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Script
Somtime last year Taleb started his attack on the importance of intelligence. Taleb is one more in a long line of pseudoscientists trying to drag advanced western civilization into semitic primitive sensibilities. But lets get into a little depth and explain why, by puting Taleb into context with his peers.
Listen to this long line of almost exclusively Semitic underminers of every single asapect of western civilization: Cantor and Bohr’s re-platonization of mathematics after descarte’s rescue; Freud, Boas, Gould, Pinker and now Harari’s feminine revisionist history of man; Marx, Lenin, Trotsky’s Marxism, Communism and Bolshevism to revolt against Darwin’s explanation of wesern civilzation; Garmsci, Adorno, Marcuse, Fromm, Horkhimer, Baudrillard, Lyotard’s neo marxist attack on western civlization and it’s values; Georg Lukács, Derrida, Foucault, and the postmodern revolt against western civlilizations discovery of truth, by correspondence with physical, natural, an evolutionary laws; Rothbard-Rand libertarianism as a revolt against rule of law, and demand for production of commons, Strauss, Perle, kristol’s neoconservatism as a revolt against secular academic lefts pacifism; Sam Harris’ and less so Jordan Peterson’s selective sophistry, Moldbug, Brett and Eric Weinstein’ popularity by critique – never once proposing a solution, Daniel Schmactenberger’s search for third wave socialism by extending false hope to the hopleess task of defeating physical, natural and evolutionary laws;
And until now we haven’t been able to prevent these attacks, becuase we hadn’t codified western group strategy such that defenders could argue it. Why? Because our ethos is military and militial and handed down generation by generation as the military tradition, the european traditional egalitarian law of warriors we call the peerage and the law of tort, against which the envious middle class philosophers, and lower class theologists wrote nothing but complaint begging for crumbs, without grasping that it was martial epistemology and martial reciprocial committment to self determination, sovereignty under law to preserve it, military reporting as testimony before a jury of peers, that made their existence possible.
Or that the failure of every other civlization to discover, adapt to, and apply the physical, natural, evolutionary laws; failure to preserve self determiniation; sovereignty reciprocity evidentiary testimony; argument before a jury of peers; failure to create markets in all aspect of life as a result; and falure to recognize the preservation of the law of war, laws of court, and laws of faith and the equivalent of priesthoods in each, that made their debates possible – unike other civlizations.
Because the semitic people cannot produce commons. They are tribal peoples permanently seeking a despot to produce commons so that they can focus on self, family and tribe. They have never had, and never developed, the trust necessary to produce a commons, produce defense, maintain a state, and produce a middle class. The entire history of the middle east is parasitism upon lowly farmers, and parasitism upon the trade routes that passed through the middle east as a nexus of the four continents. And the one people tunite them did so in the worst way: a supernatural religion that mandated conquest, consumption of the conquered, institutionalized, ignorance stagnation dysgenia and collapse.
So when Jews could not hold their home they found hosts. When the arabs ran out of capital to consume they were conquered by the turks. When the turks conquered the toll brigdge to europe we call byzantium, the europeans developed the age of sale, united the world in trade, and the middle east was deprived of it’s long standing asset – the shopping mall of the continents – and it’s weakness as a low trust primitive dysgenic society was exposed. If not for oil, the middle ast would be on part with subsaharan africa or southern india. (And fo what it’s worth) south america is heading the same direction..
Sometime last fall, Claire Lehman of Quillette stated:
—“Taleb, like Gould, is trying to demonise mainstream psychology–but he’s only successful in creating a folk demon for the lay public. He knows that anyone with any technical expertise thinks he’s a clown. But he doesn’t care, because accuracy is less important to him than fame.”—Claire Lehmann @clairlemon
Given that nassim and I share similarly unpleasant temperaments and objectives, I don’t want to be the frontman on this subject. But I need to put a stake in the heart of his deception – although I think Stefan Molyneu’s done a pretty good job.
Taleb’s not trying to take down psychology, he’s trying to justify Arab immigration to the west, and satisfy the chip on his shoulder as a Christian Arab.
