THE OTHER REASON TALEB IS WRONG. THE UN-TRUSTWORTHY.
By Curt Doolittle, The Propertarian Institute
We presume intelligence is the driving factor in our differences in life outcomes. It’s just the driving factor for (a) rate of learning (b) working with complexity. Conscientiousness is evenly distributed across the spectrum of complexity regardless of intelligence. So the market demand is for minimum necessary intelligence and conscientiousness. And then by intelligence sufficient for the degree of complexity. But, what isn’t in that dichotomy is our incentives. This is where Taleb makes his second mistake. Just as we pay police to avoid corruption, we pay people more to avoid corruption. We are not paid just for conscientiousness, or just for complexity, but for loyalty and consequence.
So instead of just Intelligence, we have:
a) Reward for Conscientiousness (quality),
b) Reward for Intelligence (complexity),
c) Reward for Scarcity (by income) , and
d) Reward for Insurance (by status and security)
The Chinese bureaucracy was successful, because of the training and incentive against corruption, in exchange for the status and predictability of income – and why the German and French have been, and why the American has not been, and why the Semitic people have never been able to develop (a) civic trust or truthful speech (b) commons, (c) governments at scale, (d) nations at scale, (e) companies at scale (f) economies at scale, (g) a durable civilization without consuming an existing great one, and (h) why the Semites produce an ibn Khaldun (low trust), instead of Locke, Smith, Hume, Hamilton, Adams, and Jefferson, Pareto, Darwin, Menger, Maxwell, Nietzsche or Hayek (High Trust).
Taleb hates the answer: (a) intelligence matters in the suppression of parasitism, (b) rewarding it with income, status, and security matters in the suppression of parasitism (c) dysgenia results from low trust, poverty results from low trust, and inability to innovate results from low trust, leaving only consumption and distrust and small scale corrupt organizations, (d) he and his ‘Fat Tony’ profit only because in a high trust society and civilization under rule of law, with scale institutions, both private and public, the opportunities for immoral (non-productive) windfalls exist – precisely because we are so high trust we never even THINK of the kinds of scams that Taleb, Fat Tony, (George Soros), imagine. In other words, all Taleb has managed to do across his books is explain why he could come to the west to make money but his people live in ignorance, superstition, tribalism, deceit, and relative poverty.
( … continued )