Friends, I have seven points. Why seven? Because I’ve been reading too much Babylonian history recently.

FROM CONNECTIVITY TO TECHNOFEUDALISM

The first one is about concentration, a distinctive feature of the modern world, often tied to what I called the Black Swan problem. We now see winner-take-all effects everywhere, owing to connectivity. Imagine an island with many species but a high density per square meter. Compare that to a continent, where opening up space leads to fewer species per meter because some will eventually dominate. This mirrors cultural and economic life today.

Take books, for instance. Everyone reads the same ones — think Harry Potter or, for music, The Beatles. In publishing, a few authors prevail. You either sell 20 million copies or you’re working at Starbucks (unless you boycott the firm, as I do personally). This concentration applies to opera singers too. In the past, they could make a living locally because there were no audiovisual recordings. Now, a few stars capture most of the income.

This concentration isn’t inherently bad — it’s just part of market mechanisms, the way things work. The problem arises when it becomes sticky at the top. The road from a college dorm to dominating through Google was once short, and search engines like AltaVista could disappear in minutes, replaced by the newly universally adopted Google. But now, replacing Google is harder because dominance is entrenched, which is unhealthy. This leads to what some like Varoufakis call technofeudalism.

Concentration also applies to viruses. COVID spread globally in about a week, dominating the planet. Compare that to the bubonic plague, which took years to travel from what was Constantinople to Northern England and never reached the Americas due to limited connectivity. Today’s hyper-connectivity amplifies concentration, which is only pathological if we cling to an archaic, early 20th-century textbook understanding of economic, social, cultural, and biological life.

In wealth, for example, only 20% of billionaire families in the U.S. remain after 20 years, but in Europe, it’s the reverse — concentration is getting stickier, and we’re heading toward the more stultified European version globally.

Comment 1
Capitalism works not just by allowing upward mobility, but by accelerating its downward equivalent.

DYNAMICS AND MISUNDERSTANDING OF HISTORICAL PROCESSES

The second point is our difficulty in grasping dynamics, particularly in geopolitics, because historians and statisticians view history differently. My specialty is in stochastic processes (sort of), so I see history as a dynamic process, not a static textbook description.

Comment 2
Both GDP and its rate of growth can fool one in projecting future states; but errors from ignoring growth differentials can be monstrous owing to their compounding. When in doubt, use the rate of growth as status quo.

When I published The Black Swan in 2007 (it became a bestseller again recently, despite warnings that my tweets on Palestine would cause my books to be sold for $1 at discount stores. Threats of cancellation keep coming, though)… In 2007, the U.S. accounted for about 20% of the world economy (using purchasing power parity, the most rational metric), Europe about the same, and China around 6%. Now, the U.S. is roughly 15% and declining, Europe is about 14% and dropping faster, while China is north of 20%. This shift happened within the lifespan of a book.

Small differences in compound growth produce massive outcome differentials over time, as Warren Buffett keeps preaching. Even if you measure GDP in real dollars, the story is similar, with the same growth but different starting bases.

Now consider military expenditures: the U.S. spends about a trillion dollars annually, while China spends roughly a third of that. But compare what they get for their money. A chair made in China might cost $1, but here, it’s far more expensive. Apply that to military production, and you see who’s becoming the real superpower. If China isn’t there yet, wait two weeks or two months — it’s happening fast. This isn’t pro- or anti-China; it’s just reality.

• China makes things cheaper in general and comparatively much cheaper in the military field. The U.S. has a $53,000 garbage can problem.
• The U.S. weapons industry, as mentioned by Col. McGregor, is not competitive; it is one of the three areas that costs “a lot in the U.S.,” along with healthcare and education — the latter can cost two orders of magnitude more here.
• China spends a third of U.S. military in nominal terms. You can figure out what is going on since they don’t have the $53,000 garbage can problem yet.
• By some mental bias, people think that status quo is GDP. No; it is GDP growth. China pulled from 6% to more than 20% of world GDP (PPP) in 15 years. So consider what the state of geopolitics would be in 2035.

Our projections often fail because we rely on primitive analyses of the past, ignoring second-order effects. In the future, discussions about war might need to happen in Beijing, not Washington, where overpaid officials may not grasp these evolutions.

THE S-CURVE AND ECONOMIC SATURATION

The third point is the S-curve, which I discussed in Antifragile. In biology and economics, entities grow in a convex way, then slow as they saturate — growth may be unbounded, but remains sub-logarithmic. Once you have a two-car garage, do you need a five-car garage? Some might, but most don’t — the incentive diminishes.

China is growing fast because many still lack basics like a car, while Europe and the U.S. have reached saturation, with little incentive for further growth. And many are discovering that lifestyle improvements, such as bicycling paths and pedestrian- and cyclist-friendly cities, may not produce economic growth.

The problem is that it is saturated economies, like the U.S. and Europe, that carry the most debt. There’s a French saying: On ne prête qu’aux riches (“One only lends to the rich”). But when you’re rich and borrow heavily, you need growth to service that debt, which is harder at the top of the S-curve.

Further, policies like tariffs, as seen under the current administration, can stifle growth by forcing resources into lower-margin activities — like asking a brain surgeon to do some gardening two days a week to avoid being “ripped off” by professional gardeners. This shift from higher added value to lower added value depresses GDP, a point orthodox economists agree on — and this, at the time when we need growth the most.

Our metastatic government and irresponsible fiscal policies exacerbate this. Soon, most U.S. expenditure will go to servicing debt, and we lack the political mechanisms to correct this. Worse, we now depend on foreigners or local retirees to buy our debt. Former President Biden’s policies, like freezing assets in U.S. dollars, discouraged investment in U.S.-denominated assets. If your assets can be frozen because you once met someone who had lunch with the brother-in-law of a banker connected to Putin, why take the risk of holding dollars (or Euros since the U.S. bullied Europe into following suit)?

Central banks are shifting to gold, which has rallied significantly, as BRICS countries move away from dollar reserves.

IV. IMMIGRATION

There has never been a society that welcomed immigration for its own sake, for reasons beyond its economic utility. The West grew wealthy, then ran out of people willing to clean bathrooms, fix roofs, babysit noisy spoiled brats, and mow lawns. It would be prohibitively costly to ask a dentist to spend two days a week gardening for balance. Nor do many youngsters in the middle class dream of growing up to be janitors. So the poor must be imported — reluctantly.

Comment 3
Immigration in small doses is socially benign; immigration in large doses threatens the museum-state perception of the locals as a discontinuity from past history and feels like an invasion, even if it is not.

The United States and Europe became structurally addicted to cheap immigrant labor, building oversized houses with expansive lawns and labor-intensive upkeep. A sharp reduction in this supply would trigger hyperinflation, owing to the nonlinear effects of such squeezes. Remember 2022.

Every Western political party that won office on an anti-immigration platform has ended its term with more immigrants than before. Giorgia Meloni is a recent example.

In that light, recent moves to deport immigrants appear largely symbolic — gestures aimed at winning elections. Some are simply vicious, driven by the urge to humiliate immigrants for its own sake.

Can the West dispense with immigrants? Not without crushing its own global GDP — an option unaffordable to economies already burdened with accumulated deficits. It may be a rational choice in theory but, in practice, almost no one is willing to pay that price.

Note again, I have nothing against closed xenophobic ethnostates per se (so long as they don’t invade others and mind their own business); but under modern conditions one cannot have both such a state and accumulated debt requiring economic growth.

We end up in the strange situation of xenophobic people importing labor for their own purposes while voting against immigration — a sort of tragedy of the commons.

Comment 4
The perception of the number of immigrants tends to be biased considerably higher than reality, perhaps because of salient differences and their visibility from their concentration in dense central areas (a saliency bias).

The proportion of Muslims in Europe tends to be under 1/20, ranging between 1/10 and 1/100 in most countries — yet casual perceptions tend to be almost one order of magnitude higher.

Note on Highly Skilled Immigration
There is a marked difference between Europe and the United States in terms of reverse brain drain — the inflow of highly skilled immigrants — which explains the growth differential between the two environments. The U.S., with its more generous (though less equalitarian) academic compensation packages and fewer restrictions on retirement, has consistently drawn Europe’s most aggressive and productive scientists.

At the Tandon School of Engineering of NYU, where I spent more than fifteen years, the near-totality of both faculty and graduate students were foreign-born.

Comment 5
Reversing the direction of brain drain (via visa restrictions) may in fact help the countries of origin by keeping talent locally.

V. THE LIBERATING EFFECT OF SOCIAL MEDIA

The next point is an optimistic one: social media has transformed information flow. Historically, people traded information at the barber shop or fish market, acting as both conveyors and recipients. Big media disrupted this, turning us into passive consumers of TV lectures by the state and a bowdlerized press. Now, platforms like TikTok and X allow us to both share and receive information, returning to a natural model.

Social media is hard to control, even with censorship, and AI makes it even harder to manipulate without producing incoherent outcomes. For example, an ethnic cleansing in Gaza might have been covered up by traditional media in 1995, but in 2025, social media exposes it. The media only matters to politicians or those out of touch — anyone under 30 doesn’t care about ABC News.

So this is good; someone was talking to me about the “media cycle” in Washington and I told him the only people who care about the media are people who are either in a wheelchair or in politics. I’m here because of Facebook (initially) and X/Twitter, not traditional channels, and I’ve refused the media tour for my last couple of books.

