Taleb’s philosophical notebook

The mathematical version is here.

Non philosophorum sed philosophiae historiae

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165 – Lindy Effect and Psychological Findings

Psychology is undergoing a replication crisis; most of its research is suspicious (statistics are shoddy). Further, I've also shown in Silent Risk that many ideas of “rationality" come from an incomplete application of probability theory. Some derivations (hot hand fallacy) are just mathematically flawed. Some things (hyperbolic discounting, intransitity of preferences, mental accounting, myopic loss aversion, 1/n, "dread risk” fears) are extremely rational once one uses a more rigorous or realistic probability model or consider the difference between the collective and the individual – survival of the collective matters. Rational, it can be shown, is what allows those things that are supposed to survive, to survive.

Here I surmise that everything that works in social science and psychology has to be Lindy-proof, that is, have an antecedent in the classics; otherwise it will not replicate or not generalize beyond the experiment. By classics we can define the Latin (& late Helenistic) moral literature (moral sciences meant something else than they do today): Cicero, Seneca, M. Aurelius, Epictetus, Lucian, or the poets: Juvenal, Horace or the later French so-called “moralists” (La Rochefoucault, Vaugenargues, La Bruyere, Chamfort). Bossuet is a class on his own. One can use Montaigne and Erasmus as a portal to the ancients: Montaigne was the popularizer of his day.

Utility Theory / Prospect Theory: Segnius homines bona quam mala sentiunt in Livy's Annals (XXX, 21) (Men feel the good less intensely than the bad).

Negative advice: Nimium boni est, cui hinil est mali Ennius , via Cicero

Hyperbolic discounting: 3asfour bil 2id a7san bin 3ashra 3alshajra.

Madness of Crowds: Nietzche: Madness is rare in individuals, but in groups, parties, nations, it is the rule (this counts as ancient wisdom since Nietzsche was a classicist; I've seen many such references in Plato)

Antifragility Cicero (Disp Tusc, II, 22) When our souls are mollified, a bee can sting - See also Machiavelli

The Paradox of Progress/Choice (Lucretius): there is a familiar story of a NY banker vacationing in Greece, talking to a fisherman & scrutinizing the fisherman's business, comes up for a scheme to help the fisherman make it a big business. The fisherman asked him what the benefits were; the banker answered that he could make a pile of money in NY and come back vacation in Greece; something that seemed ludicrous to the fisherman who was already there doing the kind of things bankers do when they go on vacation in Greece. The story was very well known in antiquity, under a more elegant form, as retold by Montaigne I, 42 (my transl.):

When King Pyrrhus tried to cross into Italy, Cynéas, his wise adviser, tried to make him feel the vanity of such action.“To what end are you going into such enterprise?”, he asked.

Pyrrhus answered: “To make myself the master of Italy”.

Cynéas: “And so?”.

Pyrrhus: “To get to Gaul, then Spain”.

Cynéas: “Then?”

Pyrrhus: “To conquer Africa, then... come rest at ease”.

Cynéas: “But you are already there; why take more risks”?

Montaigne then cites the well known Lucretius (V, 1431) on how human nature knows no upper bound, as if to punish itself.

Loss Aversion: Nearly all the letters of Seneca -

Cognitive dissonance: Aesop -

Overconfidence: Fiducia pecunias amici “I lost money because of my excessive confidence”, Erasmus citing Theognis, Epicharmus

164 – Is Levantine “Arabic”? Not by any metric, no more than Italian is French

Note: I spent part of my summer “vacation” of 2015 doing intense Syriac at Beth Mardutho.
Levantine is a standalone Semitic language that is close to Aramaic, predates Arabic, has some Arabic influences (perhaps no more than Farsi or Turkish), and has inherited from it broken plurals but not its rich verb forms. Grammar remains nonArabic. Many words that are in Arabic but not common in Aramaic happen to be in North-Phoenician (Ugaritic). Unlike genetics that has rigorous mathematical formulations and clear-cut distinctions (haplogroups show vertical not lateral transmission), linguisitc categories are fuzzy and, for Semitic languages, unrigorous.

Many people who are fluent and Levantine and Arabic fail to realize that the distance between the two is greater than between many languages deemed distinct, such as French and Romanian... Slavic “languages” such as Ukranian and Polish are much, much closer to one another than Levantine and Arabic. Same with Scandinavian and Germanic languages. But there is a bias in believing that whenever a word exists in both Levantine and Arabic, that it is of Arabic origin, never Aramaic or Canaanite -largely because of the typical lack of familiarity with Levantine languages. So Mar7aba is deemed to be Arabic when it is in fact just Aramaic.

Ana bi-Amioun is Levantine for “I am in Amioun". In Aramaic-Syriac (most versions) it would be "Ana bi-Amioun". In Arabic "Innani fi-Amioun" (Arabs say "fi" in their modern dialects, not "bi"; listen to Jordanians who use North Arabian versions; the "bi" in Arabic comes from Aramaic). Same with words that have hamze, i.e. Mayy in Levantine is water (as in Aramaic), Ma2 in Arabic, etc. (If Egyptians say "mayya", it is likely because they got it from the Aramaic which was Persian state language). But the "y” in Arabic can become a hamze/olaf: Yaduhu in Arabic is ido (Yad->Eed) in both Syriac and Levantine.

By Aramaic tongues I mean: Western Aramaic: Maaloula, Yerushalmi, and Eastern Aramaic: Syriac (Eastern and Western), Babili ( Babili and Yerushalmi are both Talmudic, but most of what we read is Babili), modern neoAramaic (Mandean), and the spoken Syro-Mesopotamian Turoyo (Central-Western Syriac), and Mesopotamian Swadaya(Eastern Syriac). In Northern Lebanon we are inspired of Western Aramaic but with Syriac words; the language like Hebrew retained the Canaanite shift, “Allah" becomes "Alloh", "Taleb" is pronounced "Tolib". But unlike Eastern Aramaic where Sarah is "Saro" while for us it is "Sora”. (Incidentally, Taleb is present in Ugaritic/Phoenician).

Levantine uses the French é sound (the diacritical rboso) where Arabic has an “i” (kasra) or long i. (batyté, Ghassén, etc.)

When I trained in the Lebanese army the march (one-two-three) was in Syriac “7ad, Tr(n)en, Tlete, Arb3a” (not Wa7ad, Etnen, ...).

Note the difference: mim in Arabic (beytohom) become noun in Aramaic and North Levantine (beyton, beytkon). Even Ibrahim becomes Brohin.

Same with grammar. The stucture is largely Aramaic. For instance, we use the plural form for a verb before a plural subject; in Arabic the verb is singular.

It is foolish to think that a population will speak a language, say Aramaic, then suddenly, tabula rasa, switch to another one without bastardization.

Traditional linguistics categorizes languages as independent variables, failing to take into account co-linearity, i.e., if Y= a_1 X_1+a_2 X_2 + \eta (noise), the effect will show loading in a_1 or a_2, not both. So if Levantine resembles Arabic, and Arabic resembles Aramaic, and Aramaic resembles Canaanite/Hebrew, the tendendy is to believe that Levanine comes from one (the a_1 with the highest load) not another.

Accordingly, simplified linguistics fail with Semitic languages because of confounding, much more consequential with Semitic tongues than IndoEuropean ones. In English we know that what comes from Latin has no colinearity with Northern European sources, except for remote roots.

An argument is that the dhad in Canaanite became a 3ayn (Eretz in Hebrew became Ar3a in Aramaic). So there was a shift that stayed in Aramaic and Levantine use the Arabic dhad that does not have the shift (which is believed to imply that we did not get these words from Aramaic). But the argument is not strong: Arabs did not pronounce the dhad as modified tzadeh.

Verbs forms: Arabic has 15 forms; Levantine and Aramaic have the same 4-6 forms (depending on regions).

So it looks after deeper investigation that in fact except for broken plurals, and a few other words, what resembles Arabic is what is in both Aramaic and Arabic, or in both Arabic and Canaanite. (Note that Syriac has broken plurals).

I am preparing a linguistic note... Which doesn't fit people politically since “Arabism" is a political agenda. People in Syria and Lebanon are brainwashed to think that they are speaking "a dialect of” Arabic, when it is not even remotely true.

More examples:
“Zammar 3a l'kou3” Levantine
“Zammar 3a kou3” Aramaic
“Inshud 3al mun3atif” Arabic

For A***le:
“Bu5sh tizo” Levantine
“Bu5sh tizo” Aramaic
“Thaqb iliatihi” Arabic (or mu2a55ara)

ARABIC LEVANTINE( Beirut, Amioun)

1s Ana Ana, ana

2ms Anta inta, int
2fs Anti inte, int
3ms Huwa huwwe, hu
3fs Hiya hiyye, hi
2d Antuma into, ont
3md Huma hinne, hinn
3fd huma hinne, hinn
1p Na7nu ne7na, ne7no
2mp Antum into
2fp Antunna into
3mp Hum hinne, hinn
3fp Hunna hinne, hinn

ARABIC LEVANTINE
(long a, 2) long eh
1s 2akl 3am bekol [3am means “in the process of ” in Syriac]
2ms ta2kol 3am btekol
2fs ta2kulina 3am tekle
3ms yakulu 3am yekol
3fs takul 3am tekol
2d ta2kulani 3am bteklo
3md yakulani 3am byeklo
3fd na2kul 3amnekol
1p takuluna 3amteklo
2mp takuluna 3amteklo
2fp takulna 3am teklo
3mp yakuluna 3ambyeklo
3fp yakulna 3ambyeklo

ARABIC Amioun Beirut

Akaltu Kilt Akalt

Akalta Kilt Akalt
Akalti Kilte Akalte
Akala Akol Akal
Akalat Aklet Akalet
Akaltuma kelto Akalto
Akalat eklo Akalo
Akalata Aklo Akalo
Akalna kelna Akalna
Akaltum Kelto Akalto
Akaltunna Kelto Akalto
Akaltu eklo Akalto
Akalna eklo Akalo

162 – That Thing We Call Religion

The problem of the verbalistic (and the journalistic) is expressed in an aphorism earlier in the Incerto: mathematicians think in (well precisely defined and mapped) objects, philosophers in concepts, jurists in constructs, logicians in operators (...), and idiots in words. We saw that risk and tail risk are mathematically separate objects, conflated by the IYI (intellectual yet idiot) crowd. Two people can be using the same word, meaning different things, yet continue the conversation, which is fine for coffee, but not when making decisions, particularly policy decisions affecting others. But it is easy to trip them, as Socrates did, simply by asking them what they mean by what they said – hence philosophy was born as rigor in discourse and disentanglement of mixed up notions, in precise opposition to the sophist’s promotion of rhetoric. But, since Socrates we have had a long tradition of mathematical science and contract law driven by precision in mapping terms. But we also have had many pronouncements by idiots using labels.

People rarely mean the same thing when they say “religion”, nor do they realize that they don't mean the same thing. For early Jews and Muslims, religion was law. Din means law in Hebrew and religion in Arabic. For early Jews, religion was also tribal; for early Muslims, it was universal . For the Romans, religion was social events, rituals, and festivals – the word religio was opposition to superstitio, and while present in the Roman zeitgeist had no equivalent concept in the Greek-Byzantine East . Law was procedurally and mechanically its own thing, and early Christianity, thanks to Saint Augustine, stayed relatively away from the law, and, later, remembering its foundations, had an uneasy relation with it. The difference is marked in that Christian Aramaic uses a different word: din for religion and nomous (from the Greek) for law. Jesus, with his imperative “give to Caesar what belongs to Caesar”, separated the holy and the profane: Christianity was for another domain, “the kingdom to come”, only merged with this one in the eschaton. Neither Islam nor Judaism have a marked separation between holy and profane. And of course Christianity moved away from the solely-spiritual domain to embrace the ceremonial and ritualistic, integrating much of the pagan rites of the Levant and Asia Minor.

For Jews today, religion became ethnocultural, without the law – and for many, a nation. Same for Syriacs, Chaldeans, Armenians, Copts, and Maronites. For Orthodox and Catholic Christians religion is aesthetics, pomp and rituals. For Protestants, religion is belief with no aesthetics, pomp or law. Further East, for Buddhists, Shintoists and Hindus, religion is practical and spiritual philosophy, with a code of ethics (and for some, cosmogony). So when Hindu talk about the Hindu “religion” they don't mean the same thing to a Pakistani as it would to a Hindu, and certainly something different for a Persian.

