Some books cannot be summarized (real literature, poetry); some can be compressed to about ten pages; the majority to zero pages.Nassim Taleb - The Bed of Procrustes
Hard science gives sensational results with a horribly boring process; philosophy gives boring results with a sensational process; literature gives sensational results with a sensational process; and economics gives boring results with a boring process.Nassim Taleb - The Bed of Procrustes
The characteristic feature of the loser is to bemoan mankind's flaws, biases, & irrationality -- without exploiting them for fun and profit.Nassim Taleb, aphorisms via twitter.
I.
[Karl Popper] wrote there there are no disciplines, just problems. So I always knew what my problem was: chance and misunderstanding of knowledge - I've had it for as long as I can remember. But I am still looking for a discipline.The quote about appeals for the obvious omnivorous idea, but also because you can extract the phrase no discipline, just problems, which works for me.
The incomprehensibility of society is the incomprehensibility of the individual. The ocean is not society; it is individuals. This is how I managed to gain a modicum of freedom from my terror at the illusion of the ocean called the world. I learned to behave rather aggressively, without the endless anxious worrying I knew before, responding as it were to the needs of the moment.This is the kind of book that I'd have been crazy for as a teenager, Notes from the Underground with more sex and drink. It begins: Mine has been a life of much shame. I can't even guess myself what it must be to live the life of a human being. It reminds that I should've died, been badly injured, arrested, had a career or become a father several times over by now, but somehow I escaped each time and ought to be more grateful for what I half chose and half fell into, one year without a boss on December 1st.Osamu Dazai, No Longer Human, p125
Men's nature's are alike, it is their habits that carry them far apart.Mishima once met Dazai, and they had a confrontation. The gist of it was that Mishima (the younger man), although admiring Dazai's work, was disgusted by the weakness that he showed in throwing himself into drink, drugs and women, the general lack of masculine discipline. His friend and biographer suggests that he was really shocked by recognizing his own desire for death, quoting this passage from Mishima's account of their meeting:Confucius
Naturally I recognize Dazai's rare talent; and yet I know of no other writer who from my very first contract with him filled me with so violent a physiological revulsion. Possibly....this was due to my immediate sense that Dazai was a writer at pains to expose precisely that which I most wanted to conceal in myself.Dazai killed himself at 38, while Mishima did so at 45, two paths to the same end.Jonathan Nathan, Mishima, p93
Back in Osaka for two days before Taiwan, with the [real] joy of karaoke waiting at the end of the day.
The first paragraph of the excerpt, below, overstates the case in suggesting that theoretical knowledge can never lead to practical applications, but the rest adds some modifiers to soften this claim.
The biggest myth I’ve encountered in my life is as follows: that the road from practical know-how to theoretical knowledge is reversible—in other words, that theoretical knowledge can lead to practical applications, just as practical applications can lead to theoretical knowledge. After all, this is the reason we have schools, universities, professors, research centers, homework, exams, essays, dissertations, and the strange brand of individuals called “economists.”Some related posts:
Yet the strange thing is that it is very hard to realize that knowledge cannot travel equally in both directions. It flows better from practice to theory—but to understand it you have nontheoretical knowledge. And people who have nontheoretical knowledge don’t think of these things.
Indeed, if knowledge flowed equally in both directions, then theory without experience should be equivalent to experience without theory—which is not the case.Nassim Taleb, excerpted from a forward to a book, pdf here
This was sitting with the draft posts and can continue today's theme of suicide.
Thierry de la Villehuchet -- an acquaintance of mine -- just killed himself in the after effects of the Madoff case. He had dragged his clients into investing with Madoff . "Killing himself over money?" I kept hearing. No, it is not about the money -- it was other people's money. It is about dignity. I could not help comparing it to Madoff, pictured walking around Manhattan with a faint smirk --totally insensitive to the harm he caused
This is an aristocratic act coming from an aristocratic character: you take your own life when you believe that you failed somewhere -- and the solution is to inflict the ultimate penalty on yourself. It is not the money; but the embarrassment, the shame, the guilt that are hard to bear. Someone callous, indifferent to the harm done to others would have lived comfortably ("it is all about money"). A life of shame is not worth living. Christianity never allowed suicide; the stoics did --it allows a man to get the last word with fate.Entry 106 [On killing oneself] in Nassim Taleb's notebook
Thinking way too much about Seneca on occasions, and fairly simplistic stuff like the deviant thrills of being Nero's tutor and how he made his $ / passed his days compared to how I make mine and pass my own. In addition, he's on the shelf with other long, long dead people, and I'm aware the worlds that their works were intended to acts as guides within were filled with problems that are alien to me in both their concrete horror and wild opportunities. There are no bath house orgies or man vs. hippo fights in my neighborhood, no living gods or slaves.
