What did Taleb mean by this?

What did Taleb mean by this?

"Intellectuals" are all talk.

Prove him wrong.

I think that if you call yourself or anyone else an "intellectual", you should stop.

I think Taleb makes sense, but it irks me that he is retweeting PrisonPlanet, Stefan Molyneux and Baboon Mindset.

He has a hard on for people who are famous for raging large scale wars. In a thousand years his list will include Hitler and Stalin.

Same shit as: If you can't do it, become a teacher. Seems everyone has to be a great scientist or warrior in the mind of these people. (who usually amount to nothing special themselves).

He speaks here only to courage, not other values. You're decontextualizing the words of someone whos primary topic is risk

He's basically a professional troll right now, causing furor to keep himself in spotlights

I think he's fed up with agenda-burdened sham scholars who are reinventing history to suit New Necessities, and the know-betters who aren't calling them out on it.

He has a hard on for people who can make shit done. That would include Seneca (whom he quotes as one of the main inspirations for his books, and who himself said the same: the value of a man is in his deeds, not his words). This attitude towards academia and "professional intellectuals" is not that uncommon: for the same reason Feyerabend liked Lenin better than Marx.

I can see his point. I guess that makes sense.

That too, maybe.

What's a tawker?

nigga Marx was always tryna get the ball rolling on the revolution, why do you think he wasted so much time trying to organize workers collectives and communist parties? that's the whole point of the eleventh thesis

Is this idiot our new meme now? He's actually, unironically, retarded.

Key word numb nuts

What the fuck is a stochastophobe tawker? When did you realize Taleb climbed up his own asshole?

Maybe, but better him than Peterson and Land.

"Talker" in the accent of a typical self-made Brooklyn trader that Taleb likes to reference, IIRC. Someone who talks and doesn't do, doesn't take the risk himself.

The problem is that he's become so full of himself, so self-referential, that his latest musings read like finnegans wake.

He just made it up. He means fear of randomness i guess.

Not gonna lie, I love reading Taleb, though I am wary that it may be narcissistic in the sense that I am reading about how common sense and a no BS attitude is usually best.

The main bjt I disagree with him isn't when he's too reductive, it's when he acts like many intellectuals and pretends the Greeks and Romans knew the secrets of the universe and were right about everything

yeah it is a little overwhelming. I read anti-fragile and I had no idea what he was talking about with "Nero" and "Fat Tony". I assume they were some example he used in Black Swan but I didn't read that.

He is just in love with the little world of sock puppets he's created. We get to watch him play with his toys. Here is the chart he uses to clarify.

>it's when he acts like many intellectuals and pretends the Greeks and Romans knew the secrets of the universe and were right about everything
He's just being contrarian. Since if you ask a regular guy, he'd tell you that Greeks and Romans didn't know shit, referring to the modern natural science (or even worse, modern social science).

His point was that they knew enough science to make infrastructure that doesn't fall apart in 50 years, unlike our modern engineers with their over optimized fragile crap.

To be honest, modern engineering doesn't have a task of building anything that would last more than 50 years under the current socioeconomic paradigm.

Basically this. Rome and especially Greece had cultural and social systems that are largely alien to us.