And he’s trying to claim intelligence is a limited benefit to individual income. But he’s not showing how intelligence is an unlimited benefit to EVERYONE’S income. And he’s not separating conscientiousness and intelligence as the two factors that produce income and wealth.
Ashkenazi civilization selected for cognitively female verbal ability, and europeans put them through mutliple survival bottlenecks preserving their best, and the ashkenazi got what they bred for the ability to carry female task workloads, female ability to read peope, female verbal abilty – without realizing the cost of their gains, was female intuition, and that living off the commons of host peoples reinforced that intuition, and that as a consequence they developed and institutionalzed the female means of conflict: gossiping rallying shaming straw manning and undermining host peoples – what we call a shit-test in the vernacular – and they enjoy it as much as they enjoy cheating, and shopping. But they are just as unaware of what they’re doing as are women. So the frequent observation that all jews are female is fundamentally true. Unfortunately, we have only recently let both jews and females into society, politics, institutions, and the academy, without increasing our norms, traditions, and most importantly, laws and politics to prevent female super-predation that undermines dominant males and their group strategies – so we have high constraints on male superpredator violentce but no constraints on female superpredatory undermining. Hence the destruction of our civlization as the jewish chritisans destroyed rome from the inside out, and our immigrants can’t integrate, just as roman slaves and third worlders ouldn’t integrate into roman aristocratic civlizations.
So lete’s explore Taleb’s criticism of what he calls educated but unintelligent, and expose that their educated, intelligent, and moral. And he isn’t an his people aren’t. And they can’t even concievve of it.
Western and eastern civilizations used Testing to successfully filter out corruption for positions in government. Same for military, then same for academy. The chinese put more emphasis on bureaucracy and family. The west on quality of family as insurance against corruption, then military service, then finally on testing and academics.
The more thorougly a civilizaton produces rule of law, reliable jury, and truthful speech, the more that Wealth is available across the bell curve, with complexity (IQ) determining your market, and conscientiousness determining your ability to accumulate that wealth. Unfortunately we don’t measure Consientoiusness and IQ with equal weight. And we fail to train mindfulness to imitate conscientiosness, and train calculation through excessive repetition in the asican method to eliminate error, or train with ethics, law, economics, and general knoweldge to compensate for IQ. The only substitute for intelligence is repetition at the bottom, and general knowledge in the middle.
What Taleb is attempting to obscure is west can create large complex organizations because of trust and rule of law by filtering out corruption by granting privilege to IQ, where IQ seeks to prevening crimes not exploit weaknesses in norms, traditions, and institutions. He can’t face that fact because levantines cannot create trust, rule of law or large complex organizations, because they think lying is a tool, cunning is of merit, outwitting by cunning superior than outwitting by increase in productivity, quality, or innovation – and that the commons are to be pilfered rather than invested in at every opportunity.
So Taleb is missing the whole point: that he is only able to use his techniques of via-negativa risk investment, because he is in the only high trust polity on earth that hasn’t het outlawed using IMMORAL MEANS OF GAIN in the political, academy, media, and financial sectors. And so he, like is his alter ego “Fat Tony”, or their champion George Soros, are, by western ethics and morality ‘Scammers”.
So the west at present and the east in the past, are filtering for responsibility in detecting theft, fraud, scames and abuses. The west hasn’t expanded it’s law against gains from unproductive fraudulent, of ralse works, whether in finance, media, academy, or politics. And the 20th century was the second age of great scams. From judaism, christianity, and islam in the ancient world – with the false promsie of heaven after death if they helped undermine truth, reason, reciprocity, markets, and science. To marxism, neomarxism, postmodernism, and human differences denial in the modern world undermine truth, reason, reciprocity, markets, and science.
Yet Taleb’s entire literature is devoted to lionizing scamming while ridiculing those who hold positions of privilege (influence) precisely because they are not in the scamming business, and westerners don’t even intuit the possibility of samming like semitic peoples do. European sense-making is the opposite.