Comment 6
One effect of the breaking of traditional, centralized media’s grip on Western citizens is the inability of the Israeli propaganda to frame their ethnic cleansing and Apartheid as a defense of Western values against fundamentalist Islam.

VI. THE GROWING ROLE OF GOVERNMENT

The sixth point is the creeping growth of government invalidating cross-temporal comparisons. In history books, we read about kings like Louis XIV and centralizers like Colbert, but today’s governments are far, far larger and more intrusive.

In Europe, governments account for 40–50% of GDP (higher in France particularly if you include education). In the U.S., it’s higher than reported when you include local government and recent interventions. A century ago, governments were under 15% of GDP, often less than 5%.

Comment 7
Government size is period dependent, invalidating cross-temporal comparisons. At no point have governments been more effectively intrusive, thanks to technology.

Even in economies driven by Adam Smith’s principles, government has grown substantially. In 1500, a dictatorial government couldn’t control much because it was a smaller share of the economy. Today’s governments have far more reach, and this is proving to be unstoppable. A limited-government conservative today is dreaming of what a centralizer was hoping for only a few decades ago.

VII. SCALE IS SIGNIFICANT

The final point is that scale matters when it comes to governance. I have an aphorism phrased by friends as follows: I’m a libertarian at the national level, a Republican at the state level, a Democrat at the municipal level, and a communist at the family level.

The point is, governance depends on scale. Country clubs have rules and enforcement — effectively a government — but nobody complains of country club dictatorships.

Historically, successful models like Venice, Dubai, or Singapore were small city-states. Scale enables effective governance, but as the U.S. economy grows in size and complexity, governance becomes harder. We need even more localism than we had 50 or 100 years ago, but our systems haven’t adapted to this reality.

Head-dress for success — Nobody told the Arabs — Ivermectin and religious conviction — Bad news for Baden Baden — Mother Anatolia — Take away the State Department

Some people believe that the Levant is the end of the East and a portal to the West; others describe it as the end of the West and a portal to the East. Those in the first group tend to belong to the main branches of the Islamic faith, while those in the second belong to various Christian Levantine churches. Now, one might think that the two descriptions are equivalent: an intersection, after all, is an intersection. However, by the same mechanism that generates the so-called ‘narcissism of small differences,’ not only are these two statements not equivalent, but they are, in practice, contradictory. It even took a civil war for the Lebanese to understand this fallacy.

Pierre Zalloua is a population geneticist. For a geneticist, there are (almost) no discrete categories, just continuous gradations. Many nationalists and racemongers thought that the new science of genetics would vindicate them and are currently hit by quite a surprise. Unlike languages that tend to be discrete, origins are necessarily mixed: West and South Eurasian and North African populations are largely combinations of a handful of base populations, though in various proportions. Modern ethnicities result largely from dynamic admixtures of these same base groups over the past few millennia (though with different weights). The incoherence of nationalism lies in the belief that such mixing must stop on its last iteration; they somehow reached their destination.

For instance, the French and the Germans live in distinct and historically antagonistic national narratives; they speak mutually unintelligible languages while being, for the most part (excluding the South of France), genetically indistinguishable. Entire historical accounts have aimed at creating a racial separation in a self-feeding way. We will further discuss how, counter to the “European” narrative, Ancient Greeks and the North Levantines are also the same population separated by language. Counterintuitively, the beauty of genetics does not establish races but destroys long-held concepts.

Accordingly, Zalloua’s book removes some of the clichés related to the Levant that have accumulated over the past couple of centuries

So the healthy way to think of the Levant is neither East nor West and, better, above such dichotomy; both its location on the Mediterranean and its proximity to both the Caucasus and Arabia (though separated by a desert) are highly deceiving.

The area has inflamed Western imagination for a long time, partially explained by the technology and cultural transfers that took place over three millennia. For Westerners, there has always been an aura of holiness and mystery, not just from its origination of Christianity but also for the various deep Gnostic creeds built there, the numerous religions still buried there with secret beliefs that require a complicated initiation, often hidden under Islam or even, as we now know from the Gnostic Gospels, Christianity.

The Superficiality of Cultural Markers

Let me first discuss how the notion of East vs West is highly constructed — and very poorly so. Let us consider the modern symbols that provoke such strong emotions. We’ll start with headscarves, indicative of a certain confession, with the French boiling over its non-republican significance. Well, the Islamic practice either originated from the Orthodox Church or was a common trait of the times across cultures — just look at old Russian babushkas. A noticeable trait in Renaissance paintings: Medieval Europe had stern sumptuary rules, with women dressed in black (and their heads covered) while men were allowed sartorial flamboyance.

But somehow, it recently spread as a cultural marker — in my own Levantine childhood, I never saw my Greek Orthodox grandmother without a head covering, while Muslim women (particularly in rural areas) were often bareheaded. Now, consider the prayer style: ditto. The Orthodox performed the μετάνοια, with the head touching (even hitting) the ground during prayer, a symbol of both physical and spiritual prostration, a practice that was prevalent at the birth of Islam. Finally, consider architecture: the dome is Byzantine, and the first Islamic places of worship were designed by Byzantine architects — it was so natural, as nobody informed the Arabs that there was supposed to be an East-West dichotomy that came with a cluster of symbols.

Further, the demarcation East-West, until the late 18th Century and the formation of the nation-state of Greece, was not along current lines. The “East” started at the border between the Ottoman and Habsburg empires –Orthodoxy thrived under the turban which it preferred to the tiara. So did the name Levant. The Levant Trading Company which brought coffee to coffee houses in London three Centuries ago was based in Smyrna, now Izmir, Türkiye. And it was not until Greece joined the European Union in 1981 that people stopped saying “I am going to Evropa”, meaning Western Europe. For ‘Levant’ is a French exonym meaning ‘East,’ referencing France, similar to how ‘Anatolia’ refers to ‘East’ from the perspective of the Attic mainland. Its Arabic name, Bilad el Sham is an exonym meaning “North”. Canaan is the only endonym of which I am aware.

Over time, with the rise of monolinguistic nation-states after the dissolution Ottoman Empire, the designation “Levant” kept shrinking until if referred to an area that is linguistically coherent, that is speaks a collection of dialects that are mutually understandable under the umbrella “Levantine Arabic”, mapping to today’s Syria, Lebanon, and the Holy Land, closest to Ancient Canaan.

Doura-Europos and the Arrow of History

Now, let us return to that identity business. About a decade ago, I was privileged to visit an exhibit from Doura-Europos, a Syro-Mesopotamian frontier city of the Roman Empire, in the area currently known for its origination and dominance of ISIS/ISIL (the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria/Levant). A synagogue had biblical scenes painted, proving that as late as the 4th Century, human representations were still present in some parts of Judaism. Further, the same room served as a place of worship for pagans, Christians, and Jews.

The first lesson, which was a main theme behind The Black Swan, is our endemic misunderstanding of the dynamics of history. What I call the retrospective distortion, affecting both the perception of the random character of events and the degree of differentiation of past designations: we flow back modern distinctions such as Christian or Jew to the past, in a severely deforming anachronism. We also pathologically like to categorize, and underestimate past diversity.

The second lesson is that religious differentiation, culminating in the modern polarizations, is a rather late thing in history. So is its ancillary religious intolerance.

So the direct ancestors of the most intolerant people on earth, ISIS supporters, would put to shame the modern West with their tolerance. We have numerous accounts in Syro-Palestine of families and tribes straddling different religions –some clans swapping between Christian Maronitism and Mountain Shiism (Harfoush), some between Druze and Maronites (Abillama), some between Sunni Islam and Christianity (the Shehabs). Somehow the deadline for conversion closed sometimes in the late 19th C. Even Sunni Islam (supposed to be the most Orthodox) was quite differentiated as some Sufi branches (in areas under Ottoman rule) were not aware of the interdict against the consumption of alcohol.

The rise of connectivity (in sequence, newspapers, radio, television, then the internet) had the perverse effect to make religions less regional, more centralized. For instance, Maronites used to swap religion with a Shiite neighbor in case of the realization of a wish, or neder –the practice has now stopped. My theory is that many religions stayed hidden under the cover Sufi, Shiite, Alevi, Alawi, Ezidi, and we have been losing such diversity.

So today, we tend to observe in the Levant greater polarization around religion, with separation of groups around sectarian lines, the main ones being: Sunnis, Shiites, Druzes, Maronites, Greek-Orthodox, Monophysites or “Syriac Orthodox”, Armenian Orthodox (the last two being not compatible and not in communion with the earlier ones), and Jews. But this, as we showed from Doura Europos is not intrinsic to religion: it is not necessarily a property of religion to produce polarization with clustered beliefs.

But if Levantines were in the past wise about religion, they were still polarized, but for other, generally silly things. It’ s a human trait to cluster and form networks with irrational and unexplainable side viewpoints –as one buys a collection of creeds as a single block. At the time of writing those who vote for Donald Trump believe in the therapeutic benefits of Ivermectin, an equine dewormer, while his opponents prefer to rely on vaccines; now try to see any valid, non contrived connection between therapeutic choices and political beliefs. So when Doura Europos was a bustling city, with religion a noncentral marker, Levantines weren’t textbook angels. There was almost always a severe brand of sectarian tension. The distinction was between the blues and the greens, people rooting for different teams in hippodrome races, with some political and sometimes theological correlation. Later, after the rise of Islam, a new division was formed between Qaysi and Yamani, based on imagined ancestry, which cut across religious groups: there were Muslim, and Druze, even Christian groups on both sides.