When the nation-state idea came about, things got more, much more complicated. When an Arab now says “Jew” he largely means something about a creed; to Arabs, a converted Jew is no longer a Jew. But for a Jew, a Jew is someone whose mother is a Jew. But it somewhat merged into nation-state and now means a nation.

In Serbia-Croatia and Lebanon, religion means something at times of peace, and something quite different at times of war.

When someone discusses the “Christian minority” in the Levant, it doesn’t mean (as Arabs tend to think) promoting a Christian theocracy (full theocracies were very few in Christian history, just Byzantium and a short attempt by Calvin). He just means “secular” or wants a marked separation of church and state. Same for the gnostics (Druids, Druze, Mandeans, Alawis).

The problem with the European Union is that the naive IYI bureaucrats (these idiots who can’t find a coconut on Coconut island) are fooled by the label. They treat Salafism as just a religion – with its houses of “worship”—when in fact it is just an intolerant political system, which promotes (or allows) violence and refuses the institutions of the West – those that allow them to operate. As we saw with the minority rule, the intolerant will run over the tolerant; cancer requires being stopped before it becomes metastatic.

We will see that “belief” can be epistemic, or simply procedural (pisteic) – leading to confusions about what sort of beliefs, are religious beliefs and which ones are not, disentangled through signaling. For, on top of the “religion” problem, there is a problem with belief. Some beliefs are largely decorative , some are functional (they help in survival); others are literal. And to revert to our metastatic Salafi problem: when one of these fundamentalists talks to a Christian, he is convinced that the Christian is literal, while the Christian is convinced that the Salafi has the same oft-metaphorical concepts to be taken seriously but not literally – and, often, not very seriously. Religions, such as Christianity, Judaism, and, to some extent Shiite Islam, evolved (or let their members evolve in developing a sophisticated society) precisely by moving away from the literal – in addition to the functional aspect of the metaphorical, the literal doesn’t leave any room for adaptation .

161 – Why the drop in Battery Costs is a Big Deal (Convexity)

The problem with solar is storage (the raw energy is free, hence optionality with a known strike price). Say you spend in your house 25 kWh per 24h periods. You may be able to get all of it from solar panels (the cost of which is getting cheaper and cheapter), but would get most of it during a 5h window. Say you need to store for 19-21 hours and the cost of storage is prohibitive: $300 per KwH, for a upper bound of needs of, say 40 kWh, $12,000 (with a 2x safety margin). But the way to calculate the effectiveness in cost savings is in taking the difference from the upper bound, not raw costs. And unlike other sources there is strong optionality: solar cannot rise in variable costs (all the costs are fixed for the life of the equipment) while conventional electricity is uncertain, subject to squeezes, bottlenecks and rise in prices. Most people doing static analyses fail to get such convexity.
We can expect serious, serious acceleration in use.

160 – The Verbalism of Political Discourses

The problem of nonlinearity is as follows. I am against using drugs for mild illnesses (because of iatrogenics) but in favor of using them very aggressively for severe conditions. Likewise I am against interventionism on the part of government: like drugs, it should only be used when necessary, mostly to prevent systemic effects. Words cannot convey the nonlinearity of the statement. Am I “for" or "against” intervention?
Scale: Singapore and China have similar government, but works in the small better than in the large. So It also happens that the discussion about government misses a dimension. A municipality is a goverment; a top-down centralized system is one as well. Should we have no municipalities or just no central government? A coop in NY has a government, with coercive rules for those who elect to be part of it. Should we have no coops?
Clearly one cannot rule out size and centralization as the main reason the Soviet system collapsed. The same happens with corporations when they get large hence protected by centralized governments.
“Libertarians", whatever that means, fail to get the nonlinearities/scale effects in these statements. They may be localists (as I am) or simply anarchists (against all rules). There is too much verbalism, not enough logical/mathematical rigor in what I tend to hear. The term "libertarian” is meaningless unless a scale is specified.
Furthermore, many conflate “against government" and "against centralized government” (I stand for the latter, not the former).

155 – In Arabic, “Jew” Means Something Else than in Western Languages

When a Westerner says “Jew", he means a race, or in the case of Slavs, a nationality. In Arabic (at least until a few years ago), to be a Jew is to have a certain religion, a mazhab, not an ethnicity and can only be an ethnicity if the origin is from non Arab land. Being an Arab is Ibn 3arab regardless of "belief". Arab "antisemitism” (sic) is not racial like European antisemitism, it is just religious intolerance that can be solved (and has been traditionally solved) by conversion, often forced conversion. Which is why people are talking past each other when they discuss history and historical distinctions. In references, Maimonides was an Arab, so was Sa3adiah Ga3on, so were so many. They wrote in Arabic, and Hebrew was a sort of Latin reserved for learned texts. Indeed so many Palestinians claim Jewish origin, though converted...

This is not to say that there is no Arab racism, but it was never directed at Jews Ibn 3arab per se (unlike Western Jews). In Bagdad, during the Abbasites, Arabs had ethnic tensions with Persans (Ctesiphon was largely a Persian town and the Abbasides used the Sassanide imperial structure) and the Jews counted as Banu 3arab as they were favored as Arabs; the rulers encouraged them to settle there in order to lower the rate of “foreigners" , the "shu3ubiyyin”, Moslems of Persian or Turkic stock... Which explains why circa 1900 30% of the population of Bagdad was Jewish. Same with the Christians. Arabic speaking Christians are Arabs, Banu 3arab, but not the Chaldeans.

Likewise, today when a Westerner tells a Lebanese Shiite that he has a separate “ethnicity”, he is baffled. Mazhab is not ethnicity, no more than being a democrat in the US would be a different race (although it should be). Some Christians Levantines only started to claim separate ethnicity on spurious grounds in response to Western classifications.

The reasons for Arabs seeing Jews as Arabs but not Chaldeans are 1) Judaism in late antiquity was not tribal; it was proselytic (a proselytism which benefited Christianity), and 2) it was assumed that they mixed with Arab tribes or many Arab tribes have Hebraic blood.

Also I noticed “happy Easter" and "happy passover” are different words in English. In Arabic, 3eid el Fise7 is the same word for both. Happy Easter means happy passover. (Same as pasqua).

Note: I actually believe that religious intolerance has been more murderous than racism in the West until 1939. Consider the cathars in France, the protestants, etc.

154 – Bounded, Unbounded, Finite and Infinite

Having spent more than two decades, as an option trader and book-runner (~ 650,000 trades), I have always been leery of inexperienced academics talking about “prediction markets" when we have organic, spontaneously formed markets, and have had them since civilization started – my reaction is that of an old plane engineer and pilot being lectured by a high school English student who never flew a plane. You can't tell them what they don't know. Prediction markets have to be necessarily in "binary space”, i.e. one-dimensional and only deliver probabililities when real world exposures are variable and always always open ended or with a remote bound. They test the wrong variable: a bet doesn't hedge the ecology of the real world. Here is my mooc explaining it. And here is my paper. I ignore other problems that a bet can reflect risk aversion rather than prediction.

But, it turned out, things are worse than that. In my debate on twitter with Robin Hanson, one of the proponents of prediction markets, he argued (defending the necessary boundedness of a binary bet) that “Within a finite time, real financial assets will only have a finite number of possible outcomes." He was justifying the boundedness of bets with the fact that prices appear finite. This set me off as a worrying violation of statistics and probability since all processes, no matter what their "support" is (on which further down), will deliver finite outcomes (have you ever observed an "infinite” realization?). But finite at which values? Forget statistics, this it is a blatant violation of elementary trading, something that uneducated traders and stockbrokers understand.

Every rookie in trading knows that, in your projections about the future, you cannot “cap an outcome", i.e. find an upper bound to it, beyond which no realization is possible, unless there is an organic cap, like a contractual ceiling. No matter how high your "cap", it can be topped by another one (albeit with a declining probability under unimodal distributions). So educated and uneducated traders use "infinite" as proxy for "cannot find a bound for the payoff". We call this open-ended. When there are reasons to cap, we cap, and it is no longer open-ended. The converse is "floor an outcome", a stock price is deemed to be "floored" at 0, which is reasonable though not fully rigorous, as we have seen weird things with negative interest rates. Likewise for academic finance and economics: infinity means "no known upper bound for the outcome”.

Now more worrisome is the flaw in statistical reasoning on the part of Hanson and, what is worse, all these little social scientists who didn't get it from observing the discussion. Let me repeat: finiteness of realizations does not imply finitness of support. The support of a probability distribution, say (0, Infinity), is the space of “possible" realizations that the variable can take. But all realizations ex post have to be "finite”, take on a number you can use, like 101.36 or 176.32, etc. Otherwise we would have no probability distributions; very few continuous distributions are compact in their support, such as the uniform and the beta distribution. The Gaussian is deemed close to compact, but we still have infinities on both sides. So listening to Hanson, all supports need to be pre-defined in compact intervals. But the flaw in reasoning is that he went backwards from realizations to support, rather than the opposite.

For a minute I thought about giving Hanson the benefit of the doubt, until I remembered his papers on prediction markets which I found not even wrong to cite them in my own commentary. It is necessary to engage someone who is wrong, but impossible to engage someone who is not even wrong. Staying in the debate meant having to explain to Mr Hanson what finite and infinite mean in probability, along with why realizations are never infinite, stuff that is required to understand before writing about these matters.This is similar to having to discuss a Fourier Transform and needing to explain something as elementary as what a complex number means, and facing the idiotic “show me a complex number in real life”.

The good thing about twitter is that you can publicly bust someone and show his incompetence with a single question, just as in a Wall Street interview. Academics in their papers can make things complicated so they can go a long time making us believe they know what they are talking about. You can only tell their competence when you engage them/ ask them questions.

(Technical note: you can turn a vanilla into a binary, but never a binary into a vanilla unless there is a contractual ceiling.)

(Technical note: Option theoretical formalization. I am rewriting the paper, formalizing the “elementary unit”, a binary bet as an Arrow-Debreu state price, or Butterfly, as building block for all decision theory. It makes all the math come out formally. It is remarkable how sloppy decision science is. Arbitrage trading is the best school to be formal: you need to have a clear, very very clear idea of the specification of what we are talking about, otherwise the book blows-up).

153 – The Supreme Scientific Rigor of The Russian School of Probability

I would like to record here (so people get off my back) that I do not belong to the so-called “Austrian School” of economics, in spite of a few similar positions on bailouts and bottom-up systems. I believe in mathematical statements. But if I were to belong to a school of thought designated by a nationality, the {NATIONALITY} SCHOOL of {DISCIPLINE} it would be the Russian school of probability.

Members across three generations: P.L. Chebyshev, A.A. Markov, A.M. Lyapunov, S.N. Bernshtein (ie. Bernstein), E.E. Slutskii, N.V. Smirnov, L.N. Bol'shev, V.I. Romanovskii, A.N. Kolmogorov,Yu.V. Linnik, and the new generation: V Petrov, S.V. Nagaev, A.V. Nagaev, A. Shyrayev, etc.

They had something rather potent in the history of scientific thought: they thought in inequalities, not equalities (most famous: Markov, Chebyshev, Bernstein, Lyapunov). They used bounds, not estimates. Even their central limit was a matter of bounds. A world apart from the new generation of users who think in terms of precise probability. It accommodates skepticism, one-sided thinking: A is >x, A O(x) [Big-O: “of order” x], rather than A=x.

Working on integrating the rigor in risk bearing. We always know one-side, not the other.

152 – “Déja Vu” Illusion

For something to look original to people in a profession, say academia, it is needs to be nonoriginal, and, what is worse, vice versa. When work is original, it tends to elicit “nothing new”.

The “nothing new” response is likely to come from nonspecialists or people who do not know a subject well. For a philistine, Verdi's Trovatore is not new, since it sounds like another opera he heard by Mozart with women torturing their throat. One needs to know a subject very well to place it in context.

Now academics learn to take a paper or a class of papers, imitate the style, the organization; copy the phraseology, discuss the historical literature and find some wrinkle on the problem that makes it look like a contribution. This is what tends to be published, and this is what seems to be “original”. And these works never survive the author.

150 – The Stickiness of Languages

Many Greek Cypriots still speak the language called “Cypriot Maronite Arabic", that is, 12 centuries after their settlement and integration in the Greek side of the Island. Languages are stickier than we think (People tend to associate languages with states, when the correlation was low before 1917: around the Mediterranean, particularly in Asia Minor, languages had no link to the rule (Armenians spent thousands of years in the area between Cilicia to Aleppo, way past the lifetime of some "Armenian State”;etc.)). It is only today that the Cypriot Arabic language has weakened , thanks to Facebook and intermarriage. Semitic languages being based on the triplet of consonnants – using vowels mainly for declensions – are very stable (the drift in Cypriot Maronite Arabic appears very small).