Now, this analysis will expose the primary difference between middle eastern and western people and it will explain why certain groups profit in certain industries: because they are immoral, and westerners are not. Morality requires reciprocity: productive, fully informed, warrantied, voluntary transfer, free of imposition of costs by externality against interests.
It is quite profitable to engage in immorality among permissive, high trust, moral people, just as it is less profitable so among low trust, low complexity, immoral people. And the finance business is by and large, unproductive. In other words, a westerner would never engage in the tactic used by Georg Soros, which was extractive. He did. It’s not natural for westenrers to engage in what Fat Tony and Nassim find witty and cunning – because we find it (correctly) immmoral unethical unearned gains.
So whether you cast these people as amoral or immoral, intentional or unintentional, or genetically or culturally different – the reality is that only westerners practice material Reciprocity and that verbal reciprocity we call Truth, and because we do, we produce high trust and large complex disproportionately productive organizations from the family to the enterprise to the state. And lower trust people that do NOT sort for trust and grant privilege to people who have ability in complexity to PRESERVE that TRUST. That is what the Chinese and the west did.
What institutions did the middle east foster instead? Familism, tribalism, cunning, ethics of the bazaar instead of the market, Cheating, Lying, Rent-seeking, Taxing-trade routes rather than producing. They lauded inbreeding, familism, tribalism, – and not trust and productivity – and they rewarded dogmatists not talent.
As such they could not produce a middle class, middle-class majority population, and middle-class ethics, and as such they could not develop trust at the top and push trustworthiness down into the lower middle, working, and lower classes. And because of their emphasis on the happiness of theunderclasses, they product dysgenia and a population so costly to eductation and so religiously ignorant that they can’t form a complex production hierarchy. This is why they remained poor despite taxing world trade and consuming the genetic, cultural, institutional, knowledge and aesthetic capital of five great civilizations and reducing them to ignorance, poverty and dysgenia.
So yes you can make money from your conscientious at every point in the IQ curve but you cannot push trust, reciprocity, truth, and duty, judge and jury, contract and rule of law, down into a population and produce the multiples of scale, unless you FILTER upward for both intelligence (complexity) and conscientiousness, and you reward the combination with status and income, forcing a status hierarchy that must be imitated. And that’s before we get to the fact that smarter people are better at suppressing error – which strangely, Taleb, as another proponent of via-negativa seems to overlook. And that as we scale opportunities are not scarcer, but more plentiful, but so are the increasing cascades of error.
So, in the most reductive of examples, Taleb has been trying to teach the west how to devolve into a low trust multicultural, mutlifamilial, tribale gaggle of middle eastern scam artists practicing the ethics of the bazaar and calling it ‘smart’.
Meanwhile, he fails to grasp that those ‘educated but unintelligent people’ are in their positions to eliminate error and prevent low trust, and allow us to increase productivity and scale – and to profit from that excercise- not to maximize personal profits without producing those commons.
Our society is organized to maximize profits in the COMMONS. Which if you have been following along this argument I’m making, means that not maximizing personal profit maximizes everyone’s gains.
And that we simply haven’t regulated the financial industry out of violating western law of reciprocity and productivity by a 100% tax on gains that didn’t result in increases in productivity. And we haven’t nationalized consumer credit so that consumers don’t pay interest on consumption, and investors have to seek out increasingly long term hgh capitali investment gains rather than rent seeking upon cnsumers whose government fail to provide them adequate connsumer protections.
I mean, as far as I know over one trillion dollars is extracted from the people every year that should be in the federal coffers. Given that our entire budget is 4T, and that we only Produce 3T and then some that would mean closter to a balanced budget in exchange for consumers having zero interest rates, and owning their homes in twelve instead of thirty years, and being able to save then for retirement.