Inside the chicken coup, from whence he will go to be killed, the cock sings hymns to freedom because they gave him two perches all to himself.More from Pessoa's The Book of Disquiet.
A turkey is fed for a 1,000 days—every day confirms to its statistical department that the human race cares about its welfare "with increased statistical significance". On the 1001st day, the turkey has a surprise.Nassim Taleb, The Limits of Statistics [9.15.08]
A brief profile of Nassim Taleb in Bloomberg magazine, photographed with part of his collection of Christian icons. Taleb often expresses disdain for atheists, and at least an aesthetic interest in religions.
I can't get with the faith, for so many reasons, but let's pull out one for today. Why do Christians get sad when a loved one dies? It makes no sense. The loved one is now with God, in paradise, forever. The sweetest deal that ever could be. Sure, it sucks that they're gone and you'll miss them, but a) they're in a good place, and b) you'll get to spend eternity with them in the relative blink of an eye. It's like me getting pissed off because my wife gets to go on vacation a week before I do.
I'm sure there's a neat argument around the above, but I'm not smart enough to see it for myself.
Still, I have my collection of psychedelic literature that's no less - but certainly no more - absurd in places than the Christian faith is throughout, although I just to go it for ideas to play with, not for rules to live by. Consequently I can be legitimately sad when someone dies, although to date I never have been and can't imagine that I will be. Death's the main thing to prepare for, the only thing that definitely happens.
...when I gave a lecture in the sociology department of LSE on the Black-Scholes-Merton scam, they told me that the previous lecturer, Phil Scranton, made the same talk on the jet engine: we were using it while nobody truly understood the theory. They needed the original engineers to make things work. Theory came later to satisfy the intellectual bureaucrats. But that’s not standard history.Meanwhile, the universe sits outside my skin, doing everything in ways beyond my comprehension.
Against certain instincts I like to check in at Nassim Taleb's non-blog to see what esoterica he's drawn out from his reading and travels. There doesn't appear to be anyone else on his beat.I was in India (for the first time) and had the impression that I had been there before –at some point I felt I was coming home & felt like breaking my nomadic streak & staying there. Maybe there is this manner in which the poorest of the poor can live hand-to-mouth while projecting a philosophical composure: a combination of utter indigence and striking elegance you never see in the (industrialized) West –Christianity appears amateurish by comparison. You need to learn to be poor; though it is easier to have nothing than have a little bit, just enough to start a materialistic dependence and worry about losing it, which is why I am convinced that middle-classdom is some form of punishment inflicted on unsuspecting members of Western societies. A few educated imbeciles irritated me with the cliché “fatalism” – a meaningless term.
The West in general is so up it's own ass as to take as read that little of value has come from the East, while Asia now is happy to read all, plunder all, and benefit.
Which brings me again to ataraxia [inner peace from the skeptical suspension of belief] which these people practice naturally. Among other things, I became once again obsessed with the strange similarities between both stoicism & Pyrrhonian skepticism on one hand, & Hindu thinking on the other –remembering that stoics were often Phoenicians (Zeno, Chrysippus, etc.), that Socratic ethics have some strange Eastern overtones (&, as well, Biblical).
I wish I could live another 500 years and see how it all unfolds, as it is I'll be dead within 60 or so. I'm an optimistic guy
Souls of Mischief - 93 Till Infinity
Something like a mission statement from Bertrand Russell's The Conquest of Happiness. [Also available for free on this Japanese site with a number of strange images and gifs.]
The world is vast and our own powers are limited. If all our happiness is bound up entirely with our personal circumstances it is difficult not to demand of life more than it has to give. And to demand too much is the surest way of getting even less than is possible. [...] The secret of happiness is this: let your interests be as wide as possible, and let your reactions to the things and persons that interest you be as far as possible friendly rather than hostile.Which is all well and good - drinking beer with a stack of books on the balcony, until I was driven to retreat by a couple of mosquitoes I was too lazy / slow / compassionate to kill - but the flaw in the above is the injunction to 'not demand of life more than it has to give'. How to test the limits of this and be confident one isn't holding back not out of timidity, but wisdom?p123
I am involved in an activity called “glander”, more precisely “glandouiller”. It means “to idle”, though not “to be in a state of idleness” (it is an active verb). Gandouiller denotes enjoyment. [...]Glander is how I write my books, how I brew ideas. Remarkably it best describes the notion of lifting all inhibitions to “tinker intellectually in an undirected stochastic process aiming at capturing some idea that will enrich your corpus”. “Researching” or “thinking” smack of a top-down activity. Newton was my kind of a “glandeur”; In [Dijksterhuis 2004]:My doing nothing is dangerously close to doing nothing. Everyone knows someone who wanted to be an artist of some kind, who was dedicated to their craft and knew they were going to succeed, because perseverance and talent were the keys to success, and they had both. At the very least, they had the former, and success, as Woody Allen promised, is mostly turning up. Everyone knows someone like that. Many people, [most?], have been or remain someone like that. But not many people pay the rent as artists, there's plenty of losers hidden behind each winner. Likewise, my doing nothing is no doubt doing it's part in the complex math of reality to support someone who'll bring something useful back from their lounging.George Spencer Brown has famously said about Sir Isaac Newton that “to arrive at the simplest truth, as Newton knew and practiced, requires years of contemplation. Not activity. Not reasoning. Not calculating. Not busy behavior of any kind. Not reading. Not talking. Not making an effort. Not thinking. Simply bearing in mind what it is that one needs to know.”