This stickiness of the Semitic languages supports a speculation: by the 7th Century there had to be many pockets in the Western Mediterranean of Punic-Canaanite speakers, about a thousand years after the fall of Carthage. Falling under Roman rule did not turn the population into Latin speakers (only for scholarly purposes, say Saint Augustine of Hyppo; we have much evidence of diglossia in the Levant, of the use of a language at home and for oral communication that is different from the language of writing, and doing so for 1000 years). And there had to be plenty of Semitic language speakers; just follow placenames from Carthage to Ramatuelle in France near Saint Tropez (ramat el means hill of God in both Canaanite and Hebrew). Even Marseilles seems to come from Marsa, port in Canaanite (and not from Massilia the Roman name since the Romans did not make names, but transcribed them). I estimate that the third of the coastal villages spoke Semitic dialects. The modus of the Phoenicians was network, hence a system of trade links built on trust (you send merchandise to a relative who pays you back; you needed a certain amount of trust before the letter of credit). The region is large: it extends all the way to Mogador on the Atlantic coast.

This explains the mystery of the effortless Arab invasion of the Southern and Western Mediterranean, all the way to Spain (and, less advertised, the Portuguese Algarve). They had to be welcomed by the local population along the coast. Canaanite and Arabic are easily mutually comprehensible (the distance between Semitic languages is very short, a corrollary of the stability thanks to the triplet of consonnants). And it is wasy for a Punic speaker to progressively become an Arabic speaker, since he already knows 80-90% of the vocabulary.

This also gives some credibility to the thesis that was popping up in the 19th century that the North African Jews had a Phoenician origin (or that the difference between Canaanite and Jew before the rabbinical period was not very pronounced for people to see an immediate difference). This is very plausible, since the Phoenician Canaanite diaspora had characteristics in trade networks that is similar to that of the Jews of later period. We find them in the same places as the Phoenicians. They had similar Gods (plus or minus monotheism & the beastly tophet, but we know of syncretisms as because religions were not very differentiated, as we saw evidence in Doura Europos and there were places of worship that would accommodate both Jews, early Christians, and pagans). They had a nearly identical language in the East (Canaanite) and a very similar one in the West (we only have one punic passage transcribed into Latin in a play by Plautus: in spite of the geographic distance it remained very close to classical Hebrew and Canaanite). My speculation is that many of the Jews are those locals who did not convert to Islam, and did not feel that had to. I voiced the idea to Jacques Attali (of North African Jewish ancestry) who boasted a historical relation to Phoenicians; he blurted out “tu me dis que les juifs sont des phéniciens, je te dis que les phéniciens sont des juifs”).

It is remarkable how people fall for the retrospective distortion, by imparting to ancient religions modern definitions and differentiations from rituals and theologies developed after, and to ancient “states" the definition of the modern state. "Identities" did not exist at the time, so "Canaanite" or "Arab" were not part of the discussion: one belonged to a certain network, a tribe, bottom up, using the Semitic patrilinear line of belonging. Ibn 3am means "cousin from the father's side” (Remarkably, in Hebrew 3am means people, or tribe).

Finally, the Maltese, in spite of having been a bastion of Christianity, still speak a Semitic language easy to understand by Arabic speakers.

149 – Why Is Fragility in the Nonlinear

I- There have been works on the link between risk and nonlinearity (initially by Arrow and Pratt, then followed by a collection of authors such as Rothchild, Stiglitz, Machina, and others). These fellows were not option traders; their work was mistakenly focused on nonlinearity of preferences (which they got wrong since preferences are not concave, but convex-concave and path dependent as shown by Kahneman & Tversky). What they missed is that the nonlinearity of probability of harmful events automatically determine nonlinearity in survival, hence concavity of harm.

It is not a matter of psychology and preferences, but a physical property stemming from the structure of survival probabilities.

Probabilities decline (under all standard monomodal distributions and all unbounded distributions) in an accelerated and convex manner. All unbounded continuous distributions look like half-bell curves on the right below their maximum density. And the probabilities fall in a very, very rapid manner. Even with power laws, but slightly less so than with standard cases of exponential decline. The upper bound of the harm function is the negative of the inverse of the survival probability, hence concave in shape.

More clearly: tail events need to hit you disproportionately more than regular events.

From ANTIFRAGILE:

Let me explain the central argument – why is fragility necessarily in the nonlinear and not in the linear? That was the intuition from the coffee cup I mentioned in the Prologue. Just as with the large stone hurting more than the equivalent weight in pebbles, if, for a human, jumping one millimeter (an impact of small force) caused an exact linear fraction of the damage of, say, jumping to the ground from thirty feet, then the person would be already dead from cumulative harm. Actually a simple computation shows that he would have expired within hours from touching objects or pacing in his living room, given the multitude of such stressors and their total effect. The fragility that comes from linearity is immediately visible, so we rule it out because the object would be already broken and the person already dead. This leaves us with the following: what is fragile is something that is both unbroken and subjected to nonlinear effects —and extreme, rare events since hits of large size (or high speed) are rarer than ones of small size (and slow speed).

Let me rephrase it, in connection with Black Swans and extreme events. There are a lot more ordinary events than extreme events. In the financial markets, there are at least ten thousand time more events of .1% than events of 10%. There are close to eight thousand micro-earthquakes daily on planet earth, that is, those below 2 on the Richter scale —about three million a year. These are totally harmless, and, with three million per year, you would need them to be so. But shocks of intensity 6 and higher on the scale make the newspapers. Take objects such as coffee cups get a lot of hits, a million more hits of (to take an arbitrary measure), say, one hundredth of a pound per square inch than hits of a hundred pounds per square inch. Accordingly, we are necessarily immune to the cumulative effect of small deviations, or shocks of very small magnitude, which implies that these affect us disproportionally less (that is, nonlinearly less) than larger ones.

I simplify the theorem. Take x a shock to your system.The higher x, the more damage. Take H(x) the harm from x. The upper bound is H(x) = -1/F(x) where F(x) is the probabilityof harm as in the figure below. with H'(x)<0 at x₀. Since P[x>K] the probability of having encountered intensity K in the past conditional on having survived is concave, then the form of H(x) needs to have a negative second derivative at the initial value x₀. But there is an additiona complexity: H(x) F(x) need to be declining for the expectation to be integrable, unless harm is bounded by some amount (a maximum harm beyond which it makes no difference).

The only probability distribution giving linear harm would have the shape p(x)=1/x, one that would not have any moment.

The result of the convexity of probabilities is also seen in evolution, since probability of harm map into fitness and has to be conditioned by the statistical property of the size of exposures.

II- Take this medical application. The Second Principle of Iatrogenics: it is not linear. I do not believe that we should take risks with near-healthy people and treat them at all; I also believe that we should take a lot, a lot more risks with those deemed in danger.

Why do we need to focus treatment on more serious cases, not marginal ones? Take this example showing nonlinearity. When hypertension is mild, say marginally higher than the zone accepted as “normotensive”, the chance of benefiting from the drug is close to 5.6% (only one person in eighteen benefit from the treatment). But when tension is considered to be in the “high” or “severe” categories, the chance of benefiting are now 26% and 72%, respectively (that is that one person in four and two persons out of 3 will benefit from the treatment). So the treatment benefits are convex to condition (the benefits rise disproportionally, in an accelerated manner). But consider that the iatrogenics should be constant for all categories! In the very ill condition, the benefits are large relative to iatrogenics, in the borderline one, they are small. This means that we need to focus on high symptom conditions and ignore, I mean really ignore, other situations in which the patient is not very ill.

Another way to view it is by considering that mother nature had to have tinkered through selection in inverse proportion to the rarity of the condition (in a convex manner according to the probabilities we saw above). Of the hundred of thousands of drugs today, I can hardly find a via positiva one that makes a healthy person unconditionally “better”. And the reason we have not been able to find drugs that make us feel unconditionally better when we are well (or unconditionally stronger, etc.) is for the same statistical reason: nature would have found this magic pill. But consider that illness is rare, and the more ill the person the less likely nature would have found the solution, in an accelerating way. A condition that is three mean deviations away from the norm is more than three hundred times rarer than normal; an illness that is five mean deviations from the norm is more than a million times rarer!

148 – The Central Idea: the conflation of event and exposure, or difference between f(x) and x

• f(x) is exposure to the variable x. f(x) can equivalently be called “payoff from x”, even “utility of payoff from x” where we introduce in f a utility function. x can be anything. This explains why innovation when in f(x)(trial and error) does not require understanding of x as much as being smart about f(x). The difference between theory and practice is in x vs f(x).
  Example: x is the intensity of an earthquake on some scale in some specific area, f(x) is the number of persons dying from it. We can easily see that f(x) can me made more predictable than x (if we force people to stay away from a specific area or build to some standards, etc.).
  Example: x is the rainfall in NY, f(x) is the health of my garden. Or x is arsenic, f(x) is my health (in low doses f(x) is actually OK). Example: x is the number of meter of my fall to the ground when someone pushes me from height x, f(x) is a measure of my physical condition from the effect of the fall. Clearly I can't predict x very easily (who will push me), rather f(x).
  Example: x is the number of cars in NYC at noon tomorrow, f(x) is travel time from point A to point B for a certain agent. f(x) is more predictable than x, particularly if he modifies his route.

• Some people talk about f(x) thinking they are talking about x. This is the problem of the conflation of event and exposure. This errors present in Aristotle is virtually ubiquitous in the philosophy of probability (say, Hacking).

• One can become antifragile to x without understanding x, through convexity of f(x).

• The answer to the question “what do you do in a world you don’t understand?” is, simply, work on the undesirable states of f(x).

• It is often easier to modify f(x) than get better knowledge of x. (In other words, the robustification rather than forecasting Black Swans).
  Example: If I buy an insurance on the market, here x, dropping more than 20%, f(x) will be independent of the part of the probability distribution of x that is below 20%. (This is an example of a barbell).

• If one is antifragile to x, then the variance (or volatility, or other measures of variation) of x benefit f(x), since distributions that are skewed have their mean depend on the variance (the lognormal for instance has for mean a term that includes + ½ sig^2). [BARBELL THEOREM]

• The probability distribution of f(x) is markedly different from that of x, particularly in the presence of nonlinearities.
  + When f(x) is convex (concave) monotonically), f(x) is right (left) skewed.
  + When f(x) is increasing and concave on the left then convex to the right, the probability distribution of f(x) is thinner-tailed than that of x. For instance in Kathneman-Tversky’s prospect theory, the so-called utility of changes in wealth is more “robust” than that of wealth.

• Where p(x) is the density, F(X) p(x) is the true function, the integral will depend increasingly on f rather than p, and the more nonlinear f, the more it will depend on f rather than p.

For instance, Jensen’s inequality, will increase with the convexity of f.

143 – The error about the error (Fukushima, again)

An error rate can be measured. The measurement, in turn, will have an error rate. The measurement of the error rate will have an error rate. The measurement of the error rate will have an error rate. We can use the same argument by replacing “measurement" by "estimation” (say estimating the future value of an economic variable, the rainfall in Brazil, or the risk of a nuclear accident). What is called a regress argument by philosophers can be used to put some scrutiny on quantitative methods or risk and probability. The mere existence of such regress argument will lead to two different regimes, both leading to the necessity to raise the values of small probabilities, and one of them to the necessity to use power law distributions.

142 – Time to understand a few facts about small probabilities

(I've received close to 600 requests for interviews on the “Black Swan” of Japan. Refused all (except for one). I think for a living & write books not interviews. This is what I have to say.)

The Japanese Nuclear Commission had the following goals set in 2003: “ The mean value of acute fatality risk by radiation exposure resultant from an accident of a nuclear installation to individuals of the public, who live in the vicinity of the site boundary of the nuclear installation, should not exceed the probability of about 1x10^6 per year (that is, at least 1 per million years)”.

That policy was designed only 8 years ago. Their one in a million-year accident almost occurred about 8 year later (I am not even sure if it is at best a near miss). We are clearly in the Fourth Quadrant there.

