I have finally gotten around to beginning to read Nassim Taleb despite having his books on my reading list for years. I decided to start in chronological order, beginning with Fooled by Randomness. I highlighted the following passage at the end of Chapter 7, which I marked to do follow-up research on:

The composition of Part I made me even more confident in my withdrawal from the media and my distancing myself from other members of the business community, mostly other investors and traders for whom I am developing more and more contempt. I believe that I cannot have power over myself as I have an ingrained desire to integrate among people and cultures and would end up resembling them; by withdrawing myself entirely I can have a better control of my fate… I am now thinking of the next step: to recreate a low-information, more deterministic ancient time, say in the nineteenth century, all the while benefiting from some of the technical gains (such as the Monte Carlo engine), all of the medical breakthroughs, and all the gains of social justice of our age. I would then have the best of everything.^[1]

For context, my interest was due to this passage being written sometime between 2001 and 2004 — my edition of the book is from 2004; I don’t have a first edition to compare against, and the exact year is ultimately irrelevant to this point. That being, the internet back then was not nearly as it is today, a Lovecraftian Shoggoth devouring any attention sent in its general direction. The first iPhone wasn’t released until 2007, marking a time period most smartphone skeptics look back on fondly, perhaps still a few years before these devices would peak as tools and communication devices, rather than entertainment portals. Practicing a low-information diet in the early aughts would certainly be a precursor for someone to evolve into a modern-day digital minimalist.

I was quickly disappointed when I went to research Taleb’s thoughts on current-day social media platforms and the internet in general, to instead find his X (née Twitter) account. I was unable to view much without logging in, but the posts I could see were fairly unimpressive juxtaposed against the voice, content, and clearly thoughtful rigor that I had read thus far in his first book. Perhaps it’s just the nature of the medium; nobody (reputable) has ever claimed Twitter to be a place for serious exchanges of intellectual ideas. However with his book’s emphasis on signal versus noise, I would have expected Taleb to write off social media just as he did the news media.

Instead I found someone who uses social media no differently than the most active users of these platforms — sharing his Very Correct Opinion on current events, and launching verbal eviscerations against those who had publicly thrown shade at him or some topic he cared about. Using nitter.net I was able to bypass X’s login wall to count that user @nntaleb had made 72 posts and retweets in the past week.^[2] Many of these are about the Israel/Palestine conflict, the current Very Important Event, naturally following the societal memory-holing of every previous Very Important Event. Remember China’s internment of Uyghurs, the Sudanese civil war, the Libyan crisis? Probably now that I mentioned them, but most people wouldn’t without prompting, despite that these issues are all still ongoing and the scale of consequence has not changed.

I shouldn’t have to caveat that this is not a criticism borne from which side Taleb supports in the Israel/Palestine conflict; this is also irrelevant to my point. Someone as steeped in Stoicism as Taleb, who references Seneca’s Letters on Ethics, should no doubt recognize war in a foreign country as apoproêgmena, a dispreferred indifferent. Yet still, being of Lebanese origin, he has more justification and background for having an opinion on this topic than the average American (the vast majority of whom pick a side determined by their respective left or right branch on the political dichotomy). Have you ever heard someone say anything like, “this is a complex and nuanced topic with a long history which I am not intimately familiar enough with to make a judgment”?

Unlikely. For decades, the media has worked themselves into a position of societal indispensability by conflating the simple possessing of information with characteristics like intelligence, worldliness, and good citizenship. Having an opinion on a topic became a shorthand signal for possessing information — and thus also the prior traits — even if no reasoned judgments were made by the individual and the information is inactionable rubbish. Conversely, to have no opinion is to publicly “admit” to being uninformed and ignorant (even if one possesses the exact same set of information as his opinionated fellow). So pervasively effective is this campaign, often having no opinion on something is itself viewed as being an opinionated position, rather than a simple deference to intellectual humility.

My carping about Taleb’s X use does not mean that I discount his ideas (or worse, reject them entirely) due to finding disagreement or distaste with one single thing he says or does. That’s characteristic of an inherently terminally online mindset; the wholesale rejection of a person and their body of work due to one single (perceived) behavioral, moral, or intellectual failing. If one finds the words said by another to be true and valuable, then they are, regardless of whether he who said them is imperfect at implementing them. As Seneca said, “whatever is said well by anyone belongs to me.”^[3]

Amusingly, Taleb himself makes a similar point just a handful of paragraphs prior to the first excerpt I quoted. Reflecting on Karl Popper’s personal life allegedly being at odds with his professed philosophies, Taleb writes:

I will refrain from commonplace discourse about the divorce between those who have ideas and those who carry them in practice, except to bring out the interesting behavioral problem; we like to emit logical and rational ideas but we do not necessarily enjoy this execution.

Ideally, we would all like to have and to flawlessly implement ideas. But it’s clear these are not always concurrent traits; this more than anything is perhaps the source of many post-Socratic philosophers’ admiration for Socrates, that he truly lived a life in accordance with his professed ideals. However, if a choice must be made between these two traits, I’m unequivocally positive that the second of the two is far superior. There’s an infinite pile of ideas already out there to engage with, some of which have stood the test of several millennia. However the intrinsic nature of self-discipline means it cannot generally be outsourced. What good would knowing the answers to all of life’s questions be if one lacked the tenacity to put them into practice?

Perhaps Taleb doesn’t view the amount of time he spends on Twitter as a problem. Or maybe nearly everybody is just addicted to the internet now, even those smart enough to work through a line of reasoning about how pointless and temporally wasteful most things that happen here are. Heck, look at me, futilely spending my human effort adding text to the internet, while during the time I took to write this it’s certain that tens or hundreds of thousands of pages worth of unadulterated LLM slop flooded out onto the web.