Thursday, December 29, 2016

Taleb on a tear

Medium Corp: What we have been seeing worldwide, from India to the UK to the US, is the rebellion against the inner circle of no-skin-in-the-game policymaking “clerks” and journalists-insiders, that class of paternalistic semi-intellectual experts with some Ivy league, Oxford-Cambridge, or similar label-driven education who are telling the rest of us 1) what to do, 2) what to eat, 3) how to speak, 4) how to think… and 5) who to vote for. 
But the problem is the one-eyed following the blind: these self-described members of the “intelligentsia” can’t find a coconut in Coconut Island, meaning they aren’t intelligent enough to define intelligence hence fall into circularities — but their main skill is capacity to pass exams written by people like them. With psychology papers replicating less than 40%, dietary advice reversing after 30 years of fatphobia, macroeconomic analysis working worse than astrology, the appointment of Bernanke who was less than clueless of the risks, and pharmaceutical trials replicating at best only 1/3 of the time,
The artticle is funny throughout. Taleb has this theory that the less turbulence we see, the less fearful we are of the unknown, and we get caught, caught by what he calls a Black Swan, the sudden appearance of a negative shock.

He calls the inner elite:  The Intellectual Yet Idiot, IYI,  another term for kanosian.

Rednecks have comrades in the UK:

He [IYI]  thinks people should act according to their best interests and he knows their interests, particularly if they are “red necks” or English non-crisp-vowel class who voted for Brexit.

The None Crisp Vowel Class! , otherwise known as fellow UK Rednecks, hey, welcome to the party, fellow secessionists.

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