I spent the last two decades explaining (mostly to finance imbeciles, but also to anyone who would listen to me) why we should not talk about small probabilities in any domain. Science cannot deal with them. It is irresponsible to talk about small probabilities and make people rely on them, except for natural systems that have been standing for 3 billion years (not manmade ones for which the probabilities are derived theoretically, such as the nuclear field for which the effective track record is only 60 years).

1. Small probabilities tend to be incomputable; the smaller the probability, the less computable. (Forget the junk about “Knightian” uncertainty, all small probabilities are incomputable). (See TBS, 2nd Ed., or Douady and Taleb, Statistical undecidability, 2011.)

2. Model error causes the underestimation of small probabilities & their contribution (on balance, because of convexity effects). Any model error, just as any undertainty about flying time causes the expected arrival to be delayed (you rarely land 4 hours early, more often 4 hours late on a transatlantic flight, so “unforeseen” disturbances tend to delay you). See my argument about second order effects with my paper. [INTUITION: uncertainty about the model used for calculation of random effects causes a second layer of randomness, causing small probabilities to rise on balance].

3. The problem is more acute in Extremistan, particularly the manmade part. The probabilities are undestimated but the consequences are much, much more underestimated.

4. As I wrote, because of globalization, the costs of natural catastrophes are increasing in a nonlinear way.

5. Casanova problem (survivorship bias in probability): If you compute the frequency of a rare event and your survival depends on such event not taking place (such as nuclear events), then you underestimated that probability. See the revised note 93 on αδηλων.

6. Semi-technical Examples: to illustrates the point (how models are Procrustean beds):

Case 1: Binomial

Take for example the binomial distribution with B[N, p] probability of success (avoidance of failure), with N=50. When p moves from 96% to 99% the probability quadruples. So small imprecision around the probability of success (error in its computation, uncertainty about how we computed the probability) leads to enormous ranges in the total result. This shows that there is no such thing as “measurable risk” in the tails, no matter what model we use.

Case 2: More scary. Take a Gaussian, with the probability of exceeding a certain number, that is, . 1- Cumulative density function.. Assume mean = 0, STD= 1. Change the STD from 1 to 1.1 (underestimation of 10% of the variance). For the famed “six sigmas”, the area in the tails explodes by 2400%. For the areas above 10 sigmas (common in economics), the area explodes by trillions. (More on the calculations in my paper).

140 – Why Did Communism Fail?

The common interpretation is that communism failed because it did not line-up to human nature, disregarded incentives, free-market matters etc. But I have not heard any commentary attributing a share of the failure to the top-down implementation by gigantic states & the necessity of a large state for that – making nonlinearities & second order effects dominate.

The large state is qualitatively different from the very small municipal state, one in which people have visual contact with those implementing public policy. The large state brings fragility, the small municipality brings robustness. Just as there is a fallacy of aggregation, I believe in the fallacy of scale (because of concavities). Properties change with scale.

93 [REVISED]– Epilogism, the adelon αδηλων & the unmanifested

(After two years I received a letter from Perilli correcting a typo & informing me that Sextus was actually citing the much earlier Anaxagoras, 5th C. BC).

(Sextus, Ad.Mat.: οψις γαρ των αδηλων τα φαινομεναι). The central concept of empiricism is the passage from the observed to the unobserved – making inference on the unseen based on the seen. I have no trouble explaining it to a cab driver – but not to a “rigorous" academic proto-turkey (or someone with Asperger) simply because what is not observed is "handwaved” in a discussion and not precise enough for them. The concept was used by the brand of skeptics reviled by history: Empirical Tripodists/Aenasidemans (see Galen’s Subf. Emp.). It died very quickly. People in technology may understand it (if they are making speculative bets). Not Harvard Business School half-men/professors who write on biotech or insurance (Froot). Certainly not bankers (“it never happened before”). My statistical translation: look for rare events that are not part of your sample because of its limitations: where can the unobservables be?

I am working on uncovering historical heuristics of adelon. [The only living scholar I found who used – & understood – epilogism is Lorenzo Perilli]. Before him, a Frenchman , Albert Favier, used it (died c. 1914) – he was a joint MD-philosopher. Philosophers of science are far, very far behind: they just talk & cannot have the right ecological intuitions. Induction & deduction are for those who do not take decisions: they do not exist in practice].

Where is the adelon, The unmanifested in the data?

135 – Income, Happiness & the Less is More Effect

Iatrogenics of wealth: As a child I was certain that poor people were happier because they had less complicated but more social lives, huddled together in small quarters, and having no soccer mom (or the then-equivalent), they could just play in the streets etc. In addition, rich people use harmful technologies, go to the gym instead of playing in the streets, meet economists and other frauds, etc... So there were things money could not buy, in effect, money caused you to lose... Later on when I got a windfall check, in my twenties (before it became more common for people in finance to get big bucks), I discovered another harmful side of wealth: unless one hid the cash, it was hard to know who one's friends were...

But for some people, money can be beneficial – some. I am not convinced of the utility theory approach & results showing the absence of effect of higher income (in excess of lower-middle class wages) on happiness (the noise I see in the research papers is MONSTROUS, even if the “average" seems to accord with the findings). Also, I am not quite certain that "happiness” is refined enough an expression. People don't quite understand what being human means. There is the unhappiness that's natural to mankind, sadness from heartbreak or the loss of a family member (Why do so many people read sad love stories?) and the unhappiness of working in an office building, commuting, sitting in a structured classroom, captive in a technological nightmare... more later.

134 – Megalopsychia in the Republic of Letters

Fighting the prevailing order (and the vulgar minds), requires a measure of courage that was absent among the scholastics. Marc Fumaroli “La grandeur d'âme, comme préalable a toute pensée philosophique et scientifique, est un facteur commun des princes de la République des Lettres du début du XVIIe siecle." (Preface de La querelle des ancients et des modernes). Indeed it is inseparabe from "princely” attributes.

133 – Galen's Megalopsychos (The Magnificent in my New Work)

Les Belles Lettres has just issued an unpublished treatise by Galen called ΠΕΡΙ ΑΛΥΠΗΣΙΑΣ , ne pas se chagriner (avoiding sorrow) -a strange brand of Levantine stoicism quite different from the then prevailing Roman version. In it Galen describes how he suffered the loss of his books and manuscripts with equanimity. At [50-51] he uses μεγαλοψυχία, greatness of soul αλλα το παντα μεν απολεσαντα τα φαρμακα , παντα δε τα βιβλια , και προσετι τας γραφας των αξιολογων φαρμακων, ετι τε τας περι αυτων εκδοσεις γεγονιας αμα πραγματειαις πολλαις αλλαις και ων εκαστη μονη γεγονυια την καθ ολον τον βιον ικανην φιλοπονιαν εδεικνυτο μη λυπηθηναι γενναιον ηδη τουτο και μεγαλοψυχιας εχομενον επιδειγμα πρωτον. [ the fact that, after the loss of the totality of my pharmaceutical remedies, the totality of my books, as well as these recipies of reputable remedies, as well as the various editions I wrote on them, in addition to so many other works, each one of which exhibits that love of work that was mine my entire life; the fact that I felt no pain shows firstthe nobility of my behavior and my GREATNESS OF SOUL.]

Also pre-Christian thoughts on greatness of soul in the Hellenistic Levant :The Pagan Virtue of Megalopsychia in Pagan Syrian by Glanville Downey (Historian of Antioch on the Orontes).

Note that humility in pre-Christian ethics was an insult.The Arabs translate it literally: كبير النفس

131 – Les Grands Erudits – One Who Had it All

The Roman Emperor Gordian had it all.

Twenty-two acknowledged concubines, and a library of sixty-two thousand volumes, attested the variety of his inclinations, and from the productions which he left behind him, it appears that the former as well as the latter were designed for use rather than ostentation.

(in Gibbon's Decline & Fall)

Because of its genuine character, erudition is usually absent from academia where you would think you would find it – and has been so for a long time (nothing new, since the Renaissance was not an academic production but one by dilettantes). Of history's great erudites, perhaps the most remarkable is Joseph Juste Scaliger – I had thought that the most cultured of all was Pierre Daniel Huet, but Huet who thought Montaigne was ignorant and ungroomed in the classics held Scaliger in greatest respect. Scalinger had such a hunger for texts he read Hebrew & Arabic. Of course there are many identifiable others: Pierre Bayle, and, earlier, the commonly known pre-renaissance scholars Nicholas d'Autrecourt, Gerardo of Cremona, Michael Scotus, Rodolphe Agricola, etc. And there are many we are missing because they left nothing of interest behind; or nothing they left has reached us.

Note that Gibbon, though luminous, is not in the same league – one of the finest English prose writers, but not exceedingly broad in his knowledge since he was just classically trained, and not deeply at that – his sources are concentrated (mostly Diodorus Siculus, Ammianus Marcellinus, Procopius I think).

I am only impressed by a man's two attributes: courage & erudition. I disrespect those who lack the former, & crave the company of those endowed with the latter. Erudition is wealth, robust knowledge, being alive; it is organic diversification & signals open mindedness.

129 – Pascal & Mutanabbi

I was in Arabia talking to people about ancestral wisdom when Mohammed AlQatari pointed out to me that Pascal's saying on rationality le coeur a ses raisons que la raison ignore (the heart has its reasons that the reason ignores) has been said in the very same exact words some seven hundred years earlier by al-Mutanabbi: I transcribe in Arabic without even translating because a good translation would produce exactly the same words as Pascal's.

لهَوَى النّفُوسِ سَرِيرَةٌ لا تُعْلَمُ

Also it hit me that the ubiquitous word “khair", or "kheir" خيرin Arabic comes from the Greek χάρις ("grace", also "gift”, the root of charm, charisma, etc.)

So does جنس (kind, gender, nationality when in the feminine form) from γένος (genus).

128 – Plato, a Treasure Trove

The philosopher (popularizer of philosophy) Bryan Magee, in his memoirs discusses how he is often surprised, reading an author, how his perception of the author conflicts with that of the prevailing trends in commentary (his Wittgenstein was not that of his contemporaries). Simply, academics cluster into a research tradition, with a standard interpretation; such interpretation is unstable as they may all cluster to a new focus, etc. They may collectively miss on a central idea of the author – something the fresh reader may get.

After a half a lifetime of reading commentary on Plato, I've embarked on my own re-reading of the complete works, and have been quite shocked at what I saw, in relation to my specialty of probability & randomness: topics brought up in the mouth of Socrates that were rarely discussed in the commentaries, or, at best, treated marginally. Now, granted much of the commentary comes from classical writers; still it remains that the commentators are not looking at Plato with our eyes & concerns.

1. PHAEDRUS Fooled by Randomness; the cognitive distortions of mistaking the subset for the superset (modern research by Kahneman & Tversky showing how people after a vivid description think Linda is more likely to be a feminist bankteller than a bankteller; or how people can be manipulated to overpay for terrorist insurance, more than general insurance that includes terrorist coverage). In Phaedrus, Socrates warns against the sophists Tisias & Gorgias who who make the probable more likely than truth, and make small things appear large & large things appear small. Τεισίαν δὲ Γοργίαν τε ἐάσομεν εὕδειν, οἳ πρὸ τῶν ἀληθῶν [the true] τὰ εἰκότα εἶδον [“see what resembles", εἰκών, a copy, shares roots with the probable, εἰκάζω ("I guess") and ἔοικε ("it looks like", εἰκότα is neutral plural for εἰκώς used as “the probable” in Plato] ὡς τιμητέα μᾶλλον [value more], τά τε αὖ σμικρὰ μεγάλα καὶ τὰ μεγάλα σμικρὰ φαίνεσθαι ποιοῦσιν διὰ ῥώμην λόγου...

2. PROTAGORAS The hindsight bias (one aspect). Socrates explains how he “prefers Prometheus to Epimetheus” – Prometh = forward; Epimeth = backward. There was the myth of the two brothers, retold by Hesiod, but presented in Plato to warn about thinking in the past & not projecting properly into the future.

3. PROTAGORAS Use of conditionals is SOPHISTRY I was once discussing with Richard Thaler, a behavioral finance researcher his work on a psychological explanation of the equity premium puzzle. My point is that his interpretation might be true, but it lacks in empirical rigor, as we first needed to ascertain whether there was such a thing as the equity premium puzzle – to me, Black Swan events were not accounted for by the story, so we could not ascertain under “fat tails" what the risk was to make such statement; indeed whatever equity premium there was has evaporated in recent years. The behavioral economist agreed with me, but continued: "IF there was an equity premium puzzle, then...". I was highly irritated by the matter and could not see any sincerity in work that is so CONDITIONAL (the practice in economics has exploited some unrigorous paper on positivism by Milton Friedman; in Medicine nobody says "if man were mice, then this..."; in physics nobody says "if the Moon had water..."). I had been worried ...until I read Socrates' view that one cannot conduct a dialectic unless one SINCERELY agrees to every step of the argument. SOCRATES, refuting the sophist Protagoras who assented for the sake of argument with one of his statement: "I do not think an argument's validity can be tested unless these "ifs" are removed from it”.

