Recent Controversies Involving Nassim Taleb, Part I

I've written about Nassim Taleb on earlier occasions in this blog. I'll let you do the search yourself, dear reader, for the full background. The short answer to the question "who is Taleb?" is this: he is a 57 year old man born in Lebanon, educated in France, who has been both a hedge fund manager and a derivatives trader. He retired from active participation from the financial world sometime between 2004 and 2006, and has been a full-time writer and provocateur ever since.

Taleb's writings for the general public began where one might expect -- in the field where he had made his money -- and he explained certain financial issues to a broad audiences in a very dramatic non-technical way.

Since then, he has widened has fields of study, writing about just about everything, applying the intellectual tools he honed in that earlier work.

As you might have gather from the above, I respect Taleb, though I have sometimes been critical of him when my own writing about many of the same subjects has required that I state relevant opinions frankly.

Whew. That started out as the "short answer." Perhaps it ended up being quite long enough for some of you. But now we may taste the milk in the cocoanut.

A Brawl with Mary Beard

Taleb has gotten himself involved in two contentious intellectual brawls in recent days -- brawls that between them illustrate the width of his interests. First there is a dispute with Mary Beard, a renowned student of ancient Rome, nothing less than a classics professor at Cambridge University, about the ethnic/racial make-up of the population of Britain during the centuries when the Romans were running the place.

This came about in an odd way. The BBC made a cartoon to help educate children about life in Roman Britain. It evidently didn't expect that heavy-duty intellectuals would weigh in. But a number of viewers thought it odd that the cartoon featured a high-ranking and clearly black soldier in a supposedly 'typical' family. This was denounced (by people who shall for our purposes remain nameless) as BBC obsequiousness before the forces of political correctness, diversity, etc.

Mary Beard weighed in. She said the cartoon was "indeed pretty accurate" and that there is "plenty of firm evidence for ethnic diversity in Roman Britain."

Of course there was plenty of movement among the different parts of the vast Roman Empire in its heyday, and it would not have been shocking for a man to enlist as a Centurion in Algeria and later find himself stationed in Londinium. I say "not shocking" because that is a low bar. Would it have been not-shocking-though-rare? or would it have been reasonably common? That is the difference between Taleb's and Beard's view on this subject.

Taleb carried on about this on twitter, saying that Beard's comments are proof that "historians believe their own BS" and asking "where did the sub Saharan genes evaporate?"

I should say here that, yes, the soldier in the BBC cartoon looks sub-Saharan. Ethiopian or Nigerian black, not Algerian dusky. Some such figures would presumably have been around in Roman North Africa, and some of them may well have gotten to Britain. But if that was true of a lot of them, then why didn't the Brit population become and stay duskier than was the case? Where did they evaporate?

But I will let that subject evaporate, and move on to another. Taleb has angered a lot of people of late by getting all friendly with Mike Cernovich.

So ... who the heck is Cernovich? 

The shortest safe statement is that he is a right-wing conspiracy theorist. His was one of the creative minds behind "Pizzagate," the view that a certain pizza shop in DC named "Comet Ping Pong" was actually the headquarters for a child pedophile operation with global reach.

There was never any factual support for this: it was inspired by such considerations as the initials "CP," which work both for "child porn" and for "cheese pizza" and for the first two-thirds of the initials of Comet Ping Pong. For more on this, I refer you to wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pizzagate_conspiracy_theory

The perpetrators of this fantasy (including, SFAIK, Cernovich) now seem to acknowledge that "pizzagate" was wrong-headed, but they are generally less than apologetic about it, and have simply moved on to other theories.

So: what does Taleb have to do with Cernovich? That will be the question for Part II of this discussion.