What other people do repels me. It's an instinctive weakness, 1/3 due to curiosity [what about another way?], 1/3 due to arrogance [I'm sure I know better], and 1/3 straight stupidity [mind is blank]. Curiosity, arrogance, stupidity. A winning combination, the kind that leads to poking bee hives with a stick.
I've been to gyms, and enjoyed getting into the subset of consciously healthy people, although, once ensconced, it's plain that there are degrees. For example, the leap from exercise to diet is often unmade by gym rats, save for protein shakes and the like. I see such people eating crap, which is broadly defined as not only junk food but all carbs, the basic paleoconservative position being that you should eat nothing introduced into the human diet after the development of agriculture. So, no grains, but a hunter-gatherer diet of vegetables, meat, nuts and fruits, although not the bred-to-be-sweet varieties of the latter. It's strict, and it's a pain to observe as it involves breaking many habits and being prepared for when hungry [appropriate snacks on hand], but it works, if you do it. Note: this does not mean, if you follow the paleo-diet and also eat carbs. The foods are not supposed to be an addition to your diet, but to become the entirety, or at least the vast majority. Losing weight, gaining muscle, saving $, learning a language, cooking good food. Many things are easy if you do what you are told, but what people tell me to do repels me.
You try - observe - tweak - observe. After some time you have what works for yourself. The Heath Robinson nature of my work-arounds. Ideally I'd make use of Dr Lilly's Metaprogramming, but the fact is that I shouldn't be allowed anywhere near the controls of my biocomputer. My first creative instinct, when I got into self-hypnosis, was to cobble together MP3s that put me under and then produced sex and psychedelic dreams. When it comes to tinkering with my basic system, I'm not to be trusted, but I still trust myself better than anyone else. It's my body, my head. At best I try to undertake the task with close reference to nature, following the clues it scatters. Try - observe - tweak - observe.
Nassim Taleb on his exercise regime, via Art DeVany:
1) NO MODERATE EXERCISE SESSIONS. Either too little, or too much, way beyond what I thought I could do –and no set schedule. Never have a clear plan of how long to stay at the gym. So I would randomly push myself –with output as powerlaw distributed as possible. It is a matter of bandwidth –The range of fatigue from regular exercise does not reach all areas of the body. I now spend between 5 minutes and 4 hours at the gym –working out harder as I get more tired. I spent several times 10 days without any exercise. But my total time at the gym per month averages less than I did before. And I have no routine, do not count sets, with a preference for free weights/pull ups/dips/pushups. Sometimes I just do pushups by avoiding the moderate number 60: either 10 or 350 –then nothing for a week.
2) NO PURELY AEROBIC EXERCISE –the separation is foolish & not empirical. Avoid listening to “trainers”.
3) FOOD INTAKE Eat no carbs that do not have a Biblical Hebrew or Doric Greek name (i.e. did not exist in the ancient Mediterranean) : no oranges (only citrus), no bananas, no mangoes, etc. Apples and grapes were acidic in taste, bittersweet. Eat nothing out of the box. No sugar, bread, pasta, etc. Avoid artificial sweeteners.
4) STARVATION: Workout while starving.
A series of three lectures from David Gross called "The Search for a Fundamental Theory of Reality" [scroll down, April 2006], each about 1hr 40min. There's no math, the guy speaks well, and he won a Nobel prize in physics - three things that rarely come together on the topic.
In the third lecture [1hr 15min in], Gross dismisses the idea of progress in science being like peeling an onion, getting closer and closer to the truth. Instead he sees knowledge as expanding outward, like a growing sphere.
Since ignorance exists at the boundary of knowledge, more knowledge = greater awareness of ignorance. But, thinking in terms of the sphere, we can see that the volume is knowledge and the surface is ignorance, which means there is a net gain, even as ignorance increases. He ends the idea with this formula:
..the interesting thing about Umberto Eco is that he has a library, and he has two kind of visitors. His library has 30,000 books, so two kinds of people come to pay homage to Professor Eco. The first category is people who tell him, "Oh wow, how many of these beautiful books have you read"? And you have a second category of people who realize that the value of a library does not lie in the books you've read, but in the books that you haven't read.