127 – Learning From Erwan Le Corre & Robust Exercise

Spent some time with Erwan Le Corre, whom many describe as the fittest man in the world, in a broad, naturalistic sense (along with John Durant the expert on Paleo nutrition & their friends) – we were filmed by French TV who picked up the links between their ideas and mine on the need for a certain class of randomness. Le Corre understands the value of moderate unpredictability, the importance of improvization, and unconstrained exercise – to avoid the “fossilization" of routines. My idea of naturalistic/Paleo fitness: the broadest domain bandwidth, freedom from the captivity & injurious gym machines (resembling Tayloristic methods in working out). So started walking/sprinting on "rough”, fractal sufaces. I am lucky to have a place within walking distance from the best parc for that; along the coastline with close to a mile of rocks. Exhilarating, except for my broken nose.

Just as chess skills only help you in chess (we know that those who can play chess games from memory don't have strong memory for other matters), classroom math only helps in classrooms, weight training in gyms almost only helps you in gyms, a specific sport almost only helps you in that specific sport, and walking on smooth Euclidian surfaces causes injuries somewhere deep inside your soul.

When you run and jump on rocks, your entire brain and body are at work; you stretch your back better than with yoga; every muscle in your body is involved; no two movements will be identical (unlike running in gyms); you become yourself.

Absence of effort: So I can get the benefits of a hunter-gatherer lifestyle with less than 20% changes in my day – as I can manage a 5-course dinner at Le Bernardin, drink good wine, dress with some elegance, yet have the benefits of the caveman... To me it is mostly about absence of effort in my life, outside of intense moments, freedom, work without constraints, unpredictability in my day, lounging whenever I feel like it, minimal contact with businessmen & other half-men, etc. I spent 7 years in total as an employee. When I look back, it was half way between being dead & alive.

Also I just realized that, in the same vein, broad erudition, when supported by a good mathematical culture, is vastly more robust than any specialization. The wisdom of the ancients was domain-independent.

126 – Evidence that we human use thought largely for ornamental purpose

At the Harvard Symposium for Hard Problems in Social Science, Emily Oster presented a very simple, elementary problem: almost all people with type-2 diabetes who are overweight can be cured by losing a little bit of weight. They are made aware of it, yet they usually gain weight after diagnosis (she mentioned “Atkins" among the options, so it was not just AMA low-fat.). It is so obvious that we know what to do yet do not carry the action because thinking can be largely ornamental. The proof of the sterility of (a significant class of) knowledge was right there (among the obvious evidence that the population has been gaining weight in spire of technological and educational progress). Yet the others social scientists kept exalting the value of "education" in spite of this simple devastating evidence. Someone even suggested teaching more "critical thinking”. This is the great sucker problem: people who teach truly think that teaching, or, worse, preaching, cures.

125 – Nerdiness, “Interesting” Heuristic for Natural Intelligence

I've always wondered why males with boring professions, even when wealthy, do not attract females as much as artists do: rock stars, painters, & (in Europe) novelists & poets are more “interesting” than mathematicians, engineers, computer scientists, or physicists. Likewise men with flamboyant objects like red Ferraris or colorful clothes attract like a magnet, compared to the more conservative, but stable, plodding accountant. Same with wit compared to intelligence. Is it about the Zahavian showoff with language & artistic prowess? We have been playing with linguistic prowess and cave paintings for tens of thousand of years. Anyway, this metric can be used as a guideline to define true intelligence & relevant subjects: whatever subject is boring & unattractive in a Zahavian way will not be ancestrally fit & will be not natural to society. Painting, wit, music are more NATURAL than abstract mathematics or abstract, not exhibited wealth.

What I take is that intelligence in the sense of IQ tests and SAT scores is not as natural & ancestrally fit as wit, l'ésprit fin.

By not natural I mean not Black-Swan robust, skills we call intelligence because of a certain construction, but that are not needed ecologically. Mate selection has the right heuristics & intuitions – though in the right domain, & in the right domain only (the modern world we've constructed is quite different). So, Is “intelligence” without wit & verbal briliance really intelligence?

123 – That Treacherous Thing ...

I vividly remember my long afternoon walks in the park du Luxembourg in the Latin Quarter in Paris, as I used to lived across from it, Rue d'Assas. There were retired men talking about their war stories and playing pétanque, lovers silently hugging on benches, people just trying to be friends with each other, and me, flaneur crossing the park because it was on the Eastern side (the 5th arrondissement) that the philosophers were based, rue d'Ulm and I felt something vibrate in me there, just breathing the air & imbibing philosophy and the hype that came with it; it was a pilgrimage to my promised land. For years, as I routinely crossed that park, the same APlatonic depressing idea haunted me upon seeing the lovers embracing & cuddling each other on the benches, the idea of the transitory aspect of such intensity, and its potential reversal. The more intensely enthralled two being are with each other the harder they will try to hurt each other upon separation. They seemed to want to unite with each other, care about each other, protect each other, minister the smallest need in the other, cure the other of the small wounds, but, at some point in the future they might be inflicting the most scathing injury to the other. The nonlovers might be less close, but, in all likelihood, they should unconditionally stay friends, or, at least they are not expected to inflict harm on the other. I realized that there was an element in this treacherous thing called love that was not for philosophers.

116 – Fooled by Rationalism; Lecturing Birds How to Fly

This is the “lecturing birds how to fly” effect.

MEDICAL NOTES: Aggregation of notes on the history of medicine as I am writing my long chapter on iatrogenics.

103 – The translational gap

How long can something be held as wrong before its practice is discontinued? A long, very long time, much longer than we think. We've know that “modern finance” and economics represented a danger to society [since 1961, with close to 400 blowup episodes including the crash of 1987] to no avail – and this blowup of the banking system will not bring any relief. Even the fact that I may have made the point in what may turn out to be the ALL TIME bestseller in economics and philosophy of science [ and the mother of all empirical evidence] might not help displace the charlatans. Some ideas from the history of Medicine (Medicina, soror philosophiae!).

Noga Arikha “Just Life in a Nutshell: Humours as common sense”, in The Philosophical Forum Quarterly, XXXIX, 3:

When William Harvey demonstrated the mechanism of blood circulation in the 1620s, humoral theory and its related practices should have disappeared, because the anatomy and physiology on which it relied was incompatible with this picture of the organism. In fact, people continued to refer to spirits and humors, and doctors continued to prescribe phlebotomies, enemas, and cataplasms, for centuries more – even when it was established in the mid-1800, most notably by Louis Pasteur, that germs were the cause of disease.

See also Arikha's book (it was swallowed by my uncatalogued library so I am ...reordering it).

The most complete compendium is in Wooton Bad Medicine: Doctors Doing Harm Since Hippocrates.

p 184 [...] why doctors for centuries imagined that their theories worked when they didn't; why there was a delay of more than two hundred years between the first experiments designed to disprove spontaneous generation and the final triumph of the alternative, the theory that living creatures always come from other living creatures; why there was a delay of two hundred years between the discovery of germs and the triumph of the germ theory of disease; why there was a delay of thirty years between the germ theory of putrefaction and the development of antisepsis; why there was a delay of sixty years between antisepsis and drug therapy. [he explains elsewhere that there was no money in microscopy, which delayed implementation...]

Elsewhere Wooton shows how surgeons resisted anesthesia (because it was considered cheating), how doctors in France were still bleeding patients at the end of the 19th century, yet: In 1851 [...] Dietl showed that bloodletting tripled the death rate in a pneumonia.

p 240- Pasteur had a sensible distrust of doctors. p 14 I took it for granted that in an open argument, good ideas would always defeat bad ideas. [...] Peer group pressure often halt progress in its track.[...] Despite the brilliant work of philosophers and historians of science, no one has really worked out how to write a history that takes account of this. p 293 Shapin tells us that “The Harvard biochemist L.J. Henderson [1878-1942] was supposed to have remarked "that it was only sometime between 1910 and 1912 ...that a random patient, with a random disease, consulting a doctor chosen at random, had, for the first time in the history of mankind, a better than 50-50 chance of profiting from the encounter.”'

Also, something that explains why I am going nuts.

By 1861 [Semmelweiss] was denouncing those who had not adopted his views as murderers.

James Le Fanu: The Rise and Fall of Modern Medicine (1999) talks of “collective deception”.

I call this the translational problem because of a great paper by Ioannides (my hero) et al. Life Cycle of Translational Research for Medical Interventions in Science (Sept 5, 2008) – they show how long it takes from initial scientific paper to implementation – and how the cycle is lengthening. But my problem is that the gap knowledge/practice is not curable – the arrow goes from practice to knowledge.

New books on medical history: Gloria Origgi have me a book on Semmelweiss by ... Louis Ferdinand Celine! (merci mille fois). Also Francois Lebrun Se soigner autrefois Médecins, saints et sorciers aux XVIIe et XVIIIe siecles, Georges Vigarello Histoire des pratiques de santé, Jackie Pigeaud La maladie de l'ame, Collectif (Centre Jean Palerne): Rational et irrationel dans la médecine ancienne et médiévale. I also got a long paper by Gerd Gigerenzer on medical practice and conditional probability (I guess it is the misunderstanding of Type 2 error that is costing us so much).

Also I consider the work of Gary Taubes (and soon the book by Art DeVany) as documents in the history of medical errors.

***

Canguilhem wonders why it took so long to figure out iatrogenesis: “Quant a l'iatrogenese medicale, comment peut-on penser que les médecins aient attendu la deuxieme moitié du XXe siecle pour observer les effets secondaires” [Etudes d'histoire et de philosophie des sciences, Vrin, 1968, 1994].

Scribonius Largus: who accompanied Claudius, was interested in pharmacology but not interested in hidden causes.

Comme indices plaidant en faveur de cette orientation empirique chez Scribonius, on peut noter la place de choix acordée a la pharmacologie, le respect scrupuleux des auctores, de meme que l'absence d'interet pour la connaissance des choses cachées. [Joelle Jouanna-Bouchet*, Scribonius Largus et Marcellus: entre rationnel et irrationnel, in Collectif, Rationnel et Irrationnel dans la médecine ancienne et médiévale, Publications de l'Université de Saint-Étienne, 2003].*

113 – Negative Advice; Why We Need Religion

At the core of the expert problem is that people are suckers for charlatans who provide positive advice (what to do), instead of negative advice (what not to do), (tell them how to get rich, become thin in 42 days, be transformed into a better lover in ten steps, reach happiness, make new influential friends), particularly when the charlatan is invested with some institutional authority & the typical garb of the expert (say, tenured professorship). This is why my advice against measuring small probabilities fell on deaf ears: I was telling them to avoid Value-at-Risk and the incomputable rare event and they wanted ANOTHER measure, the idiots, as if there was one. Yet I keep seeing from the history of religions that survival and stability of belief systems correlates with the amount of negative advice and interdicts – the ten commandments are almost all negative; the same with Islam. Do we need religions for the stickiness of the interdicts?

Telling people NOT to smoke seems to be the greatest medical contribution of the last 60 years. Druin Burch, in the recently published Taking the Medicine

The harmful effect of smoking are roughly equivalent to the combined good ones of EVERY medical intervention developed since the war. (...) Getting rid of smoking provides more benefit than being able to cure people of every possible type of cancer" [emph. mine]

Life expectancy: Another problem. I keep hearing the fiction that medical practitioners doubled our life expectancy. Life expectancy increased because of 1) sanitation, 2) penicillin, 3) drop in crime. From the papers I see that medical practice may have contributed to 2-3 years of the increase, but again, depends where (cancer doctors might provide a positive contribution, family doctors a negative one) . Another fooled-by-randomness style mistake is to think that because life expectancy at birth was 30, that people lived 30 years: the distribution was massively skewed: the bulk of the deaths came from birth & childhood mortality. Conditional life expectancy was high – I do not know of many measurements (it should not be too hard) – just consider that Paleo men had no cancer, no tooth decay, almost no epidemics, no economists, and died of trauma. Perhaps legal enforcement contributed more than doctors to the increase in life .

