[Twitter | X] Nassim Nicholas Taleb Reiterates His Critique: IQ as Pseudoscience and Its Role in Race Science

[Twitter] Nassim Nicholas Taleb Says Biden’s Age and Cognitive Decline Pose Significant Risks for Presidency

Nassim Nicholas Taleb recently shared his thoughts on the potential risks associated with President Joe Biden’s age and cognitive health on X (formerly Twitter).

Medium: The insidious racism of Mary Beard and the “diversity” operators

The diversity discourse appears to serve an insidious form of racism and Northern Euro supremacist agenda (with a redefinition of the Western world and a reframing of the classics). Please stop classifying people according to race, and stop creating racial stereotypes and divisions in the name of “diversity”, while doing some smug virtue signaling. Look up “framing” in a decision theory textbook and you can see what I mean. This is no different from funding Al Qaeda headcutters and women-enslavers in Syria in the name of “democracy”.

Read the full piece on Medium: https: // medium. com/ @nntaleb/ the- insidious- racism- of- mary- beard- et- al- 8b6b768b4575

Nassim: “Trump makes sense to a grocery store owner”

While in Jaipur, Nassim was interviewed for The Hindu. In that interview, he explains his support for Trump:

In Skin in the Game, you seem to build on theories from The Black Swan that give a sense of foreboding about the world economy. Do you see another crisis coming?

Oh, absolutely! The last crisis [2008] hasn’t ended yet because they just delayed it. [Barack] Obama is an actor. He looks good, he raises good children, he is respectable. But he didn’t fix the economic system, he put novocaine [local anaesthetic] in the system. He delayed the problem by working with the bankers whom he should have prosecuted. And now we have double the deficit, adjusted for GDP, to create six million jobs, with a massive debt and the system isn’t cured. We retained zero interest rates, and that hasn’t helped. Basically we shifted the problem from the private corporates to the government in the U.S. So, the system remains very fragile.

You say Obama put novocaine in the system. How will the Trump administration be able to address this?

Of course. The whole mandate he got was because he understood the economic problems. People don’t realise that Obama created inequalities when he distorted the system. You can only get rich if you have assets. What Trump is doing is put some kind of business sense in the system. You don’t have to be a genius to see what’s wrong. Instead of Trump being elected, if you went to the local souk [bazaar] in Aleppo and brought one of the retail shop owners, he would do the same thing Trump is doing. Like making a call to Boeing and asking why are we paying so much.

Click through to read more.

The Syrian War Condensed

On Medium, Nassim posted a comparison of the Assad regime and the “moderate rebels.”

Juxtaposition. The way to analyze the situation is to look at the factions comparatively. You do not compare Assad’s regime to the Danish or Norwegian governments, but to the alternative. The question becomes if there is anything in the left column that is worse than the right column?

Note 1. Assad father’s operatives blew up my house in Amioun when my grandfather, then MP, voted for Bashir. In Skin in the Game I discuss this as “acting against one’s interest” (the opposite of conflict of interest). So as a scientist and a humanist, I have been setting my grudge aside in considering the far, far, far, greater cancer of Salafism or Islamofascism.

Note 2. Recall that I am a statistician. When I took a look at the statistics of the conflicts, most appear to be fabrications inflated by Qatari-funded think tanks and their useful idiots — by a mechanism the Indians call “Salma told Sabrina”. For instance, we know that Hama’s toll was not the 30–40,000 people report but the only real evidence is closer to 2,000.

Note 3. One may ask: are the “rebels” all theocratic Salafis? No, but the groups became progressively so by the minority rule: you put a single Salafi in a group of five, and the five behave as Salafis. This, aside from Wahabi funding.

Note 4. One may ask: are all people who are mourning Aleppo that stupid, so gullible to the think tank operators? My answer, alas, is yes. And it takes some financial and intellectual independence and a great deal of integrity to analyze matters outside the main narrative as think tankers jump on you like flies.

In the end I never imagined seeing the “left” siding with the AlQaeda of Sept 11, mourning the fighters of Aleppo and, aside from such independent journalists as Robert Fisk, spreading all manner of concoctions.