Last week I read an article by Nicholas Taleb that caught my eye. Although I have a good deal of respect for Taleb’s original, provocative thinking, I also have a strong tendency to dislike unnecessarily aggressive tones and overly simplistic arguments. Summing it all up, the article left me an overall negative impression.
Taleb argues that we are beginning to see a rebellion against a supposed inner circle of well educated, semi-intellectual insiders. These insiders, having colonized policymaking, the mainstream media and universities, would be telling the rest of us what to do, what to eat, how to think and, most insultingly, who to vote for.
But who forms this evil force, you might wonder? A broad base of ‘Intellectual-Yet-Idiots’, as he collectively labels them in the article’s title. Watch your back, you yourself might be wearing the damning badge. I for one could well fit the IYI profile. After all, I sure as hell know less that he does about probability theory and logic models.
As he hypothesizes, I might be a mere semi-erudite who struggles to detect sophistry or getting second order logic right. And I surely plead guilty to the charge of describing some political phenomena I dislike as populism.
Taleb makes one interesting point about that old VC favorite: having skin in the game. Having stakeholders’ personal incentives aligned with the outcome of any decision making undertaken is a natural demand to formulate. It is hard to argue against that, and I in fact always try to abide by that rule in all my undertakings. But where the argumental line woes awry, in my view, is when Taleb aggregates and assigns the blame for a vast array of societal flip-flops.
Suitably his foes, the IYIs, are to blame for anything from reversed dietary recommendations to incorrect monetary stimulus; from non-replicable pharmaceutical trials to foreign policy disasters; from psychotherapeutic failures to mistaking absence of evidence for evidence of absence, not less. Because they do not have skin in the game? Is that really the problem? I could not follow that reasoning.
As I re-read the article I could not help going back to one recurring thought, though. If Taleb really wanted to publicly vindicate his penchant for binge drinking with Russians --as he is very well entitled to--, there were more economic ways to do so. More economic than shooting in circles against a new, convenient but dubious class of felons, that is.
PS: I hope this article (in Spanish) helps me crawl out of at least one circle of no-skin-in-the-game IYI hell.
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