60 – Religion Protects You From Bad Science – Medicine, Expert Problems, and the Rationality of Temples

I – Medicine

Nobody seems to notice that over the millennia religions (all religions) have saved people from death – because it protected them from doctors and “science”. Because of the illusion of control, we feel like “doing something” when facing a problem – “seeing an expert”, etc. If religion is at least neutral then it is a great way to stay out of harms’ way: science, faux-experts, quacks, etc.

Martial in his epigrams gives us an idea of the perceived expert problem in medicine in his time (i.e., the doctor causing more harm than expected, but exploiting his expert status):

Nuper erat medicus, nunc est uispillo Diaulus: quod uispillo facit, fecerat et medicus I thought that Diaulus was a doctor not a caretaker – but for him it appears to be the same job.

Non habui febrem, Symmache, nunc habeo. I did not feel ill, Symmache; now I do (after your ministrations).

Montaigne goes deeper. He reports on the attribution problem seen by the ancients – not too different from current stockbrokers & economists. Doctors claimed responsibility for success and blame failure on mother nature.

On demandoit à un Lacedemonien qui l'avoit fait vivre sain si long temps: L'ignorance de la medecine, respondit il. Et Adrian l'Empereur crioit sans cesse, en mourant, que la presse des medecins l'avoit tué. A Lacedaemonian was asked what had made him live so long; he answered “ignoring medecine". The Emperor Adrian continually exclaimed as he was dying that it was his doctors that had killed him.

Mais ils ont cet heur, selon Nicocles, que le soleil esclaire leur succez, et la terre cache leur faute; et, outre-cela, ils ont une façon bien avantageuse de se servir de toutes sortes d'evenemens, car ce que la fortune, ce que la nature, ou quelque autre cause estrangere (desquelles le nombre est infini) produit en nous de bon et de salutaire, c'est le privilege de la medecine de se l'attribuer. Tous les heureux succez qui arrivent au patient qui est soubs son regime, c'est d'elle qu'il les tient. Les occasions qui m'ont guery, moy, et qui guerissent mille autres qui n'appellent point les medecins à leurs secours, ils les usurpent en leurs subjects; et, quant aux mauvais accidents, ou ils les desavouent tout à fait, en attribuant la coulpe au patient par des raisons si vaines qu'ils n'ont garde de faillir d'en trouver tousjours assez bon nombre de telles... [Attribution Problem]

Effectively you hear accounts of people erecting fountains of even temples to their favorite gods after these succeeded where doctors fail (see Vivian Nutton’s Ancient Medicine, an interesting book for a start, though near-silent about my heroes the empiricists, and not too detailed about ancient practices outside of a few standard treatises).

I truly believe that it was rational to resort to prayers in place of doctors: consider the track record. The risk of death effectively increased after a visit to the doctor. Sadly, this continued well into our era: the break-even did not come until early in the 20^th Century. Which effectively means that going to the priest, to Lourdes, Fatima, or (in Syria), Saydnaya, aside from the mental benefits, provided a protection against the risks of exposure to the expert problem. Religion was at least neutral – and it could only be beneficial if it got you away from the doctor.

Montaigne on why the last thing a doctor needs is for you to be healthy [Agency Problem].

Nul medecin ne prent plaisir à la santé de ses amis mesmes, dit l'ancien Comique Grec, ny soldat à la paix de sa ville: ainsi du reste.

The easy part is to show that religion was superior to science. It is hard to accept it: religion protects you from bad science. Now my conjecture, which I am trying to substantiate, is that the empiricists (Agrippa, Philinus, Menodotus, etc.) and to some extent the medical methodists, did not have the expert problem. The empiricists insisted on the “I did not know” while facing situations not exactly seen in the past, for which an exact treatment did not repeatedly yield a cure. The methodists did not have the same strictures against analogy, but were still careful.

II – Agrippa (no relation)

Which brings me to a strange, and strangely overlooked writer – or perhaps a literary mystery as we could be dealing with two writers. Or a joke. Or a madman – a victim of acute schizophrenia. Montaigne’s sources on medicine come from the recycling of the very erudite Henry Cornelius Agrippa’s De incertitudine et vanitate scientiarum atque artium declamatio invectiva (“De vanitate”), published c.1530. It is a strange skeptical attack on the negative aspect of science and knowledge by a 16^th century man who is mostly known for a treatise on magic that he wrote before that, & for his practice of magic & alchemy. And it was not a change of heart: Agrippa continued to practice magic & alchemy after writing the De vanitate (which attacked alchemy and magic!). De vanitate is a Pyrrhonian treatise though, seemingly, Agrippa was not aware of the works of Sextus Empiricus (which had not been available in Latin). He covers literally everything: mathematics, medicine, EVEN FINANCE, in way that is suspiciously similar to (but more extensive than) Adversus mathematikos. I just got a photocopy of the text that Montaigne read (in Medieval Latin, almost impossible to read owing to the characters & even harder to understand), & the only readable document a photocopy of a Medieval French translation by Louis Turquet de Mayerne. The only bound volume I managed to locate was selling for $4000 on Abebooks (photocopying such text is legal; photocopied but bound volumes make for a much better reading quality than originals).

Agrippa might be the only Pyrrhonian skeptic who was imprisoned for his writings (I guess if you do not take my brief jail episode in Lebanon into account).

Agrippa's Dilemma: Hermetic“ Rebirth” and the Ambivalences of De vanitate and De occulta philosophia Renaissance quarterly [0034-4338] Keefer yr:1988 vol:41 iss:4 pg:61

87 – Alexander of Aphrodisias & Stochastic Arts

Questio 2.16. [that the stochastic arts do not just differ because they have the same ends and different means, they have ] So for [these stochastic arts] the end is not the achieving of their objective, but the completion of what belongs to the art [itself]. [Stochastic arts: medicine & navigation as compared to deterministic arts, like weaving or building. He thinks that the objective of a stochastic art, one that depends on external factors, is the perfect practice itself, which is reminiscent of stoic doctrines].

Ierodiakonou & Vanderbroucke [1993]. More fundamentally, the Greeks wondered what gave rise to the stochastic nature of medicine. Here, their ways split. In the second century AD Alexander of Aphrodisias held it to be an inherent property of medicine. Medicine does not proceed by syllogisms to the effect that something necessarily and invariably is the case. Rather, medical propositions are concluded in terms such as “for the most part", or "in only a rare case”. These expressions hold true generally, but not necessarily for the individual. Others such as Galen in the same century, believed that medical science in itself was as impeccable as any other but that its practical application was fallible because of variation in the individual patient. [Medicine as a stochastic art. Ierodiakonou, Katerine,Vandenbroucke, Jan P., Lancet; 2/27/93, Vol. 341 Issue 8844, p542, 2]. I looked for Ierodiakonou’s research (she is a classicist, V. is a medical researcher) on the vanishing Aenasidemians.

107 – Misc. Notes

Mathematized Frauds in Medicine (birth and death of iatromathematics): Aside from the Aristotilization of Medicine with the Galenic method (imbued with logic and rationalizations after Aristotle whom Paracelsus who scorned any form of learning from words called “the great illusionist”), there have been forgotten attempts to mathematize medicine.

There was a period during which “medicine derived its explanatory models from the physical sciences” [Andrew Wear, in Conrad et al., 1995].

Giovanni Borelli, in De Motu Animalium, compared the body to a machine consisting of animal levers. “He wrote that God applied geometry when making animal organs, and that since the movements of animals are the proper subject of mathematics they can be understood in terms of levers, pulleys, winding-drums, and spirals, etc. Borelli ordered his book into propositions as in geometry, first demonstrating, for instance, the forces involved ...”

Cicero and Probability: Cicéron de Clara Auvray-Assayas. “... probabile" n'est pas une traduction du Grec mais un concept forgé par Cicéron; son usage ne se limite pas a la theorie de la connaissance, mais permet d'articuler la rhetorique et la philosophie ... une critique rationnelle de toutes les doctrines systématiques.”

Apres avoir montré qu'il n'existe pas de representation telle qu'elle differe d'une fausse, l'academicien propose de se fier a ce qui est “persuasif", pithanon en grec, et que Ciceron rend par probabile. A premiere vue il s'agit donc de la traduction de l'adjectif grec "pithanon"... Reste la question du sens: non seulement le latin fait disparaitre l'element semantique essentiel, la persuatsion, au profit des valeurs de la preuve et de l'approbation contenues dans le verbe ˆprobare , mais le sens actif du grec pithanon (qui persuade) est occulté dans l'emploi de l'adjectif probabile dont tous les emplois attestes sont passifs (”qui peut etre prouvé/approuvé). [...] le sujet ne recoit plus passivement ce qui le persuade, c'est lui qui juge si une chose mérite son approbation.

[Cicero translated Plato's Timaeus λογος εικος [believable rationalization/explanation] & εικος μυθος [believable story] by probabilia, something we can give approval to.]

79 – Bibliography on Ancient Medical Empiricism: very, very few sources

Misunderstanding of empiricism: For bildungphilisters (financial economists & other), empiricism is looking at data and formulating opinions congruent with the data (using a mental disease commonly called statistical methods). Wrong. The true meaning of empiricism is the avoidance of inductive generalizations outside the instances in which a given observation was made: you cannot extend the properties too aggressively outside the sample set of observation, particularly when you encounter slight dissimilarities. So an empirical doctor would focus on the extremely similar. History can only repeat itself in the exact circumstances of prior occurrences. It also implies the avoidance of top down theorization, ideas about how things should be in order to fit the presumed mind of nature (Aristotelian’ final causes, Galen’s natural purpose of an organ, today notions of “equilibrium”, naïve evolutionary theorists etc.). [This explains why some cannot understand why I can be skeptical and empirical at the same time].

Another major error (again voiced by two economists, among whom was (angry) Lord Eatwell): you cannot observe without some theory. Even Galen used it as his lame argument “Logos is needed for observation … observation is impossible without logos”. It misses the point entirely. Empiricism is not about not having beliefs: it is about avoiding to be a sucker, a decided and preset bias on where you want your error to be – where the default is. An empiricist defaults to suspension of belief (hence the link with the skeptical Pyrrhonian tradition), while others prefer to default to a characterization or a theory. Mostly, avoid the confirmation bias ! (we empiricists prefer the disconfirmation/falsification bias).

Tension between “rationalism” and empiricism: The distinction appears to be expressed in modern terms (Claude Bernard -l' empirisme compris dans son sens le plus large et le plus général est l' opposé du rationalisme ;l' empirisme est alors l' exclusion de tout raisonnement de l' observation et de l' expérimentation.(emph. his)) The medical empirical tradition supposedly died out c. 200 AD. (to be revived later first by Paracelsus, then by a collection of surgeons, but waxed and waned. I suppose that it was stamped out by the Arabs). Within Hippocrates’ corpus some writings are said to be in the rationalist tradition, while others (the oldest) are in the empirical tradition. & Al-Razi on the difference:

فالرازي مثلاً يقدم النظري على العملي، ويعطيه الأسبقية إذ يقول : “من قرأ كتب أبقراط ولم يخدم، خير ممن خدم ولم يقرأ كتب أبقراط"، ويقول أيضاً : "إن قليل المشاهدة (أي الخبرة) المطلع على الكتب خير ممن لم يعرف الكتب”

Note that Al-Razi, nevertheless, stood up to Galen, something that did not take place again for 5 centuries. He wrote a book called: “الشكوك على جالينوس”.

Primary (or close to): Galen (almost all there is to know in found subf. empirica), Sextus Empiricus, Diogenes Laertius, Photius, Celsus (De Medicina), Caelius Aurelianus, Arabic texts (?): Ibn Sina, Al-Razi, Comments on “Jalinos” by Averroes,

Secondary: Charles Daremberg (cours du Collège de France), Lorenzo Perilli (Menodoto di Nicomedia & papers), Victor Brochard, Albert Favier (unreliable), Zeller, Ludwig Edelstein (Ancient Medicine – collected papers), Deichgraeber (not translated: I cannot read German), Harris Coulter (a linear combination of his predecessors, mainly Deichgraeber), Vivian Nutton (not very good), Roger French (Medicine before Science), Don Bates (Knowledge and the Scholarly Medical Traditions)…

Literature on Pyrrhonian skepticism: Unlike the literature on empiricism, you can fill up a wall of books and file cabinets of contemporary, post-contemporary, and secondary sources.

OLDER SEQUENCE

114 – “Where is the Evidence?”

