops then responds by ...fat shaming (based on lies from @saifedean).
Then she complains about MY behavior
Dec 4, 2022 • 5 tweets • 3 min read
Ms Nina Teicholz @bigfatsurprise's own paper shows that cutting on Saturated Fats gives a 98.6% chance of reducing CardioVascular Events, and AT LEAST 86% of reducing mortality.
Statistics is hard for the verbalistic.
cc:thanks to @DrDamluji 2) Please do not invoke "ancestral" diets in support of the consumption of hamburgers and supermarket butter: these were different animals, and were eaten at a different frequency.
Dec 3, 2022 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
The thread below shows the severe defect of AI: verbalism. It works with labels, maximally shallow thinking not any better than buzzwords.
See also below my definiton of verbalism. 2) In case the thread loops away from this.

Nov 29, 2022 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
Banning Trump after Jan 6 is entirely compatible with the foundations of democracy, even necessary. By the Gödel-Popper rule, a democracy should never give its tools to those who want to thwart it. Turns out the constitution has a variant of the Gödel-Popper rule.

Note that the name "Gödel-Popper rule" is something I put together to merge Popper's paradox of tolerance and Gödel's naturalization's anecdote, see Skin in the Game.