That Europe Thing

Some news for you, uncovered by Pierre Zalloua and colleagues (including yours truly). Where are you most likely to find people who are genetically closest to the ancient Greeks, those who have inflamed Western imagination and fueled theories of cultural ascendance? Well, it’s not in Athens, and even less so in the capitals of “Europe.”

The West — that is, to simplify for the purpose of this foreword, Northern Europe, the land of butter — has spent some time trying to give itself its own letters of nobility by associating with the Greeks. This includes attributing some qualities as unique to the Hellenes. By assuming that the absence of evidence is evidence of absence and that if we don’t have texts on a subject that precede the Greeks, then they must have invented it. This culminated with the great racial awakening of Europe emerging from the Middle Ages into the buildups of the category Indo-European vs. Semitic, essentially language groups that became associated with race. Later, a German could claim to be vicariously, through their ancestors, an active partaker in the origin of Western Civilization.

Our discovery will certainly irritate, perhaps infuriate, some Neonazi with a tattooed skull doing combat training in a clandestine camp near Baden Baden –or, worse, some professor of classics in a German university. For we found that the closest genetics to ancient Greeks are people from the Northern Levant. We sampled three groups from Northern Lebanon near the Syrian border: Muslims from Dinniyeh, Maronites from Zgharta/Ehden, and Greek-Orthodox from the Koura valley. They proved to be genetically closer to the Ancient Greeks than a random person in today’s mainland Hellas. Is this from gene swapping with Greek sailors and Byzantine armies? No, as we could time the admixtures: the origin is very ancient. It just happens that both Ancient Greeks and Ancient Levantines, particularly those in the North, originate from the same source population in Ancient Anatolia.

For the distinction Indo-European vs. Semitic is merely linguistic, not racial, but even scientists spent two centuries under the delusion that it was an unbrigeable genetic fissure. Languages move faster than people. As I argued in Skin in the Game, genes follow a majority rule, slow to disperse between neighboring populations, while languages (and religions) follow a minority rule, and can spread nonlinearly, like wildfire. If ten people whose mother tongue is not English sat in a company meeting with an solely English speaker, English will be the spoken language, which explains how the elite language becomes rapidly the norm. Often, as in Türkiye, Morocco, Egypt, conquered populations change language rapidly, deceiving themselves about a national origin. Even Ernest Renan, who was obsessed with the racial superiority of the West, at some point defined Semitic as merely linguistic[1]. An easy way to see that the Phoenicians and Greek were almost the same branch: the dominant paternal haplogroup for both is the Anatolian J2a (Zalloua will make the notion of haplogroup clearer in Chapter x).

The Anatolian connection doesn’t require genetics; it is actually visible to anyone with acceptable vision (or a competent optician) who has taken a road trip across the Eastern Mediterranean. 1) What is called “Arabic music” in the Levant is actually an Anatolian style shared across the entire zone from Crete to the foothills of the Zagros Mountains — the tones are the same, although the words change. 2) The dances: Lebanese and Syro-Palestinian “dabke” are similar to those found in Turkey (“halay”) and the Greek world (Καλαματιανός, Χασάπικο, and Συρτάκι). 3) The traditional Lebanese mountain garb, consisting of loose-fitting trousers with tapered ankles, resembles the Greek βράκα, the Turkish “şalvar,” and perhaps has its origins in the Persian “shalwar” (pants, often misperceived as a Western thing, actually originate from Persia and Anatolia).

That Bad Greek of Syria

Another fact that may irritate the “West vs. East” crowd: the Levant was the larger contributor to “Western Civilization” directly, that is the Graeco-Roman corpus during the Hellenistic era, that is the ten centuries extending from the arrival of Alexander in the 4th C. BC to the 7th C AD, with the Arab invasion. Just as I am now writing in English without being a Northern European and liking butter (and porridge), Levantines wrore in Greek while being diglossic (Greek and Aramaic), or even triglossic (Greek, Aramaic, and the local Canaanite dialect). [Footnote: There was even quadriglossia in Berytus, present day Beirut, as the law school taught in Latin, something that horrified the purist Libanius Antiochus (ironically I recall once insulting someone telling him“we spoke Latin before you” as, in addition, the author Ammianus Marcellinus was, as his name indicates, from Ammia, present day Amioun, my ancestral village and place of residence)]. Many historians miss the link, focusing on the East-West transfer of knowledge via the translation program of the Abbasides House of Wisdom. Let us not forget that the New Testament was written in Antioch in what Nietzsche called the “bad Greek of Syria”.

Ironically, the racemonger Charles Murray wrote a book proclaiming the superiority of Western civilization by listing its contributions, not realizing that most ancient names were Levantine.

So below is a short list of Greek language Levantine authors and thinkers:

First, six Levantine scholarchs, that is, heads of Plato’s Academy: Diogenes of Phoenicia Hermias of Phoenicia, Syrianus, Marinus of Neapolis, Isidorus of Gaza, and Iamblichus of Apameia.

Next, the sholars Lucian of Samosata, Posidonius of Apameia, Numenius of Apamea, Zeno of Citium (originator of Stoicism), Zeno of Sidon, Philostratus, Philo of Byblos, Aeneas of Gaza, Libanius Antiochus, Zacharias Scholasticus, Boethus of Sidon, Apollonius of Tyre, Procopius of Gaza, Damascius, Apollodorus of Damascus, Domninus of Larissa, Timotheus of Gaza, Nicomachus of Gerasa, Ammianus Marcellinus, Antipater of Sidon, Antipater of Tyre, Marcus Valerius Probus (Probus of Berytus), Vindonius Anatolius Berytius, Dorotheus of Sidon, Hermippus of Berytus, Sopater of Apamea, Procopius of Caesarea, Lucius Julius Gainius, Fabius Agrippa of Apamea, Antiochus of Ascalon, Apollodorus of Seleucia, Philostratus, Maximus of Tyre (Cassius Maximus Tyrius), and Sopater of Apamea.

Add the jurists Papinian (Aemilius Papinianus) and Julius Paulus Prudentissimus.

Add the aphorist Publilius Syrus.

Finally, we count the theologians Eusebiusm, John Chrysostom, John of Damascus, Ananias of Damascus, Alcibiades of Apamea, Alexander of Apamea, not counting a certain number of Catholic popes.

The Most Stable Region of the World

Another counterintuitive fact: the Levant today appears to be an unstable part of the world, filled with warfare and intractable conflicts. This may lead people to overlook the fact that, between 1860 and 1948 (or more generally 1967, and, for Lebanon, 1975), the Levant was the most stable part of the world. It attracted a large number of what the French called “Levantins” — French and Italian merchant families in search of stability who settled in the Ottoman Empire, some of whom moved further south after its dissolution. There were bankers, doctors, dentists, piano teachers, and even French grammar specialists among these fortune-seekers. Additionally, the Levant was the main destination for Anatolian Armenians following their massacre in 1915. Remember, during that period, Europe was consumed with warfare, from the Franco-Prussian Wars to the Second World War, which completely spared the Levant. The area benefited from not being on the radar of the United States State Department, an institution that wreaks havoc when trying to ‘improve’ –usually unsolicited –yet remains unaware of its track record. It is my hope that we will revert to that situation at some point in this century.

[1] La vie de Jésus

A Few Things We Don’t Quite Get About the Levant was originally published in INCERTO on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

On The Cluster of Charlatans, Zero Interest Rate Virgins, & Crypto Tumors

Interview with Laeticia Strauch-Bonart in L’Express (French magazine), translated.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb : "Le bitcoin est un détecteur d'imbéciles"

Last year, 2022 was not of much respite for cryptocurrencies. While bitcoin has lost more than 60% of its value, the entire sector is in crisis, punctuated by various bankruptcies such as those of Terra and FTX. The phenomenon is the consequence, according to scholar and former trader Nassim Nicholas Taleb, of the low-interest rate “Disneyland” economy in which we have been living for fifteen years. A “cluster” was formed: Pro-putin, climate and Covid deniers, carnivores, and crypto culties, that Taleb, a former crypto hopeful but a fierce opponent since 2021, has decided to attack head-on.

L’Express: As early as 2021, you warned about the inability of bitcoin to play the role of a real currency. Prophetic remarks…

Nassim Nicholas Taleb: My point in the article I published in 2021 nicknamed “the bitcoin black paper” was that in its current version, despite the hype around it, bitcoin had not managed to satisfy the notion of “currency without government” and that it even turned out to be not a currency at all. It is because it can be neither a short-term nor long-term store of value, cannot function as a reliable cover against inflation and, worse than anything, it does not remotely constitute a shield against government tyranny or a vehicle to protect against catastrophic episodes.

The comparison with gold is quite poor. It cannot be expected that an entry on a register that requires active maintenance by interested and motivated people — this is how bitcoin works — will retain its physical properties, a condition for monetary value, for any period of time. In addition, we are not sure of the interests, mentalities and preferences of future generations. Technology comes and goes, gold stays, at least physically. Once neglected for a brief period, bitcoin would necessarily collapse [The “absorbing barrier”].

The fundamental defect and contradiction at the base of most cryptocurrencies is that initiators, miners and maintainers of the system were making money from the inflation of their currencies rather than the simple volume of the underlying transactions. Thus, the total failure of bitcoin to become a currency has been masked by the inflation of its value, generating profits (on paper) for a sufficiently large number of people. In reality, bitcoin has maintained extremely high volatility throughout its existence and, even worse, at higher prices, which makes its capitalization considerably more volatile.

