Just talking about money makes people poor.A practical definition of wealth: one is wealthy in inverse proportion to the mentions of “money” whether positive or negative during the course of one’s year. This also applies to societies: hunter-gatherers were most certainly the wealthiests of all the world was their property, social climbers and unemployed bankers the poorest by far.
He’s back! HatTip to Dave Lull.
This morning, Nassim Taleb returned to Twitter, posting one of the technical appendices to his new book. And immediately he got into a wonderfully wonky twitterfight/conversation with Daniel Davies.
I don’t pretend to understand all the subtleties of the conversation between the two, but, for Tom Foster, here’s an attempt. Davies has promised a Crooked Timber post on other parts of the appendix; I’m really looking forward to that.
via Felix Salmon.
I am watching with depression the Syrian events & how intractable they are, looking for historical analogs & I just realized that it was only recently that a “civilized” state and one that boast being the paragon of civilization did worse atrocities, with the Algerian war of independence causing 1,000,000 victims mainly Algerians, close to a tenth of the population, 30 times what we have had in so far Syria. By then there was no Youtube to convey the vivid stories the elaborate “gegene” to torture rebels and the radio was controlled by the French state. And, what’s worse, people like Francois Mitterand were in on it, then led careers lecturing the rest of the world on humanitarian values. And, what was remarkable, America sided with the rebels.
FOR HISTORICAL SPECULATION– let’s discuss
http://www.fooledbyrandomness.com/notebook.htm
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.
(continues)
via FOR HISTORICAL… | Facebook.
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Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder (At Amazon U.S.)
Very satisfying. A great work. Looking forward to a re-read but want to let it sit for a while.
