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Comment by klmadfejno | Hacker News Reader

> Apart from being contrarian, they are often mean spirited or adversarial. For instance, in the first one he calls those he’s criticizing fools, the second he’s trying to access how uninteresting a person and the third and fourth ones he makes a rather rude comparison of wage employment to slavery. The fifth one is classic [X] is [A], [Y] is [!A], another popular Taleb pattern.

I've noticed this as well. His other rhetorical pattern is to purposefully misrepresent a group of people as having a particular set of stupid ideas and then shit on them for believing it. It's an effective trick, because the ideas are dumb, so the reader instantly feels like they're smarter than the targeted group too, and thus feel like they're in the cool kids camp with Taleb.

I think he's a dick.

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>Apart from being contrarian, they are often mean spirited or adversarial. For instance, in the first one he calls those he’s criticizing fools, the second he’s trying to access how uninteresting a person and the third and fourth ones he makes a rather rude comparison of wage employment to slavery.

Yeah, god forbid anybody says anything that disturbs the status quo and the illusion that we're all nice people living the best of lives.

Except the currently sanctioned targets du jour of course...

What happened to the hacker spirit? Having thick skin, tolerating no bullshit, being blunt but respecting intelligent insights? Why are HNers much more susceptible to Taleb's assholishness than, say, Torvalds, or esr?

(This is a rhetorical question - I think we all know why but it would be flamebait to expand further)

Whataboutism. But also, I don't think he makes insightful insights. My point is that, not unlike mainstream media, he finds the dumbest way to represent a group, and then acts like he's the first person to see how stupid it is. It's acting in bad faith.

I'm sure he's an above average intelligent guy. But he's also an immature narcissist who seems overeager to convince people he's smarter than others. I hope he fades from public awareness personally.

> Having thick skin, tolerating no bullshit, being blunt but respecting intelligent insights?

I think the issue is that much of Taleb's work doesn't qualify as intelligent insight, and is in fact bullshit. Black Swan was notable, and its core message makes the work worth reading. Just about everything else he has produced consists of meaningless platitudes, edgy, pretentious contrarian takes, and self-aggrandizing chest thumping. He is like if you combined Reddit's r/iamverysmart with the Sphinx character from the 90's movie Mystery Men.

Being a dick perhaps is tolerable if you have genuine insight to offer. Without it, why must the dickish behavior be tolerated?

> so the reader instantly feels like they're smarter than the targeted group too

This seems to be a very popular playbook these days. Jordan Peterson, Shapiro, etc. Glib points, flowery language, and helping the reader (or more regularly the watcher) feel superior.

> he makes a rather rude comparison of wage employment to slavery.

This comparison was widely observed by Black intellectuals who were the direct descendants of slaves in the era of Reconstruction era and beyond, so it’s funny to class it as “rude.”

Capitalism emerged out of feudalism, maintained many of its hierarchical qualities and power dynamics, and replaced a bound peasant labor force with one with varying degrees of freedom. At the bottom of this hierarchy in the U.S. was a racialized slave caste that was later freed from this this specific form of bondage, but kept me in much the same position through other means. Various forms of current and historical struggle have brought us to greater equality, but it’s difficult to argue that wage labor in the U.S. wasn’t shaped and defined by the presence of slavery. How could it not be?

This starts to redefine slavery as "being forced to do something I would prefer not to do" (given a better alternative). But what drives us to work is the basic human needs for food, shelter as well as higher order needs once the basic ones are satisfied. So should we therefore take the next step and conclude we are all slaves of ourselves and our physiology? I think it's true, but then why do most people who believe that "employment is slavery" not also take this next step? Could it be because it's more psychologically satisfying to some people to be able to blame their unhappiness with work etc on someone else, rather than accepting a fundamental reality of the human condition? :)

That’s an entirely separate philosophical discussion about the meaning of “slavery.” I’m speaking to the historical and material reality that the structuring and maintenance of wage labor was informed and defined by the existence of slavery in the U.S.

And of course it still is - slavery is legal as a form of punishment in this country and we have prisoners working at pay and conditions below those of other forms of wage labor. Is it your hypothesis that the two don’t interact with each other? How could they not in a market context where forced labor persists in competition with other low wage labor?

Modern work is as much a fundamental part of the human condition as much as hunting and gathering was before.

> Could it be because it's more psychologically satisfying to some people to be able to blame their unhappiness with work etc on someone else, rather than accepting a fundamental reality of the human condition?

It's only a fundamental reality of the human condition if you're not born into wealth. So, not really fundamental at all. A fundamental component of slavery is there being a master. You're sort of ignoring that wage-slaves are in fact, creating wealth for someone else.

And how did their parents get their wealth by means fair or foul? No matter how many generations back of inheritance it still comes back to the same root cause.

The "exception of born into wealth" sounds a lot like the ancient Greek nonsense of philsophers and aristocrats justifying slavery ironically. While they themselves were willfully ignorant of actual means of wealth generation and thought it had to be stolen by conquest and holding traders in contempt.

And this sickness was modeled into the Antebellum US South combined with the projection of accusing the North of wanting to enslave everyone.

Wage employment for reconstruction era blacks was different. After slavery was abolished, a number of replacement policies were put on to basically enable it under a different name. There has been a back and forth across the years of policies forcing blacks to unfair conditions only for courts or lawmakers to nope.

E.g. In Mississipi if a black man left a contract early to seek better wages elsewhere, they would have to forfeit already earned wages and could be arrested.

Surely, there are individuals for whom their employment status, then and now, are some form of extreme leverage not unlike slavery. However, Taleb is making a general statement across all wage employment, and that's pretty dickish. Plenty of people feel they have autonomy in their lives while working a job. Taleb asserting they don't is rude.

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