Let’s add that Bitcoin transactions are considerably more visible than others, which makes it uninteresting for intelligent fraudsters!

Where does the craze for cryptocurrencies come from?

What we have been experiencing for fifteen years is a kind of Disneyland, with near zero, sometimes negative, interest rates and therefore without real market functioning. Lowering rates creates asset bubbles without necessarily helping the economy. Capital no longer costs anything, risk-free returns on investment become too low, even negative, pushing people into speculation. We lose our sense of what a long-term investment is. It is the end of real finance.

Investors get pushed into a Ponzi-like strategies: to invest in the assets of companies whose price was rising. Thus, the majority of technology companies do not produce cash flow but are financed through “funding” which inflates their assets on paper. Another phenomenon, in the past fifteen years, hedge funds that should not normally exist have grown like mushrooms. And then you have malignant tumors like bitcoin.

At first, when cryptos appeared, you seemed rather favorable

At the time, I was very critical of the Fed’s policy. I have always been critical of Ben Bernanke, who in my opinion did not see the structural risks of the system before the 2008 crisis, and overreacted afterwards. Instead of correcting debt and mitigating hidden risks, he covered them with a monetary policy that was only supposed to be transitory. I wrongly thought bitcoin would be a bulwark against the distortions of this monetary policy. By flooding the money market, central banks have created these tumors. Central banks have an advantage: they ultimately show a certain accountability, which is not the case with cryptos.

I think the crypto universe attracts manipulators and scammers. It also has a generational vice: it is filled with young people who have no experience, who bought bitcoin early and who got temporarily rich without knowing anything except computer programming (but it will not last). This is the difference between our world and that, for example, of the Romans, who did not have the cult of the youth, who even despised it, precisely because it had not experienced much. In fact, young bitcoiners do not understand finance: they do not get that it cannot be a reliable cover against inflation. In any case, what we need is to return to a normal economic life, with interest rates of 4 to 5%. It will clean things up, particularly in the technoparadise

You spend some time fighting on Twitter with crypto advocates…

About 36,000 “people” trolled me— which I had to block all thanks to a bot. Here, we have to do what can be called a “cluster”, which brings together crypto fans, Covid-19 skeptics, climate skeptics, Putinists, and radical carnivores. Many are delusional conspiracy theorists, but naive to the core. I’m not kidding, these people connect and share the same opinions on apparently very distant matters. Their scientific background is zero.

At the height of the disinformation about Covid-19 and the vaccine, a person I respect asked me to intervene: “The mainstream press looks like a boring and moralizing schoolteacher. You are known for being a fiery character who says what he thinks, much more reliable and interesting to listen to. So you have a moral duty to fight against misinformation. In addition, you obviously seem to be having fun so people will trust you.” I then began to attack these charlatans who pose a threat to society, and particularly to this cluster.

I occasionally share the opinions of the cluster, for example against GMOs, interventionism in Libya or Syria, and the Fed, which makes my opinion less suspicious for young people.

This cluster seems strange. What is the link between cryptos and Putin, for example?

There is as much coherence in that universe, located on the right of the right, as in the one, on the very left, who loves state economic control while advocating gender transitions. We can detect generalized lunacies: for example, the cluster is convinced that we are victims of a “great reset” conspiracy. This would be a plan orchestrated by globalized elites, starting with Bill Gates, to control the world following the Covid-19 pandemic, which would have been engineered for that purpose. If you believe in the “great reset”, then there is a chance that you will be wary of any state initiative to fight the pandemic, and that will make you seek Putin’s protection. And you may not know anything about bitcoin, but since it is part of the cluster, you adopt it with the rest! You know, by repeating nonsense, suckers end up believing it.

Isn’t this conspiracy-prone cluster likely to be stimulated by Elon Musk’s acquisition of Twitter?

I know Elon Musk a little bit, I met him several times and publicly discussed Tesla’s flaws with him on Twitter. But since then, he has blocked me! It was in March 2020, when he claimed that he was stupid to panic about Covid-19, to which I replied that it was stupid to say what he said. He got angry — he thought the epidemic would end by the end of March 2020. I maintained that we had to panic immediately, because it didn’t cost much then. When it is not expensive to panic, in any situation, it must be done.

Then, regarding freedom of expression, I don’t like disinformation but I think nothing purifies better than sunlight. We must let all these idiots ridicule themselves and disqualify themselves in public.

What about sensitive issues, such as health? Shouldn’t we set limits?

I agree. On these issues, you do not have the right to give an unfounded opinion. It’s dangerous. We must really be wary of quacky opinions uring medical emergencies. Today, when 100 experts think X and a dissident person thinks non-X, like this quacky Didier Raoult’s or some other false scientist, the charlatan will pass on television much more than the bearers of professional consensus.

Why is non-conformism preferred to scientific conformism?

Because of a phenomenon called salience. Consider the quote attributed to Stalin: “The death of a man is a tragedy. The death of a million men is a statistic.” The former is more prominent than the latter, despite the disproportion between the two. However, in their representations, people do not function statistically but emotionally. But science does not work through public opinion nor any opinion; it is a mechanism of evidence and demonstrations.

Note: More than a million people died of Covid after Musk‘s episode. There is something pathological about people who don’t get that without vaccines we would be in real trouble, and they divert you from these points by nitpicking. So we need safeguards.

Some interpretations see in conspiracy the conspiratists or supporters of the disinformation of narcissists. You too?

It also counts. But conspiracy theory is not necessarily bad for society. I would say that experts and mainstream media are right in 95% of cases, conspiratists in less than 5%, even if unfortunately the public is led to believe that conspiratists are 95% right and the media 5%. So we need them, but we must control them, prevent catastrophes. Will Elon Musk kill them? I don’t know. We must be very careful because when information is suppressed, people tend to believe it even more, which advocates for a very weak regulation of expression. Except, as I have just said, in specific, extreme cases: in the event of a national emergency such as a pandemic or when children are concerned, it is necessary to control false information on the networks, for example by pointing out that such a person is not qualified to express himself on the topic, particularly medicine [Note: People don’t get that nondoctors are not allowed to give specific medical advice; they don’t let truck drivers treat cancer patients, and I haven’t heard too many people complaining of lack of freedom of expression there]. YouTube has done such controls, as did Facebook. But it should not be abused: it should not be used in the case of opinion debates.

This is difficult, because the current alternative opposes radicals of freedom of expression to people who want to limit all speech for fear of offending certain categories of people.

You have to be in the middle. And when you censor, you have to treat people fairly. Either you censor everyone or no one. I don’t like the toxic and unhealthy utopianism of the wokes, and they, no one censors them. Overall, censorship remains limited to a few and unbearable trolls continue to thrive on this social network. Being on Twitter is like going to a café that brings together the entire population and you don’t know which one is a fool and who is a professor of medicine. In general, when you go to a real café, you know if you are at the truck stop or at the Deux magots. Twitter is a mess, a mix.

You find yourself at a table with Einstein on your left and a truck driver on your right who comments on IMF policy or discuss whether the people of Davos are trying to put chips in our brains…

What could happen is that Twitter becomes such chaos that people spontaneously flee to networks where trade moderation is stronger. In any case, I think things will eventually settle: you will have a Twitter for Einstein and his friends, and a Twitter for others. There is already Parler, which brings together Trump fans.

We find this dynamic in France, except that at home, the center exists, with Emmanuel Macron.

I note that the right is no longer conservative in the sense given to it by the British Edmund Burke: respect for institutions, traditions and the defense of prudence in progression. Traditionally, the two American parties were Burkians, one progressive, the other conservative: their ideal pace of progress was not the same. Now you have two clusters of fools, both on the left and on the right. Because of Trump, the real American conservatism has nearly evaporated. Moderate Democrats now have the advantage, and some people who voted Republican for years have started to vote Democrat.

In France, this right-wing shift translates into the rise of Eric Zemmour, who is completely xenophobic. It is even possible that he is anti-Semitic. The extreme right really makes me think of what some call the “ Nigerian scam” [a form of scam by which someone is promised a large sum of money in exchange for a small initial payment, supposed to have to be used to get the big amount. When the victim makes the payment, the fraudster invents a series of other fees to be paid or disappears.]

Well, the message sent by fraudsters is so primitive that most people immediately detect the fraud. But it still works because it filters a certain category of people: idiots. It’s the same with the extreme right: what they say is so stupid or weird that only fools or idiots believe in it. However, in a large population you will always have a few hundred thousand idiots. Bitcoin has had the same effect, it is now a magnet for idiots, a fool detector.

What do you think of Zemmour’s words on immigration and integration?

Christian Lebanese like me assimilate very well in the West, much better than in the East, but Zemmour makes me uncomfortable. Some appreciate it because it represents a very radical version of assimilation — we see it with its obsession with French first names. The problem is that Zemmour does not understand that in a more individualized world like ours, we cannot coerce people into specific names and identities. They rebel.

Look at the difference between Algeria and India: in Algeria, French colonizers were violent and sought to dispossess locals of their land and culture, unlike the British in India. As a result, the current relationships are very different. To the point where their current Prime Minister, Rishi Sunak, is of Indian origin. The British even had a Sephardic prime minister, Disraeli, a century before the United States had its first Catholic president!

The British manage to integrate differences as long as they have a commercial basis. It is not the State that manages national identities, as in France, so integration is more organic, especially thanks to business. This is why immigrants are generally conservative in the United Kingdom, and especially in the United States. These people have immigrated in order to succeed and want to protect what they have acquired.