Why do we put passengers through checkpoints when we “have no evidence" that they carry weapons? How "unscientific!" Why don't we drink from a stranger's glass (in a bar), when "we have no evidence" we may get sick? Just consider that if airports had no checkpoints, I could predict, with a very high probability, that a plane will be blown up by some terrorist. Which is also, from a risk management standpoint, why I can safely predict that any enterprise managed by a certain class of "rigorous” idiot savants using a certain class of certainties would blow up.

I leave aside the confusion absence of evidence/evidence of absence—and the misunderstanding of the very notion of “empiricism". It is a fact that in the real world of our daily decision-making 1) we do not have much evidence of most relevant things, yet we need to take action; 2) In most situations, "true/false" is never symmetric (one side is more harmful than the other), so the burden of evidence is one-sided. Which is why once these fakes "doing science" lose their tenures after the endowments (and charity) run out of funds, they will be barely fit to do anything in the real-life ecology. I wonder what you can do with an unemployed, say, academic orthodox economist. You could do better with non-post-academic cab drivers. Clearly those the most fit at dealing with "just evidence” will be idiot savants outside their evidence domain.

And I can expect that with the SP500 about 20% lower than here, you will see tenures unexpectedly evaporating. The silver-lining of the crisis, perhaps, with the de-academification of society.

When I was warning about the risks of the financial system, I encountered nasty resistance from these types – recall that I blame the academic establishment for this idiotic risk taking.“Where is the evidence?", they kept saying, missing the subtlety of the a-delon & evidence of fat tails. Two unpleasant situation, worth naming names because these two individuals are exceedingly harmful to society. 1) The most unpleasant situation was the psychologist Dan Gilbert from Harvard who broke the Brockman dinner party etiquette by shouting insults within earshot, c. Feb 2007, (and with Harvard's endowment at > twice its current value), and kept ranting in my back that "he offers no evidence!" . 2) The second one was in London, in 2006, when one Herr Doktor Prof. Armin Falk University of Bonn, who did some bullshit experiments on bounded rationality, not knowing that I was a trader, shouted in a strong German accent: "I do science ; you just do philosophy”. Science it was.

So let me take this into more interesting territory, and express my anti-social-planner views. Even more that in Hayek's days, the ecology of the real world is becoming too complex for Aristotelian logic: very, very little of what we do can be safely formalized, meaning asymmetries matter more than ever. Which puts the Western World today at the most dangerous point in its history: unless we get the Bernanke-Summers crowd out of there, it will eventually be destroyed by the machinery of arrogant, formal-thinking civil servants, and Ivy-league semi-retards.

Finally, beyond the current mess, I see no way out of this ecological problem, except through that tacit, unexplainable, seasoned, thoughtful, and aged thing crystalized by traditions & religions – we can't live without charts and we need to rely on the ones we've used for millennia. Le 21e siecle sera religieux, ou ne sera pas!

PS: I went on a European radio to express my ideas. When asked: what should we do, I replied: just listen to John Gray. He is the greatest living thinker. It was a great surprise when a few hours later, I opened my mail and saw John Gray's book with a handwritten note from him.

111 – The Black Swan, You Fools

People think that I wrote TBS to communicate my ideas about human errors, epistemic arrogance, complexity, and high-impact uncertainty. The fools. I wrote a book to talk about Yevgenia, Lebanon, Casanova; I wanted to express my love for il Deserto and my outrage for the very existence of frauds like Robert Merton le petit. And I used that Black Swan idea as an excuse. Any other topic would have bored me. Had I written a book about the black swan idea almost nobody would have read it.

Some people think they attend the opera for the story.

It is the same with language. Language is largely made to show-off, gossip, confuse people, delude them, charm them, seduce them, scare them, exploit them, etc. And, as a side effect, convey information. Just a side effect, you fools.

110 – Being Self–Owned is a State of Mind

A man is morally free when, in full possession of his living humanity, he judges the world, and judges other men, with uncompromising sincerity. George Santayana

Is it true? How about the reverse: you do not become free by acting intransigent; those who are free have the obligation to be intransigent. Fat Tony to Nero: “Being self owned is a state of mind”.

107 – Misc. Notes

Mathematized Frauds in Medicine (birth and death of iatromathematics): Aside from the Aristotilization of Medicine with the Galenic method (imbued with logic and rationalizations after Aristotle whom Paracelsus who scorned any form of learning from words called “the great illusionist”), there have been forgotten attempts to mathematize medicine.

There was a period during which “medicine derived its explanatory models from the physical sciences” [Andrew Wear, in Conrad et al., 1995].

Giovanni Borelli, in De Motu Animalium, compared the body to a machine consisting of animal levers. “He wrote that God applied geometry when making animal organs, and that since the movements of animals are the proper subject of mathematics they can be understood in terms of levers, pulleys, winding-drums, and spirals, etc. Borelli ordered his book into propositions as in geometry, first demonstrating, for instance, the forces involved ...”

Cicero and Probability: Cicéron de Clara Auvray-Assayas. “... probabile" n'est pas une traduction du Grec mais un concept forgé par Cicéron; son usage ne se limite pas a la theorie de la connaissance, mais permet d'articuler la rhetorique et la philosophie ... une critique rationnelle de toutes les doctrines systématiques.”

Apres avoir montré qu'il n'existe pas de representation telle qu'elle differe d'une fausse, l'academicien propose de se fier a ce qui est “persuasif", pithanon en grec, et que Ciceron rend par probabile. A premiere vue il s'agit donc de la traduction de l'adjectif grec "pithanon"... Reste la question du sens: non seulement le latin fait disparaitre l'element semantique essentiel, la persuatsion, au profit des valeurs de la preuve et de l'approbation contenues dans le verbe ˆprobare , mais le sens actif du grec pithanon (qui persuade) est occulté dans l'emploi de l'adjectif probabile dont tous les emplois attestes sont passifs (”qui peut etre prouvé/approuvé). [...] le sujet ne recoit plus passivement ce qui le persuade, c'est lui qui juge si une chose mérite son approbation.

[Cicero translated Plato's Timaeus λογος εικος [believable rationalization/explanation] & εικος μυθος [believable story] by probabilia, something we can give approval to.]

106 – On Killing Oneself

Thierry de la Villehuchet – an acquaintance of mine – just killed himself in the aftereffects of the Madoff case. He had dragged his clients into investing with Madoff . “Killing himself over money?” I kept hearing. No, it is not about the money – it was other people's money. It is about dignity. I could not help comparing it to Madoff, pictured walking around Manhattan with a faint smirk – totally insensitive to the harm he caused.

This is an aristocratic act coming from an aristocratic character: you take your own life when you believe that you failed somewhere – and the solution is to inflict the ultimate penalty on yourself. It is not the money; but the embarrassment, the shame, the guilt that are hard to bear. Someone callous, indifferent to the harm done to others would have lived comfortably (“it is all about money”). A life of shame is not worth living. Christianity never allowed suicide; the stoics did – it allows a man to get the last word with fate.

Thierry, veuillez recevoir l'expression de mon respect le plus profond.

105 – The Strange Story of Scientific Maleficence

Iatrogenics at the core of professionalism and knowledge. Iatrogenics only entered my private vocabulary quite recently thanks to a conversation with Bryan Appleyard; I have been haunted by it since then. How can such a major idea remained hidden from our consciousness? – indeed iatrogenics sneaked into modern medicine very late (see Canguilhem's commentary). This to me is a mystery: how professionals can cause harm for such a long time in the name of knowledge and get away with it. So to me the history of knowledge is indissociable from the history of intellectual frauds and the mental biases that make us believe in “men of science”.

It entered the vocabulary in 1924 – but initially referred to the harm caused by the doctor in causing distress to the patient while informing him about his ailment. It was not until the 1960s that it became part of the culture – and until recently nobody considered the type 2 error. Practitioners who were conservative and considered the possibility of letting nature do its job were accused of “therapeutic nihilism". See Sharpe and Faden 1998, Medical Harm. The authors link skeptical empiricism to therapeutic skepticism. [ I encountered the same insults later with the charlatan Philippe Jorion who considers not wanting to be a turkey "nihilism". I also encountered the same with another intellectual fraud, Robert Merton with his "these are the best models we've got" (they never consider that "nothing" may be better that the best model). I also encountered resistance from another sucker, a certain physicist-but-critical-of-blind-use-of-physics-in-finance, who could not make the leap from the point that ludified models were impractical to a refusal of the supremacy of a top-down theoretical background—and that rigor might not resemble what he is used to, or that an "Enstein in finance” might be just a fat Tony (or, better, a Montaigne).]

Sadly, these iatrogenics were mere rediscoveries after science got too arrogant. Alas, once again, the elders knew better. Iatrogenics and harm were not strange to ancient medicine; they were even formalized - See: Medical Ethics of Medieval Islam with Special Reference to Al-Ruhāwī's “Practical Ethics of the Physician”, Martin Levey, Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, New Series, Vol. 57, No. 3 (1967), pp. 1-100.

Church and Epistemic Arrogance: Lateran II, 1139 (pope Innocent II) bans the use of complicated weapons in battle “We prohibit under anathema that murderous art of crossbowmen and archers, which is hateful to God” which denotes awareness that complex weapons can break the link action/planned consequence – but with a disclaimer: the ban is limited to action against Christians and Catholics. (Source: the jesuit scholar Etienne Perrot).

Other Discovery: An original Arabic language medieval commentary on Galen's discussion of the empiricists: by anonymous reviewer of the differences between the three schools :analogists (أصحاب القياس ) , empiricists ( أصحاب التجارب ) and methodists (أصحاب الحيل )

رسالة في علامات الأمزجة وذكر اعتقادات الأطباء في المعالجات وأصحاب القياس والتجربة والحيل

102 – “You are worldly ... i.e., a theoretician”

The rewards of reading in the text, a great investment: Croesus to Solon [in the account by Herodotus], expressing his admiration at the Athenian visitor: ὡς φιλοσοφέων γῆν πολλὴν θεωρίης εἵνεκεν ἐπελήλυθας – “you are a lover of wisdom ( φιλοσοφέων) and have seen a lot of things around the earth (γῆν πολλὴν θεωρίης εἵνεκεν ἐπελήλυθας)”. (Histories, Book 1, 30.2).

In other words: “you are a philosopher and a theoretician" meant "you are wise and worldly” – theoria means looking! It is exactly the opposite of the modern effect for both: lover of wisdom (not a nerd), and someone who has seen things (not some tenured person with blinders)!

100 – Platonism, Randomness & Ancestral Lifestyle

Skeptical-empirical lifestyle & ecological conservatism: try to replicate as much as feasible the type of randomness that prevailed in our natural, ancestral environment – even if it “does not make sense”. Defer to nature, not to your intuition. It does not mean that the ancestral world is necessarily better – it is just a default assumption that what has been around for a long time is more robust and more stable than what is less seasoned. And mother nature's ecological intelligence is vastly superior to that of humans (particularly academic scientists).

It looks like we need randomness in both energy output and expenditure, with a negative correlation between the two. Just consider that we worked harder when hungry (thus compounding the deficit), and conserved energy during periods of feeding – exactly the opposite of the dictates of Platonic “equilibrium". The effect is to make our net energy "lumpier”: large deficits followed by large excesses, followed of course by large deficits, etc.

I am discovering from the literature (under Art De Vany's guidance and based on his ideas on metabolic switches) that three meals a day is for morons – we need episodes of hunger punctuated brief by periods of replenishing. Hunger improves insulin sensitivity, brain function, etc. So it is a good idea to, counterintuitively, fast on days when we need the energy, rather than the opposite. Our Platonic “make sense" indicates that you need to "eat well" during a period of physical stress – the opposite holds true empirically: fasting chemo patients do much much better. Without actual testing, every cancer patient has been told to "eat well but not excessively”.

The same applies to thirst.

Stochastic sleep: I have not seen anything on the subject in the literature, but I am also realizing that stochastic sleeping periods might be good for us. I have been traveling on red eye flights and went through such memorable experiences as a whole night standing at Mumbai airport (there were no seats available and I needed to stay near the gate). After a sleepless night. I always manage to catch up, as I design my own schedule. I am now discovering that sleep if vastly more enjoyable after periods of deprivation – much like the taste of water under extreme thirst.

