The Problem with Nassim Taleb’s Thinking

As someone who has learned a great deal from Nassim Taleb’s writings over the years, I cannot help but feel grateful for his contributions. They have changed my thinking on many things. But Taleb has a fatal flaw, and it is the kind of thing you only notice in a close relative or childhood friend. It takes a lot of time to become obvious.

His philosophy on almost anything, echoes Nietzsche’s brilliant observation that philosophers are autobiographical, that is, they are merely playing a rhetorical game to validate who they already are.

Taleb does this with finesse and confidence (and arrogance), which gives the impression that he has reached a holy truth, or a limit of human understanding, but it is far from that. It is simply that he has come to accept the choices he has made, and is now in the business of justification.

The way he chooses to do this, is to poke holes in all the alternate paths to knowledge seeking, whether this be journalists, economists, psychologists, or other philosophers who disagree with him. In simple terms, if you are not a statistician, or a trader, or speak some ancient language like Latin, then you’re an idiot. You see, all social scientists, have been proven to be frauds, because almost half of their experiments fail to replicate. So, it is prudent to dismiss them. While you’re at it, you can safely dismiss any book that has not been written more than a hundred years ago. Except, of course, Taleb’s books, because they are paragons of wisdom and insight.

If you want to know what a fool or a sucker looks like, it’s very simple. He is the antithesis of Taleb. If Taleb thinks bitcoin is a good bet, then people not invested in bitcoin are idiots. If he thinks bitcoin is a bad investment, then anyone pushing bitcoin is a scam artist. This is his latest position. Mind you, I have no dog in this fight, this is simply something I noticed, unfortunately.

The saddest part about Taleb is that he refutes himself, repeatedly, in his own writings. In [The Bed of Procrustes](The Bed of Procrustes), he says that the only way you know you have won an argument is when someone has insulted your character. On Twitter, and in the same book, a few pages later, he insults many people’s characters. Whether that be Steven Pinker, or most recently Snowden.

Taleb is not a genius, but he is a very sharp thinker. He has, however, fallen prey to his own vain obsessions. He has failed to cultivate the kind of character he preaches about so much in his writings, he disparages entire disciplines because he doesn’t really understand them, and he relies and defends ad hominem attacks when it suits him, while accusing others of weakness and intellectual weakness when they do the same.

To say something controversial or edgy or unexpected or contrarian or divisive does not make you a great thinker, it makes you pedantic and a little pathetic. I hope, as a reader and supporter of Taleb, that he focuses more on making the keen observations that improves the public discourse, and helps individuals think more clearly, and less on trying to sound like a savant renegade teenager who is deeply misunderstood.

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3. Part 2: Stir Up The Transgressive and Taboo (The Art of Seduction)
4. Chapter 19: And They Lived Happily Every After (Sapiens)