It is difficult to imagine the French right dealing with immigration in this way…

This is because the French right is not liberal in the classic sense of freedom of trade and limited state (Adam Smith, Jean-Baptiste Say, Margaret Thatcher, Ronald Reagan). The French right is nationalist, centralist and in favor of the big state. It’s like the opposition between Zelensky and Putin. Recall De Gaulle saying “Maintenance will follow” (l’intendance suivra). This denotes a planning-oriented vision of political and economic life. On the contrary, what is the cardinal value of the British right? Free enterprise. They are both called “right”, but they don’t have much to do with one another.

Bitcoin is the Detector of Imbeciles: was originally published in INCERTO on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

I met Luca Formenton, Saggiatore’s capo twenty years ago, in April 2002, in the eternal city, in a mozzarella bar-terrace near the parliament. I spoke in highly ungrammatical Italian; he addressed me in impeccable English, a practice we have sort of maintained for twenty years. That was the period when I very badly wanted to satisfy my failed childhood dream to produce literature, but everything conspired to stop me from partaking of that highly protected genus.

I was in Rome supposedly for a conference on risk but I just wanted an excuse to be in Italy (coincidentally I also made friends with Daniel Kahneman on the same day, another, more complicated story). Luca was the first literary editor who was interested in my work, thanks to an intercession by the late Marco Di Martino.

By then I had written the first volume of the Incerto, Fooled by Randomness, a book that was practically impossible to publish. It was a continental style meditative essay and the Anglo Saxon world, in spite of their infatuation with Montaigne and Umberto Eco, were about five hundred years late to the genre. The official “subject” (an essay is not supposed to have such a constraint as a subject) was a random mixture of autobiography, philosophy (of probability), mathematics, inductive logic, musings on historical events and financial markets. It included parables with fictional characters, one of whom seemed to resemble me, which appeared to be confusing since I also had explicit autobiographical episodes. “Why are you confusing the reader with both Nero Tulip and yourself”, I was often asked by those who did not find the mixture too uncanny and continued reading the text. “What’s wrong with confusing the reader?” was my usual answer. The good thing about inserting “randomness” in the title is that it allowed me to write about anything that crossed my mind, given the ubiquity of chance and, worse, the lack of awareness of it. Not unexpectedly, the reaction of publishing houses had been unanimously dismissive: why would anyone mix finance, Solon, and Proust? And why these mathematical discussions?

Now I have no problem with focus and precision: I do not want my vacuum cleaner user manual to be a stream of consciousness. I had written a specialized treatise in mathematical finance, and was embarking on a career writing scientific papers, which must be as narrow as possible. But literature should not have explicit boundaries: the confines of the subject are internal and may remain elusive and hard to express in words. Nor should literature have institutions formalizing and commoditizing things. And I wanted to do my own version of what is called literature. Literature must be idiosyncratic.

I remained undeterred by the insults in the rejection letters. Something I experienced even more acutely with The Black Swan, editors were not content in rejecting the book as a wise businessperson would reject an investment, by saying something like it may be great but I do not wish to take the gamble or politely appeal to caution. No; they went out of their way to explain with a lot of precision why it would flop, why nobody would read it. Both Fooled by Randomness and its successor The Black Swan were treated by the industry like Yevgenia Krasnova’s Story of Recursion(which few realize was about The Black Swan recursively talking about itself and its own future). All books acquire retrospective qualities after they become successful.

My belief has always been that primo, “books are not written for book editors” and secundo, almost all book editors don’t know it –it turns out that there are good editors in some elite houses (such as Will Murphy in New York, Will Goodlad in London, and those who replaced them) but these were still outside my reach then. Predictably, I refused to be edited, feeling that it disrupts the inner harmony of the text; the manuscript showed a fiercely stubborn personality, which editors easily confirmed upon meeting its author.

Finally, I miraculously managed to get temporarily published by a newly founded aggressive internet house who traded my refusal to be edited against lower royalties. The house was so patently incompetent (yet aggressive) that they rapidly became financially insolvent –the managers burned their cash on first class transatlantic seats and lavish author parties (not mine). But I had no reason to complain: only an incompetent-but-aggressive publishing house would have accepted to publish me. To cheat, Fooled by Randomness had been promoted to some as a business book (although the only business in it is its dismissal of business as both a vulgar and a random thing); to others as a philosophy of science manual though the demand for these was so limited that the last books in that category that were read beyond a narrow group of graduate students were by Karl Popper, fifty years earlier.

However, by the time I met Luca, Fooled by Randomness had been steadily circulating via word-of-mouth, thanks to the internet. Your local bookstore, in spite of the romanticism for the neighborhood business, is only interested in local turnover for what can be rigidly categorized, say the biography of an exiting president or the travelogue of a recently divorced suburban dentist’s trip to Tuscany. But a revolution happened around then. Amazon, the internet publisher, could now reach people across genres and connect authors to my kind of readers who may be locally rare but large enough across the planet. For the internet switched the focus from physical geography to thematic subjects –the shift was analog to the replacement of the Riemann integral with a Lebesgue one. This is what put me on the map and in the presence of Luca Formenton on that spring day in Rome.

It was Luca who firmed up a certain idea in my head. He said that Saggiatore, his publishing house, had for its best success the Italian translation of Triste Tropiques by Claude Levi-Strauss, which put a quarter million books in the hands of readers. Except that it was five thousand a year over (almost) fifty years. It evoked the joke about winning a million zlotys at the Polish lottery: you receive 1 zloty a year for one million years –but joking apart, here is the very idea of robustness: the expression chi va piano va sano –e va lontano is double edged. Lontano in Italian is both temporal and spatial.

Luca seemed to know it was my kind of book. The hidden story, of which I became aware when I started writing the Incerto, is that Triste Tropiques was written initially as a novel. What’s more, he started with the poetic, Baudelairian title (reminiscent of Tristesse de la lune), then embarked on the writing of the stuff. Anthropology, Brazil, the Amazon were some background topic. I realized that I was playing Levi-Strauss’s game: find some topic to furnish one’s autobiographically driven reflections. As I wrote earlier, genuine literature is not found in the Goncourt circles or among these salon people who go to parties and readings in New York and tag themselves with a “literary” label by deploying a certain vocabulary and mentioning Borges. No, as I said, literature was something fundamentally grounded in its creator, the individual.

But there is something more central to the story: this idea of surviving fifty years without anybody noticing is a great lesson on what came to be called in The Black Swan the Lindy effect.

How do I write? The common fallacy is that if you want people to read you in the future, you must project something related to the future, focused on the contemporary and be as different from the past as possible –say by populating your work with space machines, high technology, and revolutionary ideas. My U.S. publisher still tries to squeeze modern art on the cover when I am looking elsewhere.

No, no; it’s the exact opposite. I stood the idea on its head. If you want to be read in the future, make sure you would have been read in the past. We have no idea of what’s in the future, but we have some knowledge of what was in the past. So I make sure I would have been read both in the past and in the present time, that is by both the comtemporaries and the dead. So I speculated that books that would have been relevant twenty years in the past (conditional of course of being relevant today) would be interesting twenty years in the future.

Another discovery I made then, and to which I have been adhering until the present. If you consider writing a creative endeavor, then avoid practicing it in mundane matters as it may both dull your vitality and make it feel like drudgery, work. I find it painful to write outside of my books (or mathematical papers) –and immensely pleasurable to write in book form. So I limit my emails to one or two laconic (but sometimes incomprehensible) sentences, postcard like; the same with social media posts that are not exceprts from books. There is still such a contraption called a telephone. Likewise, I don’t read letters and emails longer than a postcard. Writing must have some solemnity. Reading and writing, in the past, were the province of the sacred.

Twenty Years Later: I was passing through Milan in the summer of 2022, and Luca wanted to meet. I suspected that, principally, he wanted to show me his gravel bicycle. But he also had a gift for me: a special, about fifty year old edition of Tristi Tropici. Inside the book was a photocopy of some accounting report. He said that the Cigno nero published fifteen years earlier became his new Tristi Tropici.

How I write was originally published in INCERTO on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

By a mechanism dubbed the retrospective distortion, we look at history using the rear view mirror and flow values retroactively. So one would be naturally inclined to believe that the ancients, particularly the Greco-Romans, would seem like us, share the same wisdom, preferences, values, concerns, fears, hopes, and outlook, except, of course, without the iPhone, Twitter, and the Japanese automated toilet seat. But, no, no, not at all, Holland is saying. These ancients did not have the same values. In fact, Christianity did stand the entire ancient value system on its head.

The Greco-Romans despised the feeble, the poor, the sick, and the disabled; Christianity glorified the weak, the downtrodden, and the untouchable; and does that all the way to the top of the pecking order. While ancient gods could have their share of travails and difficulties, they remained in that special class of gods. But Jesus was the first ancient deity who suffered the punishment of the slave, the lowest ranking member of the human race. And the sect that succeeded him generalized such glorification of suffering: dying as an inferior is more magnificent than living as the mighty. The Romans were befuddled to see members of that sect use for symbol the cross –the punishment for slaves. It had to be some type of joke in their eyes.

Clearly pagans were not totally heartless –there are records of pagan cities in Asia Minor assisting other communities after a disaster but these are rare enough to confirm the rule[2].

