The Left, the Right, and Nassim Taleb

Nassim Taleb is refreshing because he writes on social phenomena in a way at a great distance from the usual platitudes of right and left, and that leaves him agreeing with one or the other in ways that seem fortuitous.

I just finished reading SKIN IN THE GAME (2018).

The essential idea of the book is that one shouldn't take advice from anyone who doesn't stand to lose if the advice is wrong. Don't buy stock in Apple on the basis of a case made to you by someone who has no Apple in his own portfolio.

This is connected in Taleb's mind with the idea of "fat tails," extraordinary events that aren't at all as extraordinary as they "should" be under Bell-curve or Gaussian probability theory. A bell curve maps one dimension, which can be for example the earnings of Apple next year. The highest point is the most likely outcome. Some absurdly high number for Apple's earning would be the "tail" figure on one head, and bankruptcy-forcing disaster for Apple would be the "tail" on the other. Disasters happen. So do windfalls. "Hundred year floods" come by every twenty years or so. Tails are fat.

Combine the two ideas -- skin in the game and the fatness of tails -- and one gets the precautionary principle. This is the notion that we shouldn't do or allow X if X might create a disaster, where a lot of room is allowed for the word "might." There are always people who want us to do X and who lecture us on the relative improbability of the disaster (it's way over at the tail of the curve), and the selfishness of obsessing over that rather than looking to the other side, to the good X will do if the disaster doesn't happen.

Taleb says in such situations, first, that people who urge us to do X generally do so after assuring themselves they would not be hurt by the disaster: taking their own skin out of the game; second, that the disaster is more likely than they condescendingly explain. They are assuming the tails are thin.

But let's get back to the left/right stuff. One of Taleb's common examples of the precautionary principle is the growth of genetically engineered agriculture. This could very well end in disaster: he is not explicit in this book about the contemplated disaster, but he seems to have in mind crop failures that would in turn lead to famines.

So far, you might say: ah, a leftie. The lefties are always blaming the Big Corporations of Big Ag and their service providers for one disaster or another. Taleb seems just to be coming around to taking their side by a slightly circuitous route.

But then he'll say something that sounds quite different, and yet the same. He writes about how young people ask him what he thinks they should do if they want to save the world. He replied, to you and presumably to them, that whatever you do out of such a grandiose motive will almost certainly worsen matters. Instead, he suggests: start a business. Devote your energies to serving your customers -- you will definitely have skin in that game, and you will likely end up doing it well, thus improving the world, where you personally touch the world.

He doesn't exhort young people toward starting a business selling synthetic chemicals to farmers, and I gather barriers to entry there would be high anyway. But the "start a business" idea is as rightward-sounding as the precautionary principles, as he applies it, is leftward sounding. And yet they also sound as if pulled each out of his gut, not like a patchwork.

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Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

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