Hacker News Reader

Comment by soVeryTired | Hacker News Reader

I enjoyed the Guardian's (satirical) digest so much:

https://amp.theguardian.com/books/2018/feb/25/skin-in-the-ga...

> Having skin in the game means reading the Code of Hammurabi. And, because I’ve got skin in the game, I didn’t trust other people’s translations. I took time out to learn the ancient Babylonian script myself. Turns out the translations were pretty accurate after all.

I actually laughed out loud. The thing about Taleb that gets said often is if he just shut the hell up after The Black Swan he would be hailed as a genius.

I enjoyed Black Swan: "Everyone is doing statistics wrong, except me" and was about to read Anti-fragile... Maybe I will quit while he is ahead.

I enjoyed Fooled by Randomness, and, to a lesser degree, Black Swan. But recently Taleb has just taken a dive off the deep end.

While I did enjoy Fooled by Randomness, it was a needlessly hard to read

The reviews Antifragile and Balck Swan makes me think, they will hard the same problem

While Nassim Taleb is definitely smart and brings up nice idea, those ideas are better presented in shorter articles

What, in particular, about his recent work makes you think he's taken a dive off the deep end?

Mostly his blanket dismissal that anyone who is not from his particular background could have anything meaningful to say about risk/statistics/trading. All academics are ivory tower intellectuals, all politicians are corrupt flunkies, everyone else not ruthlessly optimizing for optionality and/or skin in the game is stupid or incompetent or both.

What really ruined Antifragility for me was his apparent inability to make his point without insulting the intelligence of some central banker and/or professor literally every other paragraph.

His arguments are sometimes very fragile and overly broad.

He has this fetishism about past times. For example, He claims things that stood the test of time have proved their worth. But he just ignores things that have stood the test of time but are loathsome, like sexism and racism. Not only have they stood the test of time but these ideas often co evolved over diverse populations.

Much of his examples are extremely cherry picked and I’m really not into his embrace of what basically amounts to grandma wisdom. It has a place but he isn’t nuanced about it and is incredibly arrogant. I do think he has some interesting ideas though but he strikes me as insufferable at times

I think Antifragile is quite useful and a good concept to keep in mind for many things. In fact, it is perhaps more broadly applicable than the Black Swan.

I think Taleb is from Hammurabi's general neighborhood, by birth. I wonder if he already knew some dialect of Assyrian/Babylonian/Aramaic already. They're still used, mostly liturgically.

I think he has a strong Lebanese background.

I laughed at the Pinker bit. Taleb does seem to have a bit of an obsession there.

> Time was when leaders would actually lead their countries into battle. Caesar, Hannibal. They were men putting their bodies on the line. Even Hitler. Say, what you like about Adolf – and the man did have his faults – but at least he was prepared to top himself when everything went tits up. That’s having skin in the game. George W Bush and Tony Blair had no skin in the game when they went to war against Iraq and have completely messed up the entire world as a result. If they’d had to fight or send one of their kids to the front line, maybe they would have acted differently.

I have not read Taleb's latest book, I am silly enough to have found some interesting bits in Antifragile so I am certainly missing something. Ignoring the sarcasm, how is this idea ridiculous?

I am certainly worried of today leaders wielding more power than ever without having any concrete idea of the outcome of an actual war. And it will only get worse.

The joke is the implication that the Iraq War was a bigger disaster than WW2 and the Holocaust.

His Jordan Peterson is also pretty solid: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/jan/28/12-rules-for-l...

I read it and considered cheap comedy. A sign of "cheap comedy" as I use it is when you have to agree with author's point of view about something to enjoy it.

That’s an excellent way to put it. Whatever the failings of Skin in the Game, I can’t learn about them if the author just parodies it constantly.

I’d say it’s a dialectic failure, but I doubt the authors of these kinds of pieces intend for them to be instructive instead of - as you put it - cheap comedy.

"But flippancy is the best of all. In the first place it is very economical. Only a clever human can make a real Joke about virtue, or indeed about anything else; any of them can be trained to talk as if virtue were funny.

Among flippant people the joke is always assumed to have been made. No one actually makes it; but every serious subject is discussed in a manner which implies that they have already found a ridiculous side to it."

- Screwtape

not sure if i read this comment correctly. I agree with taleb, yet found this piece hilarious. It’s mostly aiming at his character, which is undoubtedly a good target for mockery.

the only time I stopped laughing was when the author mis-characterized the idea of skin in the game (it is NOT having “vested interest in an outcome”. it’s pretty much the exact opposite).

Thanks, I enjoyed it too. Why is "black swan" so popular here on HN though?

could be several reasons. It was a good book, timely. For HN-relevance specifically, maybe http://www.paulgraham.com/swan.html

I would say because software engineers often work in mission critical systems where risk is a factor, and his job as a guy finding flaws in risk models on wall street, gave him insight on that topic.

Like maybe some kinds of bugs are like tail end risk.

I like how many ads are in this article

It might be a digest, but did they really have the stomach for it?

Well that was a waste of 30 seconds of my life. Neither funny nor insightful.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com