There is also the presence of skin in the game in the new religion. Christianity, by insisting on the Trinity, managed to allow God to suffer like a human, and suffer the worst fate any human can suffer. Thanks to the complicated consubstantial relation between father and son, suffering was not a computer simulation to the Lord but the real, real thing. The argument “I am superior to you because I suffer the consequences of my actions and you don’t” applies within humans and here in the relationship between humans and God. This extends, in Orthodox theology, to the idea that God, by suffering as a human, allowed humans to be closer to Him, and to potentially merge with Him via Theosis.

Irreversibility

Once in, Christianity proved impossible to remove, and the Nazarean mindset and its structure directed its opponents, its heresies, and its replacement –starting with Julian and ending with the most recent accretions of secular humanism.

For Christianity had a sweet vindication when Julian The Apostate, falling for the retrospective distortion, decided to replace of the Church of Christianity by the Church of Paganism along similar organizational lines, with bishops and all the rest (what Chateaubriand called the “Levites”). Julian did not realize that paganism was a soup of decentralized and overlapping individual or collective club-like affiliations to gods.

What has been less obvious is that while we are inclined to believe that Christianity descends from Judaism, some of the reverse might be true. For even the mother-daughter relationship between Judaism and Christianity has been, as of late, convincingly challenged. “ If there had been no Paul, there would have been no Rabbi Akiva” claims the theologian Israel Yuval[3] as we can see in Rabbinical Judaism the unmistakable footprints of Christianity.

Further East, Shiite Islam shares many features with Christianity, e.g. the same dodecadic approach, with twelve apostles, the last of whom will be associated with Jesus Christ, plus self-flagellation rituals around the memory of all-familiar martyrdom. These can be possibly attributed to a shared Levantine origin, but the Christian influence wholly accepted by Islamic scholars since Islam is backward compatible[4]. But it is clear that the latest position of Supreme Leader has been largely inspired by the Catholic hierarchy. [Note: Shiism is the religion of the downtrodden, the underdog, and the victimized, which, more than geopolitics, explains the Lebanese Shiite obsession with the plight of the Palestinians.]

Progression

The corollary of Holland’s thesis is that many ideas that we attribute today to social progress –including secularism, etc. are direct descendants of Christianity, mostly in its Western branch. This includes, of course, as we will see, atheism. But Christianity has been slow to spread its values from text to execution, and that may be the point of this book. Yes, Christianity glorifies the poor: but it took seventeen centuries from “the eye of the needle” in Matthew 19:24 to the conception of organized communism and various theories of social equality. Likewise, sadly it took more than a millennia for the “neither slave nor free” in Galatians 3:28 to move from epistle to execution.

As to the “neither Greek nor Jew”, alas, we are still waiting for full implementation as we have witnessed with the birth of nationalism in the late 18th C., a moral degradation and a step away from universalism with the modern contraption of the nation state –the murderous nation state. I recall vividly the TV ads in the early 2000s, promoted by Democrats to attack George W. Bush’s policies in Iraq; they kept showing the tragedy that 3,800 people died in the invasion. They omitted to mention the hundreds of thousands of Iraqis –lest the Republicans question their patriotism. These foreign casualties do not seem to count because nationalism establishes clean balance sheets: countries are only responsible for their own citizens.

The Debates

In the debates between Holland and the representatives of the second wave of self-branded enlightenmentistas such as A.C. Grayling, arguments are of the following type have been supplied: well, the ancients had some type of recommendation to care for their slaves. This is like saying: some of your neighbors treat their dogs in humane manner. This totally misses the point: the ancient’s worldview would have never accepted to put slaves as equal, let alone superior. The ancients may have been charitable; but it was not systematic.

A standard argument is that Christians destroyed the intellectual production of the classical periods while the Arabs preserved some of it, which can fool those who read too much Gibbon but not enough of other sources. Holland correctly busted that myth probably based on some true but not representative anecdote: these “Arab” preservationists were almost all Syriac speaking Syro-Mesopotamian Christians who operated mostly in Bagdad’s Beit al Hikma, The House of Wisdom (such as Ishac ben Honein and Honein ben Ishac) who translated from Greek but also from Aramaic sources. Those who were not Christian had been recently converted. Whatever he got wrong about race and ethnicity, Ernest Renan was correct in claiming that much of the Arab golden age was Greco-Sassanian. The “Greco” in it was Christian.[5]

Let us note that whatever the source of the myth of Christian obscurantism, that the story doesn’t fudge, no matter how we look at it[6]. It might be true that at the beginning, great minds tended to be pagan, such as the formidable Libanius. But later generations were integrated into Christianity. The most erudite people in history were 17th and 18th religious Christians such as the Catholic Bishop Pierre-Daniel Huet, Huguenot figures such as Pierre Bayle, or the great Scaliger (who, among his otherwise rare skills, was ironically able to translate Arabic wisdom into Latin). These put to shame their successors. My personal childhood experience is that Jesuit clergymen were your first stop for anything related to Ancient history and archeological matters, and before the spread of literacy in the Arab world, Levantine Christian priests (whose theological languages were either Aramean or Greek) were the ones to consult for the subtleties of Arabic grammar and the language of the Quran.

Let us expand the discussion to some of the points of Christianity beyond Tom Holland’s book.

The Secular

“Religion” doesn’t mean the same thing across various creeds. Christianity is the vehicle by which a separation of church and state was accomplished –another miscalculation by Julian and many others. Consider that in Semitic languages, din means law, which in Arabic translates into religion: the older and youngest Abrahamic religions were just law (one, local; the other, universal). But in Christian Aramaic, it is the word nomous from the Greek nomos that refers to law, separate from religion. For Jesus separated both domains with the “render unto Caesar what belongs to Caesar”; some additional work came later by Augustine to formalize how one deals with the temporal, the other with the spiritual, the afterlife, etc. This brought a natural boundary between State and Church.[7]

European “Identity”

Europe is neither a continent, nor a language group, nor a race since more than 100 million of citizens of E.U. members are olive skinned hardly distinguishable from other Mediterraneans.

European identity means Western Christianity and its values that have been spreading Eastward, which includes the “liberal order”, with a hard stop at Islamic lands.

Europa was the daughter of a Phoenician king, which gave its name to some vague area West of the Hellespont. Then moderns started referring to “Europe” as a separate continent in the large Eurasian landmass, with the fake newly created separation “white” and “nonwhite”, replacing older natural distinctions of Mediterranean vs non-Mediterranean. But anyone looking at the map would see no continent except by gerrymandering. Unlike the Pacific Ocean, the Hellespont is like a large river. The Urals used as a sort of border might be mountains, but so are the Alps.

What we had, until the notion of nationalism that sprung two hundred years ago was three separate cultures 1) Western Christianity (Catholic and Protestant) up until the Ottoman-Habsburg borders covering roughly the former so-called Holy Roman Empire, 2) The Ottoman mixed Eastern Orthodox and Sunni Muslim area covering roughly the Eastern Roman Empire, 3) Areas that are entirely Muslim further East and South, and 4) The Russian sphere, Orthodox. The Greeks, Romanians, Bulgarians and other new members of the European identity were in the second zone, and, up to today older Greek people still say “going to Europe” when they refer to travel to the first zone. In maps, the Near East started in Athens; it now starts in Syria (or Turkey, depending on Islamic orientation of its government).

So Europe became an extension of Western Christianity, with its values spreading into Orthodox areas. As Western Christianity expanded its values, so did the areas in the second zone become “European”, with in addition the progressive replacement of religion by nationality –an unfortunate Christian mutation. Until the twentieth Century, a Greek was self identifying as a rhomoi and had it not been for the creation of the nation state of Greece by Western European powers, Greek owned coffee shops would bear names like St Nicholas, St Demetrius, rather than Hercules or Acropolis.

That Western Christianity may not be entirely Christian, but a cultural mixture dominated by Northern European values is a valid hypothesis. We tend to think that religions shape people. But religions are also shaped by people. In the Levant, we can find heresies and separations along ethnic-linguistic lines: Coptic, Maronite, Nestorian, Armenian have in common the refusal to be “Greek”(rhomoi) and the East-West theological disagreements over filoque (or, worse, homoousios vs homoiousios) was more of an “us” versus “them”[8]. The Christian Lebanese writer Amin Maalouf views that as a result of social contagion: if Lebanese Christians are eager to resemble Westerners in habits and values, it is not from theology but imitation[9]. This in fact nullifies some attacks on religions based on their texts: some attribute Islamic violence to the texts, but the Old Testament is no less violent and nobody treats Lutherans as potential ISIS members. In that light, Holland’s thesis should be seen more as a cultural phenomenon integrated by Christianity.

I am writing these lines from the vantage point of my specialty of decision making under uncertainty, not that of theology, so what follows concerns the supposed conflict between religion and modern science as far as decisions under uncertainty and risk management.

Belief

In his book, Did the Greeks believe in their myths?[10] the classicist Paul Veyne explains that while reading Madame Bovary, he believes in the story and the character. This may explain how Plutarch could make fun of pagan “superstitions” and later end up his life a pious priest at Delphi.

For the notion of epistemic belief is entirely modern –and the gold standard Justified True Belief is not free of problems[11]. The term pisteuo in Greek means trust, translated into credere in Latin (linked to credit, as in a commercial transaction) and even in English, belief did not originally really mean belief, but something more related to beloved.[12] Amen (Haymen) means fidelity and trust in all Semitic languages.

