![]() Hannity broaches the now debunked canard that the police officer had a suborbital facial fracture, implying that Michael Brown beat him up. To wit, listen starting at the 7:00 mark.ġ) Suborbital fracture. The interview morphed into a dissertation of lies and prejudices without any journalistic acumen or even an attempt to arrive at the truth. Smith on his radio show (the Ferguson discussion begins at 7:00) ostensibly to discuss the racial implications of the Ferguson shooting and aftermath with a "reasonable black man". Recently, Sean Hannity interviewed sports analyst Stephen A. I'm taking a break from my moratorium to point out my appreciation for Sean Hannity's lies which are so elegant that they can be appreciated as art. I've been trying to engage in more life-affirming activities which means ignoring the ill-informed haranguing about current events. Be thrifty, be skeptical, pay off your mortgage. Fix furnaces or cars, or deliver babies that will never go out of style and you will have insurance against fat-tail events. The best protection, the optionality, is to learn a useful skill that even the Russians or Red Chinese will need. The Great Recession of 2008 was inevitable in some form, and the next crisis is already in development somewhere. Eventually, I gleaned that economic disasters occur once every generation or so, for Vince it was the Great Depression and World War II, and at the time of our discussions it was the crushing inflation of the 1970’s that followed Vietnam. Unlike Taleb, Vince didn’t have an editor so it usually took effort by the listener to keep the conversation focused. Amidst all the discussions about the Caeser’s Gallic Wars or conjecture about whether he could harness the noosphere to control a roll of the dice, pearls of wisdom would occasionally wiggle out. My father also had a firm grasp of this idea that increasing fragility, or entropy, is natural and he gave excellent advice about becoming antifragile, although he had different terminology. Taleb’s first book was a technical tome on financial options called “ Dynamic Hedging ”, so he definitely gets it. After all, Taleb successfully navigated the options markets to make a bundle of cash, so while luck likely played a role he does have some concept of risk management and the human propensity to ignore risk. In fact, for all Taleb’s withering banter about fragilisitas and fat-tails and black swans, I sense that he is all too aware of the inexorable nature of humans to embrace harrowing fallacies that lead to destruction. To wit: "If something cannot go on forever, it will stop.” While Taleb never mentions this particular maxim, I think he would embrace it nonetheless. For the vast majority of us the opportunity or inclination to act unethically is nonexistent, but a few sociopaths will always exist, so why bother fretting about the inevitable? Herb Stein, a Nixon White House economic advisor in the 1970’s, when dismissing the two-pronged dangers of the budget deficit and the trade deficit, coined Stein’s Law. I enjoy Taleb’s passion and ranting, but it occurs to me that much of his self-admitted “anger” is misplaced. The best medical practice comes from time-tested heuristics, otherwise known as rules of thumb empirically shown to be effective. The human body, much like capital markets, is too complex to adhere to such top-down models since such things as long term sequelae and side effects are impossible to predict a priori. The best examples of pharmaceutical development are rare- eg, antibiotics and vaccines- while things like cholesterol-lowering statin medication, developed for only the worst hereditary hypercholesterolemias, are now prescribed to lower mildly elevated levels without evidence of benefit. Treating numbers, like mildly elevated cholesterol levels or arbitrary blood pressure “abnormals” with medication can lead to iatrogenic (ie, doctor-induced) harm and needless cost. Medicine is best when it embraces the empiric, guided by what we see that actually works….what Taleb calls the heuristic: the rule of thumb. Upon listening to a short interview of Taleb regarding this book, I was a bit unsure if I’d agree with his assessment of health care, but having finished the book, I’ll accept that he has it mostly correct. ![]()
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