So really there's some people who use a library as a tool for self promotion or to convince themselves that they're very smart and look how much I've read. Basically people focus on what they know. Or, you can use it to humble yourself. Every morning you wake up you go down to your library, you have your cup of coffee and look at it and it reminds you how ignorant you are. So this is the idea of a library.
Nassim Taleb has a lot of money, while I don't, but I have enough, and no debt. He also has his one idea, which is a good one, enough for me to buy the first two iterations of the one book he has to write and ready to get the third when it comes out. This is how I feel about money.
I certainly do not buy the notion that money does not make you happy, counter to the literature on the hedonic treadmill. This idea stipulates that additional wealth leads to no long term gains owing to a reversion to a baseline. I agree with the reversion to a hedonic baseline. But if spending money does not make me happy, most certainly, having money stashed away, particularly f*** you money, makes me extremely happy, particularly compared to the dark years between the age of 20 and 25 when I was impoverished after having had an opulent childhood. There is something severely missing in the literature, the awareness of the idea best expressed in the old trader adage: the worst thing you could possibly do with money is spend it. Having no argumentative customers increases my life satisfaction. Not depending on other people’s subjective assessment increases my life satisfaction. Not being an inmate in some corporate structure increases my life satisfaction. Not doing some things increases my life satisfaction. Having the option to give everything away to go live as a hermit in the desert or as a social worker in Africa, increases my life satisfaction. Either nobody in these papers and papers tested for that, or he can’t get it published.Ideally in an ideal situation you would live simply with a hidden stash somewhere that nobody knows about. Nobody hangs around with you because of your money; nobody laughs at your jokes because you are rich.
I like John Gray, not the Venus / Mars guy, but the LSE /Straw Dogs guy. That book meant a lot to me a few years ago, mainly because I read it on a long bus ride coming down from Taipei after reading the Atomized [aka The Elementary Particles], my first Houellebecq, on the way up. Both considered the inability to overcome our animal nature, and reading them together left me intoxicated for several months.
I reread Straw Dogs [SD] last year and took notes. I reread the notes two months ago when I started this blog and found little worth repeating. I don't think that reflects too badly on either the book or myself. You climb the ladder and then it's unnecessary, or, as Alan Watts said of why he gave up acid: "When you've got the message, you hang up the phone".
One of the things that annoyed me in SD, and in the other works of Gray's I've read [all the popular one's apart from the most recent, Black Mass, which I'm waiting for fate to lay in front of me - things aren't just on the shelf in southern Taiwan], is the clinging to religion as a Good Thing. Nassim Taleb also has this, but in his Long Now talk he practically came out and said the function of religion is to keep the proles in line, since they can't take their philosophy any other way. I may have misinterpreted him on this.
Gray's set out another religious defense in the Guardian recently. Many annoying things, like the tiresome claim that atheism is another kind of religious belief, rather than an assertion of what is known against what's demonstrably unknown and / or unknowable. The odd thing is that Gray's theme across all his later works is to show up the illusions we have about ourselves, but he's unwilling to accept that religious belief is another one of these.
Still, he's a writer, the idea being to strike ideas together and create some light and noise, and in this he succeeds and is often fun, but never forget that what he and other public intellectual apologists of religion are defending so energetically is the belief that there is an invisible being who made everything, sees everything and can choose to intervene any time he wants, but chooses not to.
Nassim Taleb says that Niall Ferguson is 'a good lunch', which I take to mean they get piss drunk and talk shit, but I'm probably wrong. What I do know is that he talks well, and is worth listening to.
Side note. I don't have much tolerance for listening to or reading things that I agree with. It's nice to be stroked, but it gets boring fast. I don't need someone else to go on at length about my ideas or confirm my prejudices - I do a good enough job of that myself. So take this endorsement of Ferguson as something that I'm not entirely comfortable with, and hence all the more delighted with. I first heard about him when he came out as pro-British Empire and knee-jerk ignored him, being a good Chomskyite and all. So, yes, he's broadly in favor of 'liberal empires' and tends to ignore the wishes of the colonized, but he has lots of challenging ideas, and challenges are good. Plenty of contra-Ferguson articles are available at Wikipedia. So, here are four recent [2006-07] MP3s that all deal with the lessons of the past for the future we are facing.
Interview on NPR about The War of the World, or why the 20th century was so bloody. The same topic in a good talk and Q&A at Vanderbilt University.
Trialogue on reassessing neoconservatism, with Francis Fukuyama, who goes by the name of Frank here.
Another interview about America and empire.
Similar topic, After Hyperpower - The United States and the Next War of the World, November 28, 2007