The post enlightenment discourse about whether one believes in God is meant to be scientific. It’s not. It’s more like a science writer thing, such as R. Dawkins, S. Pinker and their group. The great mathematician Robert (now Israel) Aumann, who work at the Center of Rationality at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, when asked how he could be both a rational scientist and a devout Orthodox Jew, answered “It is orthogonal”. N.T. Wright, the theologian and historian, usually tries to explain that “it’s the wrong question”, but I will go beyond that. It’s an ill-posed question.

The notion of scientific belief outside science is not even scientific[13]. By a mechanism called “revelation of preferences”, rational decision making is interested in what you do, not what you “believe”. What goes in your head in the formulation of such beliefs is not the business of science. We are guided in life thanks to visual distortions –and it would be technically irrational to modify them.[14]

Empiricism in the Wrong Places

Ironically, modernists fall for what I have called the opiate of the middle classes[15], that is social science and stock market speculation. They refuse religion on rational grounds, then fall for economic forecasters, stock market analysts, and psychologists. We know that economic forecasts work no better than astrology; stock market analysts are more pompous but much less elegant than the bishop, and psychology papers do not replicate meaning their results do not hold.

My co-author Rupert Read and I have argued (using evolutionary arguments) that religion, via interdicts, allows the intergenerational transmission of survival heuristics and is effective in nudging people into some classes of behavior[16]. By some irony, “nudging” theory developed by social scientists (which earned Richard Thaler a Nobel in economic sciences) has been recently shown to be nonreplicable, owing to a statistical artifact[17]. Nonreplicable is the polite scientific term to mean that it is no different from astrology. Listen to the bishop — the recipient of generations of survival wisdom — not the psychologist.

The Sinister “Scientific” Project

For a Christian, a person is someone who breathes, from the Semitic neshama; it is the indivisible unit –all of course equal in the eyes of God. But the enlightenment, coupled with the invasive growth of “science” started finding statistical differences in the abilities of people of different races. Replacing the metaphor of Adam and Eve by Darwinian ideas lead to “evolutionary” differences not just between species, but within species.

This naturally leads to notions of eugenics: we humans can improve the human race by speeding evolution. This can also justify slavery. I went against the theories of IQ on statistical grounds, showing that it was a fake construct.[18] [19] One can easily show that people like one I’ve called the “mountebank”, the writer Charles Murray, innocent of any form of statistical knowledge, decided that African Americans were inferior, then decided to find statistical methods to justify that point of view. In general most of these studies fail to show the interpersonal variance and environmental effects.

Almost as worrisome, upon Covid, some were openly calling for geronticide and letting “fat people” die. [expand]

Desacralization and Vatican II

In the apology of Christianity, Genie du christianisme, Chateaubriand asserts repeatedly that religion is essentially mystery and sacrifice (that is, skin in the game).[20] “Which religion in antiquity did not lose its moral influence by losing its priests and its sacrifices?” he wrote.

Effectively, Catholicism lost its moral authority the minute it mixed epistemic and pisteic belief –breaking the link between holy and the profane. The aggiornamento of the Second Vatican Council, in the early 1960s, meant to “update” Catholicism. One of the measures was to translate prayers into the vernaculars, in place of Latin. By doing so they largely removed the element of mystery from the religion –it reminds me that, one evening in Chicago I walked out of a Verdi opera upon discovering that it was sung in English.

For once religion exits the sacred, it becomes subjected to epistemic beliefs. Atheism is the child of Protestantism, and Vatican II turned out to be a second reformation.

The fastest growing religion today is Sunni Islam, with one and a half billion followers, all praying in Arabic, a foreign language to nine tenth of them, and in an ancient version (fusha) never, never spoken in conversation by Arabs –when an Moroccan wants to converse with a Lebanese, they do so in French or English, not classical Arabic. Judaism survived with its prayers only in Hebrew (and some Aramaic as in the book of Daniel).

I conclude with something personal. I am Greek-Orthodox, a rhomoi, but having parents with an indifference to religion, was brought up via Sunday school and summer camps and boy scouts equally in Roman Catholic, Maronite, and Greek-Orthodox settings. I agree with Tom (private conversation) that much of the ideas of this book don’t apply to Orthodoxy as it had a different evolution and has not been affected by Protestantism. Literal “belief” is not something that concerns us too much. Furthermore, in addition to its theology, Orthodoxy distinguishes itself from Western Christianity in its stiff dietary laws, with veganism more than 200 days per annum. This is not a minor detail, as it shapes a certain type of commitment to the religion.

[1] Nassim Nicholas Taleb focuses on decision making under uncertainty. He is the author of the five volume Incerto.

[2] Lane Fox, Robin, 1986 Pagans and Christians, Knopf.

[3] Yuval, Israel J., 2016. The Orality of Jewish Oral Law: from Pedagogy to Ideology. In Judaism, Christianity, and Islam in the Course of History: Exchange and Conflicts (pp. 237–260). De Gruyter Oldenbourg. See also Yuval, I.J., 2015. “ Deux peuples en ton sein”: Juifs et Chrétiens au Moyen Age. Albin Michel.

[4] For a general view, see Corbin, Henri, En islam iranien, 4 vol, Nrf Gallimard 1973.

[5] Renan, Ernest, 1883, Islam et la science, Conference at the Sorbonne, 28 March.

[6] It was not not just in Gibbon. Consider popular culture then, as represented in the treatment of Julien Sorel’s familiarity with pagan classics by members of the clergy in Stendhal’s Le rouge et the noir.

[7] Taleb, Nassim Nicholas, 2018. Skin in the game: Hidden asymmetries in daily life. Penguin and Random House.

[8] Taleb, Nassim Nicholas, Religion, Violence, Tolerance & Progress: Nothing to do with Theology, Medium, October 2020.

[9] Maalouf, A., 2009. Le dérèglement du monde. Grasset.

[10] Veyne, Paul. Did the Greeks believe in their myths?: An essay on the constitutive imagination. University of Chicago Press, 1988.

[11] Gettier, Edmund L., 1963, “Is Justified True Belief Knowledge?”, Analysis, 23(6): 121–123.

[12] Armstrong, Karen, 2009. The case for God. Random House.

[13] Ken Binmore, 2011, Rational Decisions (The Gorman Lectures in Economics, 3rd Edition

[14] In my field of probabilistic decision-making, to be irrational is to violate some rules of intransivity, even then –and an irrational market is one in which transactions guarantee a loss.

[15] See N N Taleb, “The Opiate of the Middle Classes”, Edge, 2010.

[16] Read, R. and Taleb, N.N., 2014. Religion, heuristics and intergenerational risk-management. Econ Journal Watch, 11(2), pp.219–226.

[17] Maier, M., Bartoš, F., Stanley, T.D., Shanks, D.R., Harris, A.J. and Wagenmakers, E.J., 2022. No evidence for nudging after adjusting for publication bias. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 119(31).

[18] Taleb, N.N., 2019. Fooled by Correlation: Common Misinterpretations in Social ‘Science’. Preprint.

[19] Taleb, N.N., 2019, IQ is a pseudoscientific swindle.

[20] “Nous avons seulement voulu faire remarquer qu’il n’y a point de religion sans mystères; ce sont eux qui, avec le sacrifice, constituent essentiellement le culte” Later : “Quelle religion dans l’antiquité n’a pas perdu son influence morale en perdant ses prêtres et ses sacrifices ?”

On Christianity was originally published in INCERTO on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Clearly Covid affects the old, disproportionately. But so do practically almost all other ailments. A simple fact of life, in a population, it is the old that die disproportionally of all causes.

If you look at the force of mortality of the population, you would notice that Covid reduces life expectancy across the board in proportion to people’s mortality, an effect at starts before middle age.

Now the numbers in the graph represent the boost in mortality for all citizens over the period concerned (U.S. fatalities represents about 800K and counting, not taking into account a potential underestimation by ~200K). Now this represents the mortality boost after all mitigating measures, which includes travel restrictions, quarantines, lockdowns, vaccines, isolation, masks, etc. Nor does the graph above show the delayed effects of morbidity. Recall that only 48 million U.S. citizens have been reportedly affected so far. Should the entire population be infected (what some ignorant idiots call “herd immunity”), the effect would potentially be multiplied by >5 (or, taking into account the underestimation of cases, perhaps >3).

Now if we were to compute the effect on life expectancy, note that the effect acts across the board: a 30 year old loses more than 50 years of life, an 80 y.o. loses about a decade, etc.

Unconditional Eugenics

The inconsistency is as follows.

If Covid is an old person problem, deserving to be ignored on that account, let’s treat cardiology, oncology, urology, and most of internal medicine in the same manner.

The “old person problem” related to Covid becomes effectively an argument of unconditional eugenics, unconditional senicide/geronticide. The main trait in civilized society is to protect the weak: Ancient Mediterraneans gave a higher status to the elderly (senators). The same with almost every society that is not decaying.

The same people who advocate senicide fail to get counterfactuals right. For instance, just as one legislator one day announced that airplane checks were redundant (and costly) because there had been no recent terrorist incidents, many are arguing about mitigating measures on ground that fewer people have been dying on Covid.

Golden Rule (Dynamic) Argument

Another problem young psychopaths don’t get is that the way society is built is via dynamic not static reasoning. As I keep writing in the Incerto, a certain class of people (usually involved in technology) affected with Black Swan blindness have a mental disorder making them ignore that things move. A 30 y.o. is not going to be frozen in complete youth and (civilized) societies have been organized around intergenerational commitments: you treat the current elderly the way you would like to be treated when you grow older. For even psychopaths will be older some day.