So, by tinkering, I figured out that I fare best under the following conditions: no breakfast, working out randomly (but in a lumpy way: long walks & intense weight lifting without a scheduled time limit), “working” randomly, fasting when working out, avoiding modern carbs (and modernized fruits), avoiding contact with economists and finance idiots, taking red eye flights & fasting during episodes of jet lag and similar physical stressors.

99 – The Black Swan ...of Absence of Secrecy

In the past, pre-Web days, people used to stash money in Switzerland. They felt safe – the last spot in the world where they could be found out is such a place with a long tradition of banking secrecy. Today, UBS – who lured many into concealing assets in its “safe” harbor – is going to hand the names of the clients to the US Justice department. All clients. Weakened by the subprime crisis, UBS (and other banks) are vulnerable. Now... surprise. The clients were not paranoid enough. For hundreds of years, Switzerland was a black hole of information. Then, suddenly...

This extends to the Web. People do not realize that EVERYTHING they have done on the web, in the illusion of anonymity, has traces. And these will remain for 5, 10, 100 years! Everyone was shocked to see Yahoo handing over to the Chinese the name of a dissident (now in jail). A simple subpoena can make any entity deliver all details about a web subscriber. But that is not even necessary: the weak point in any organization is the employees. Just as the Germans bribed employees in Luxemburg banks (and the French have been getting anything they want out of Geneva), I AM CERTAIN that you can bribe someone at any web server to deliver anything (Web detectives?).

The other problem is that someone who wants to sue you can arbitrage forums. If I want to sue someone for libel in the UK, all I need to do is prove web hits in the UK – so a US resident can sue another US resident in the UK, the Philippines, or Lebanon – wherever the laws are more favorable and the definition of defamation is broadest.

I thought the web would make us anonymous... we are no more anonymous than if we lived in a small pre-industrial settlement where almost nothing you do can be secret. We just don’t know it.

97 – Non–Neutrality of Representation

Having a risk number is not trivial. It does lead you to do foolish things, even if you knew that the measure was wrong. If I can show that, many people [who offered quantitative risk measures in finance] will have to be held accountable – & I can show that! One of Fannie Mae director’s, a quack & proponent of “Modern Finance” charlatanism, kept promoting “scientific” risk measurement methodologies that do not measure risks adequately, but lead people to TAKE MORE RISK foolishly thinking they know something. [This is the reason I singled out Fannie Mae in The Black Swan as a firm sitting on dynamite & the International Association of Financial Engineers as a society of snake oil vendors harmful to society]. After >1 trillion in losses I can safely say that my statement that the banking system has been taking more risks than they thought SHOULD HAVE BEEN TAKEN MORE SERIOUSLY. So I hold that giving someone a bad risk measure was just as CRIMINAL as giving someone the wrong medicine. For a long time nobody sanctioned doctors who poisoned their patients. Why don’t we take on the proponents of quantitative risk management, put them in jail so they stop harming us?

Now I generalize the point with non-neutrality of representation. Goldstein & I will be testing experimentally on risk measures (cohorts given a risk measure v/s another one deprived of such “tool”) . But we can take the non-neutrality of representation into something much more general, more interesting than finance.

95 – Pre–Popper – Negative Empiricism & the Sophistication of Sextus

From Brochard (the 1887 text, 1932 reprint):

Negative theses:

"Les theses négatives tiennent chez les sceptiques bien plus de place que chez les positivistes.

“Si par exemple les empiriques ne se contentent pas d'énumérer simplement les cas où un phénomène se produit, procédé qui, suivant la très juste remarque de Stuart Mill, ne permet que des inductions très générales, et perd toute valeur quand on veut formuler une loi particulière ; s'ils tiennent compte des cas où un phénomène ne se produit pas, appliquant ainsi ce qu'on a appelé de nos jours la méthode de différence ; s'ils veulent s'assurer que le phénomène se produit ou toujours, ou rarement, ou qu'il fait défaut autant de fois qu'il apparaît, ou qu'il n'arrive jamais, c'est très probablement à Ménodote qu'ils doivent cet excellent précepte : on peut du moins le conjecturer d'après le passage de Galien où il est rapporté ; nous y voyons en effet que c'est Ménodote qui a donné un nom à l'expérience qui ne se conforme pas à cette règle.”

On why Sextus is not truly Pyrrhonian (he was vastly more sophisticated than his predecessors – and followers!):

“Le mot indifference (αδιαφορια) que Pyrrhon avait toujours a la bouche ne se trouve pas une seule fois dans les trois gros livres de Sextus. La doctrine a fait du chemin depuis le pauvre ascete Pyrrhon jusqu'au savant médecin Sextus Empiricus”

94 – Plato’s Academy, Ἀ**ταραξία & the “East”**

I was in India (for the first time) and had the impression that I had been there before – at some point I felt I was coming home & felt like breaking my nomadic streak & staying there. Maybe there is this manner in which the poorest of the poor can live hand-to-mouth while projecting a philosophical composure: a combination of utter indigence and striking elegance you never see in the (industrialized) West – Christianity appears amateurish by comparison. You need to learn to be poor; though it is easier to have nothing than have a little bit, just enough to start a materialistic dependence and worry about losing it, which is why I am convinced that middle-classdom is some form of punishment inflicted on unsuspecting members of Western societies. A few educated imbeciles irritated me with the cliché “fatalism” – a meaningless term.

Which brings me again to ataraxia [inner peace from the skeptical suspension of belief] which these people practice naturally. Among other things, I became once again obsessed with the strange similarities between both stoicism & Pyrrhonian skepticism on one hand, & Hindu thinking on the other – remembering that stoics were often Phoenicians (Zeno, Chrysippus, etc.), that Socratic ethics have some strange Eastern overtones (&, as well, Biblical). Karen Armstrong has the same intuitions – but she focuses on the theology of the 6^th C. BCE so-called “great transformation” – and the convergence of the three great ideas in the ancient world.

Here is the myth. [Note my premise that while most academic-paper-writing scholarship can be exact in the details, it is more likely to be faulty in the general – so the larger the issue, the more collectively wrong scholars are going to be, particularly owing to the generalization from partial evidence, missing silent evidence, etc. Very similar to journalism.] Conventional “scholarly” wisdom has it that the Arabs “learned philosophy from the Greeks”, then “brought it to the West”, which has a huge chance of turning out to be pure, self-serving baloney. It is so easy to document the opposite – that the Easterners (from way further East than the Arabs) TAUGHT the Greeks philosophy – or participated in the elaboration of what we call philosophy using the Greek language.

Here is my share:

First, the most convincing; according to Agathias [Histories], five of the seven later main philosophers of the Academy of Athens were Syrians & Syriac(Aramaic) speaking: Hermias & Diogenes (both from what is now Lebanon, Syria Libanensis), Isidorus of Gaza, Damascius of Central Syria, Iamblichus of Coele-Syria (Bekaa Valley in Lebanon), & Simplicius of Cilicia. Why convincing? Because by then the Syrians were about to enter the Omayad phase (when Damascus became the center of the Arab administration while keeping registers in Greek). There had to be an active production of philosophy, now disappeared, in the Levant. Note the presence of Syriac colonies in India.

Second, as I said, take the stoics (Zeno’s origin is not contested; though Chrisippus has been)

Third the translations of Dar-al-Hikmah [where allegedly the Arabs translated the Greek Corpus using Syrians & GrecoSyrian scholars] were suspiciously often from the Syriac (Aramaic), instead of the Greek original. So I suspect that the contributions were two-way: while Arabs did not know Greek, educated Syrians used Greek as a written lingua franca & would not have needed translations.

Fourth, Pyrrho went east with Alexander & almost certainly encountered all the syncretistic systems developed there [on that, later].

Fifth, take the number of skeptic philosophers from Syria Ἀντίοχος Λαοδικεὺς ,Θειωδᾶς Λαοδικεύς, etc.

Sixth, recall my argument a dozen notes ago that nobody cared about philosophy in the Greco-Roman world.

This is just scratching the surface.

COMMENT 94-b Randomness, Pyrrhonian Wisdom, Ἀ__ταραξία, & Arabic “Hikmah” (The Counterfactuals of the Wise) [Was note 63]

There were two incompatible schools in antiquity proposing protocols for dealing with a random world (or one in which we cannot predict & one we cannot control): the stoics & the Pyrrhonian skeptics. The stoics advocated focusing on behavior, rather than result. The Pyrrhonian skeptics advocated the need to remain skeptical about the consequence of any action, as we are not able to gauge whether it should have beneficial or adverse effects. Ἀ__ταραξία is that state of lucid indifference that results from the suspension of belief, the absence of anxiety about the future. While the two schools traded insults & were quite divided, particularly about Cosmology (the stoics were quite dogmatic) many moderns, say Charron or Montaigne (or this lesser author) have had sympathies for both schools.

Recall that the Levantine origin of both ideas is striking:. Both ataraxia & the stoic separation between labor & the fruits of the labor were present in the culture of the “Orient” – that strip of “eastern” cultures East of the Fertile Crescent.

I enjoy doing some occasional cultural archeology to dispel myths about the arrow of influence – & I can see compelling traces of the Ἀταραξία in the Arabic-language wisdom in which I grew up [& I am convinced that it did not travel from the Athenian Academy to the Arabs, but in reverse]: Do not give too much certainty to consequences of some events. You do not know what is going to be bad for you.

I finally found a fable illustrating the dictum about a King & his wise minister who is conscious of counterfactuals [to translate later, during a severe episode of boredom, or if I find it necessary to include the segment in my next book].

كان لأحد الملوك وزير حكيم، وكان الملك يقربه منه ويصطحبه معه في كل مكان.. وكان كلما أصاب الملك ما يكدره، قال له الوزير: “ لعله خير “ فيهدأ الملك.. وفي إحدى المرات قطع إصبع الملك، فقال الوزير: “ لعله خير “.. فغضب الملك غضباً شديداً، وقال: ما الخير في ذلك؟!.. وأمر بحبس الوزير.

فقال الوزير الحكيم : “ لعله خير “!..

ومكث الوزير فترة طويلة في السجن.

وفي يوم خرج الملك للصيد، وابتعد عن الحراس ليتعقب فريسته.. فمر على قوم يعبدون صنما، فقبضوا عليه ليقدموه قرباناً للصنم، ولكنهم تركوه بعد أن اكتشفوا أن قربانهم إصبعه مقطوع.

فانطلق الملك فرحاً، بعد أن أنقذه الله من الذبح، تحت قدم تمثال لا ينفع ولا يضر.. وأول ما أمر به فور وصوله القصر، أن أمر الحراس أن يأتوا بوزيره من السجن، واعتذر له عما صنعه معه.. وقال: أنه أدرك الآن الخير في قطع إصبعه، وحمد الله تعالى على ذلك.

ولكنه سأله : عندما أمرت بسجنك قلت: “ لعله خير “ فما الخير في ذلك؟..

فأجابه الوزير : أنه لو لم يسجنه، لَصاحَبَه فى الصيد، فكان سيقدم قرباناً بدلاً من الملك!.. فكان في صنع الله كل الخير.

A reader (Jean-Francois Leon) sent me this excerpt from a short story by Herman Hesse (cannot be found in English).

“Parabole Chinoise”

Un vieil homme du nom de Chunglang, qui signifie « Maître des rochers », possédait un petit lopin de terre dans les montagnes. Un jour, il perdit l’un de ses chevaux. Des voisins vinrent alors lui exprimer leurs condoléances pour ce malheur.

Mais le vieil homme leur demanda : « Pourquoi pensez-vous que cela soit un malheur ? » Et voilà que quelques jours plus tard l’animal revint, suivi d’une horde de chevaux sauvages. À nouveau les voisins apparurent, pour le féliciter cette fois-ci de cette aubaine.

Mais le vieil homme leur rétorqua : « Pourquoi pensez-vous que cela soit un aubaine ? »

Les chevaux étant devenus très nombreux, le fils du vieil homme se prit de passion pour l’équitation, mais un beau jour il se cassa la jambe. Alors, encore une fois, les voisins vinrent présenter leurs condoléances et à nouveau le vieil homme leur rétorqua : « Pourquoi pensez-vous que cela soit un accident malheureux ? »

L’année suivante, la commission des Grands Flandrins arriva dans la montagne. Elle recrutait des hommes forts pour devenir valets de pied de l’empereur et porter la chaise de celui-ci. Le fils du vieil homme, toujours blessé à la jambe, ne fut pas choisi.

Chunglang ne put réprimer un sourire.

Hermann Hesse, Éloge de la vieillesse, p. 146, trad. A. Cade, Livre de poche, n° 3376.