So let me reduce Taleb’s life’s work as an essayist in ridicule of western civilization to its foundations: (a) Mandelbrot was right that the stock market is just noise as the federal funds rates moves through the galaxy of the economy, and w/o inside information, or manipulation, it’s a scam for all but major fund investors able to manipulate the market. .(and here comes the big one), (b) rule of law and involuntary warranty must be extended from commercial goods and services to all information in the marketplace. Yes that’s right. We gave license to people to not warranty their words in the 20th, and that’s the reason we are where we are today. Period.
Did you make that leap with me? Well, then follow me further with five points on Taleb.
Point 1 – Taleb popularized Mandelbrot’s insight that unforseen outliers are more influential on than all the cumulative predictable events. Most writers that reach readers are in the IQ130’s range and popularize other people’s ideas. They rarely invent their own. But this was a service he did for our generation and perhaps all generations to come IF we can convert that fragility into policy (as we have in our recommended constitutional amendments).
Point 2 – Taleb put into words the conservatives instinct that our natural instincts for continuus improvements in efficiency create fragility- and that we should instead, subject everything we do to stresses. This is most obvious in the failure ofour medical community to practice war games like the military does. What is more obvous is that the treasury doesn’t either – because tey have not converted the financial stransaction system to strategic infrastructure despite the crash of 2008, and the demonstration the business cycle theory was inescapable.
Point 3 – Taleb is not a scientists, but an essayist, and a philosophical platonist in the continental tradition, and unfortunately he bears the burden of biases from the worst of the semitic traditions. So at first glance he popularized Mandelbrot’s insights through humorous ego-inspiring essays making us feel smart like it made him feel smart. But the reality is, we have been smart for 5000 years: we’ve demanded warranty of one’s words, martial testimony “reporting” in all walks of life. These costs let us contruct commons. And the RETURNS ON COMMONS make our disproportionate Private returns possible. Because commons require high trust, a demand for productivity to profit, and warranty of truthfulness – and that’s why Europeans are the only people to have produced those commons. We call it the civil society.
Point 4 – Taleb studies literature, but less so cognitive science, economics, and law – so he can’t grasp that the west solved skin in thru game through warranty enforced by rule of law. And that the semitic people can’t practice warranty, because they can’t practice truth, they can’t practice truth before face, and they can’t produce rule of law because of it.
Point 5 – Taleb he certaintly doesn’t grasp the foundations of mathematics, and he’s a victim of the semitic re-mystification of mathematics in the late 19th and early twentieth as set theory of language (a platonic idealism) rather than european system of measurment with geometry, engineering, and operationalism (an aristotelian realism). Meaning that it’s not possible to determine the information necessary to change state without first developing general artificial intelligence, and in turn, a unit of measure for it. Which any student of the history of commensurability should grasp immediately.
All philosophers produce a few insights. He’s produced his. But as usual, the substantive insights aren’t his; Like many non-european users of european tools, his empirical and philsophical efforts hit a predictable dead end becuase he didn’t understand the european sensemaking those tools were constructed upon. His remaining ideas make for good wisdom on life, but comparatively petty; those he is most proud of are simply examples of why semitic as well as other less developed people cannot be integrated into western civlization because wither iQ or some other genetic disposition, they are fundamentally unable to adapt to the counter-intuitive depth of european sense making: hte quest for that which is true and decidable by physical natural and evolutionary laws – regardless of whether it is preferable. We are taught to be warriors and judges that happen to engage in business in the off season. They are taught to be bargainers and bazaar merchants without exposure to judicial or marital ethics.
And that is our difference.
Because what europeans do is expensive. We make commons. European equivalent of communism is in capitlizing the commons not consumption for the moment. And capitalizing comons – which is the purpose of my work – is absent from our ‘individualist’ philosphy, because it was the aristoracy’s responsibilyt – and we disintermediated them without taking up their roles.
Europeans make it so you need a little house, and good food, because courts, churches, business, streets, parks and cemeteries are equally sacred grounds – and as safe as your kitchen. And our truth and reciproicty in our law is as sacred as our faith.
And no other people can manage it. Which is why our immigrant cities are dying one at a time, – and why only the government and financial sector parasites are benefiting from it.