{"id":3303,"date":"2008-08-04T05:33:01","date_gmt":"2008-08-04T05:33:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/zmetro.com\/?p=3303"},"modified":"2008-08-04T05:33:01","modified_gmt":"2008-08-04T05:33:01","slug":"nassim_nicholas","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/?p=3303","title":{"rendered":"Nassim Nicholas Taleb: the prophet of boom and doom"},"content":{"rendered":"

Bryan Appleyard<\/a>: <\/p>\n

“You have to worry about things you can do something about. I worry about people not being there and I want to make them aware.” We should be mistrustful of knowledge. It is bad for us. Give a bookie 10 pieces of information about a race and he\u2019ll pick his horses. Give him 50 and his picks will be no better, but he will, fatally, be more confident.
\nWe should be ecologically conservative \u2013 global warming may or may not be happening but why pollute the planet? \u2013 and probablistically conservative. The latter, however, has its limits. Nobody, not even Taleb, can live the sceptical life all the time \u2013 \u201cIt\u2019s an art, it\u2019s hard work.\u201d So he doesn\u2019t worry about crossing the road and doesn\u2019t lock his front door \u2013 \u201cI can\u2019t start getting paranoid about that stuff.\u201d His wife locks it, however.
\nHe believes in aristocratic \u2013 though not, he insists, elitist \u2013 values: elegance of manner and mind, grace under pressure, which is why you must shave before being executed. He believes in the Mediterranean way of talking and listening. One piece of advice he gives everybody is: go to lots of parties and listen, you might learn something by exposing yourself to black swans.
\nI ask him what he thinks are the primary human virtues, and eventually he comes up with magnanimity \u2013 punish your enemies but don\u2019t bear grudges; compassion \u2013 fairness always trumps efficiency; courage \u2013 very few people have this; and tenacity \u2013 tinker until it works for you.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Bryan Appleyard<\/a>: <\/p>\n

“You have to worry about things you can do something about. I worry about people not being there and I want to make them aware.” We should be mistrustful of knowledge. It is bad for us. Give a bookie 10 pieces of information about a race and he\u2019ll pick his horses. Give him 50 and his picks will be no better, but he will, fatally, be more confident.
\nWe should be ecologically conservative \u2013 global warming may or may not be happening but why pollute the planet? \u2013 and probablistically conservative. The latter, however, has its limits. Nobody, not even Taleb, can live the sceptical life all the time \u2013 \u201cIt\u2019s an art, it\u2019s hard work.\u201d So he doesn\u2019t worry about crossing the road and doesn\u2019t lock his front door \u2013 \u201cI can\u2019t start getting paranoid about that stuff.\u201d His wife locks it, however.
\nHe believes in aristocratic \u2013 though not, he insists, elitist \u2013 values: elegance of manner and mind, grace under pressure, which is why you must shave before being executed. He believes in the Mediterranean way of talking and listening. One piece of advice he gives everybody is: go to lots of parties and listen, you might learn something by exposing yourself to black swans.
\nI ask him what he thinks are the primary human virtues, and eventually he comes up with magnanimity \u2013 punish your enemies but don\u2019t bear grudges; compassion \u2013 fairness always trumps efficiency; courage \u2013 very few people have this; and tenacity \u2013 tinker until it works for you.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[15,6,3,32,35],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3303"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3303"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3303\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3303"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3303"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3303"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}