To all my Levantine friends (including more extended Levant to include Alexandria and the Aegean), please spread this article by Philip Mansel to your friends, etc. We have been destroyed by the idea of nation state; the rest of the world is becoming what we were –not us.
http://www.levantineheritage.com/pdf/LMD_April2012_Philip-Mansel.pdf
Treat! From Reason.com
Reason’s Nick Gillespie sat down with Taleb for a wide-ranging discussion about why debt leads to fragility (5:16); the importance of “skin in the game” to a properly functioning financial system (10:45); why large banks should be nationalized (21:47); why technology won’t rule the future (24:20); the value of studying the classics (26:09); his intellectual adversaries (33:30); why removing things is often the best way to solve problems (36:50); his intellectual influences (39:10); why capitalism is more about disincentives than incentives (43:10); why large, centralized states are prone to fail (44:50); his libertarianism (47:30); and why he’ll never take writing advice from “some academic at Cambridge who sold 2,200 copies” (51:49).
I was struck in Rome by the discovery of the absence of smooth and bland surfaces; nothing is low-dimentional. Everything ancient has ornaments in the smallest details; no area is left smooth, even for functional objects. The only exceptions I could find were Etruscan artifacts.These are 1st Century terra cotta oil lamps, one notices embellishments. Later Christian era oil lamps are of course adorned with religious symbols.I am now convinced, looking at a modern wall, that smooth surfaces hurt us deeply into our soul We have already discussed how we crave some class of variations, something that can be mapped by Jensen’s inequality.We are antifragile to dimentionality of objects. I feel that looking at a modern architectural object is an eyesore, even a soul-sore. I wonder if grafiti are a naturalistic rebellion against low-dimension.
The problem isn’t just that there are so many things we do for reasons too deep for us to understand; it is that our attempts to explain them spoil the party and cause us to stop doing them.
(revised aphorism)
Radical?
Published on Jan 9, 2013
Radical philosopher Nassim Nicholas Taleb offers a blueprint for how to live – and thrive – in a world we don’t understand, and which is too uncertain for us to even try to predict.