Recent Controversies Involving Nassim Taleb, Part II

The fellow pictured at the top of yesterday's blog post was Taleb: the half-smiling fellow pictured here is Cernovich.

They seem to be friends. The fact has lately come under a great deal of discussion, and Taleb has responded, on twitter.

"When I have drinks with someone on the left ... nobody on the right bothers me. When I have drinks with someone on the right, the left goes wild. F*** them."

The asterisks are in the original.

Asked whether Cernovich was a racist, Taleb replied, "#SkinintheGame. He has a Persian Muslim wife (& a half Persian daughter) . Ignore talk (by ppl & abt ppl), observe what ppl do."

The phrase "skin in the game" is in essence a "term of art" in Taleb's writings. Never trust anyone who tells you to buy Mattel stock who doesn't own Mattel stock, etc. More broadly, much of academia has isolated itself from the off-campus world, allowing its denizens to be "Intellectuals Yet Idiots," or #IYI (another Taleb-world term of art). Their delusions are directly attributable to the absence of their own skin in the world's games.

Given THAT, his observation makes some sense. But the world is full of racists who are within mixed-race marriages. Saying that a friend of yoiurs can't be a racist because of the race of his spouse sounds a bit like, "Some of my best friends are ..."

Faced with reactions to his "Persian wife" tweet, Taleb continued to add to the ante.

What to make of all of this?

Taleb has a fine mind, and "skin the the game" is a good heuristic in many cases. It doesn't tell you who is or isn't a racist, though, and invoking it as if he thinks it does only shows that Taleb has a stubborn streak, and that it gets worse as challenged.

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