It is not about a single event (this pandemic) but all future pandemics, including the one that will hit when you are older. Why is it so difficult to grasp that by killing seniors, you reduce your own life expectancy ?

No, Covid 19 is not an old person problem was originally published in INCERTO on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Santa Marina — Karl Popper — Herman Hesse’s Sidharta — Mutua Muli — Porsche’s no substitute

Santa Marina

In my ancestral village in the Northern Levant, on top of a hill, stands a church dedicated to Santa Marina. Marina is a local saint, though, characteristically, some other traditions claim her –such as Bithynia or other Anatolian provinces of the Eastern Roman Empire.

Marina grew up in a wealthy family, in the fifth century of our era. After the death of her mother, her father decided to turn his back to civil existence and embrace a life of monasticism. His aim was to spend the rest of his life in a cell carved in the rocks, in the Connubium (Qannubin) valley, at the base of Mount Lebanon, about eight miles from my village. Marina insisted on joining him and faked being a boy, Marinos.

About a decade later, after the death of her father, a visiting Roman soldier impregnated the daughter of a local innkeeper and instructed her to accuse the defenseless father Marinos of having committed the deed. The innkeeper’s daughter and her family complied, fearing retaliation by the Roman soldiers.

Marina took the blame –yet she did not need a tough litigator, to prove her innocence. She refrained from revealing her biological gender, to remain true to her monkhood identity and what she perceived to be the holiness of her mission. So Marina was forced to raise the child, and to make penitence for an act she never committed, she lived for a decade the life of a beggar outside the walls of the monastery.

Marina faced daily contempt by her peers and the local community. Yet she stood firm, never giving into the temptation to reveal the truth.

After she died prematurely, her gender was revealed during the purification rituals. The iniquity of the accusers was exposed posthumously, and she was venerated into Greek Orthodox sainthood.

The story of Hagia Marina shows us another variety of heroism. It is one thing to commit spontaneous grandiose acts of courage, risk one’s life for the sake of a grand cause, become a hero in battle, drink the hemlock for the sake of the philosophical death, become a martyr by standing tall while being maimed by lions in the Roman Coliseum. But it is much, much harder to persevere with no promise of vindication, while living the daily grind of humiliation by one’s peers. Acute pain goes away, dull pain is vastly harder to bear, and vastly more heroic.

Spitz

I have known Mark Spitznagel for long enough (more than two decades), enough to remember that he was once, briefly, a vegetarian, perhaps after reading Herman Hesse’s Sidharta in which the protagonist claims: “I can think, I can wait, I can fast”. My suggestion to follow the Greek Orthodox fast, where one is vegan two thirds of the year (and aggressively carnivore on the other third, mostly Sundays and holidays), failed to convince. Perhaps I should try again.

He finds ways to furtively inflict his musical tastes on his co-workers (Mahler, mainly, with performances by Von Karajan) and in the early days, as in a ritual, the conversations used to start and end with Karl Popper and central (Black Swan) asymmetries in the scientific method. There is this insistence that we are not in the business of trading, but partaking of an intellectual enterprise, that is, both applying proper inference and probability theory to the business world and, without any modesty, improving these fields according to feedback from markets. And there is all this German terminology, such as Gedankenexperiment. I suspect that there was a nonrandom geography of origin for the authors and topics that have invade the office: pre-war Vienna and its Weltanschauung.

Spitz has always been hardheaded; perhaps a good excuse is that it came with a remarkable clarity of mind. I must reveal that while I am far more diplomatic and less obstinate in person than I am in print, he is the exact reverse, though he hides it remarkably well to outsiders, say journalists and other suckers. He even managed to fool the author Malcolm Gladwell who covered us in the New Yorker into thinking that he would be one breaking up a fight at a bar while I would be one to initiate it.

The atmosphere of the office has been playfully unique. Visitors are usually confused by the sprawl of mathematical equations on the board, thinking our main edge is only mathematical. No. Both Mark and I were pit traders before doing quantitative stuff. While our work has been based on detecting mathematical flaws in existing finance models, our edge has been linked to having been in the pit and understanding the centrality of calibration, fine-tuning, execution, orderflow and transaction costs.

Remarkably, people who have skin in the game, that is, self-made successful people with their own money at risk (say a retired textile importer or a former shopping center developer), get it right away. On the other hand the neither-this-nor-that MBA in finance with year-end evaluation filed by the personnel department needs some helping hand –they can neither connect to the intuitions nor to the mathematics. At the time when I met Mark, we both were at the intersection of pit trading and novel branches of probability theory (such as Extreme Value Theory), an intersection that at the time (and still, presently) included no more than two persons.

Mutua Muli

Now what was the dominant idea to emerge?

There are activities with remote payoff and no feedback that are ignored by the common crowd.

With the associated corollary:

Never underestimate the effect of absence of feedback on the unconscious behavior and choices of people.

Mark kept using the example of someone playing piano for a long time with no improvement (that is, hardly capable of performing chopsticks) yet persevering; then, suddenly, one day, impeccably playing Chopin or Rachmaninoff.

No, it is not related to modern psychology. Psychologists discuss the notion of deferred payoff and the inability to delay one’s gratification as a hindrance. They hold that people who prefer a dollar now versus two in the future will eventually fare poorly in the course of life. But this is not at all what Spitz’s idea is about, since you do not know whether there might be a payoff at the end of the line, and, furthermore, psychologists are shoddy scientists, wrong almost all the time about almost all the things they discuss. The idea that delayed gratification confers some socio-economic advantage to those who defer was eventually debunked. The real world is a bit different. Under uncertainty, you must consider taking what you can now, since the person offering you two dollars in one year versus one today might be bankrupt then (or serving a jail sentence).

So what this idea is about isn’t delayed gratification, but the ability to operate without external gratification –or rather, with random gratification. Have the fortitude to live without promises.

Hence the second corollary:

Things that are good but don’t look good must have some edge.

The latter point allows she or he who is perseverant and mentally equipped to do the right thing with an endless reservoir of suckers.

Never underestimate people’s need to look good in the eyes of others. Scientists and artists, in order to cope with the absence of gratification, had to create such a thing as prizes and prestige journals. These are designed to satisfy the needs of the nonheroics to look good on the occasion. It does not matter if your idea is eventually proved right, there are intermediary steps in between that can be won. So “research” will be eventually gamed into some brand of nonresearch that looks cosmetically like research. You publish in a “prestige” journal and you are done, even if the full idea never materializes in the future. The game creates citation rings and clubs in fields like academic finance and economics (with no tangible feedback) where one can BS endlessly and collect accolades by peers.

For instance the theory of portfolio construction (or the associated “risk parity”) à la Markowitz requires correlations between assets to be both known and nonrandom. You remove these assumptions and you have no case for portfolio construction (not counting other, vastly more severe flaws, such as ergodicity, discussed in this book). Yet one must have no knowledge of the existence of computer screens and no access to data to avoid noticing that correlations are, if anything, not fixed, changing randomly. People’s only excuse for using these models is that other people are using these models.

And you end up with individuals who know practically nothing, but with huge resumés (a few have Nobel prizes). These citation rings or circular support groups were called mutua muli by the ancients: the association of mutually-respecting mules.

Cost-Effective Risk Mitigation

Most financial and business returns come from rare events –what happens in ordinary times is hardly relevant for the total. Financial models have done just the opposite. A fund miscalled Long Term Capital Management that blew up in 1998 was representative of such decorated mutua muli misunderstanding. The Nobel-decorated academics proved in a single month the fakeness of their models. Practically everyone in the 1980s, particularly after the crash of 1987, must have known it was quackery. However, most if not all financial analysts exhibit the clarity of mind of a New York sewer after a long weekend, which explains how the mutua muli can take hold of an entire industry.

Indeed the investment world is populated by analysts who, while using patently wrong mathematics, managed to look good and cosmetically sophisticated but eventually harm their clients in the long run. Why? because, simply, it is OPM (“other people’s money”) they are risking while the returns is theirs –again absence of skin in the game.

Steady returns (continuous ratification) comes along with hiding tail risks. Banks lost more money in two episodes, 1982 and 2008, than they made in the history of banking –but managers are still rich. They claimed that the standard models were showing low risk when they were sitting on barrels of dynamite –so we needed to destroy these models as tools of deception.

This risk transfer is visible in all business activities: corporations end up obeying the financial analyst dictum to avoid tail insurance: in their eyes, a company that can withstand storms can be inferior to one that is fragile to the next slight downturn or rise in interest rates, if the latter’s earning per share exceed the former’s by a fraction of a penny!

So the tools of modern finance helped create a “rent seeking” class of people whose interest diverged from those of their clients –and ones who get eventually bailed out by taxpayers.

While the financial rent seekers were clearly the enemies of society, we found actually worse enemies: the imitators.

For, at Universa, Spitz built a structure that tail-hedged portfolios, hence insulated him from the need for delayed random gratification. As introduced (and formulated) in Safe Haven, risk mitigation needs to be “cost-effective” (i.e., it should raise your wealth), and to do that it needs to mitigate the risks that matter, not the risks that don’t.

It was the birth of tail risk hedging as an investable asset class. Tail risk hedging removed the effect of the nasty Black Swan on portfolios; cost effective tail risk hedging obliterating all the other forms of risk mitigation. Accordingly, the idea grew on people and a new category was born. This led to a legion of imitators –those very same mutua muli persons who had previously been fooled by modern finance tools, finding a new thing to sell.

Universa proved the following: not only there is no substitute to tail risk hedging, but, when it comes to tail-risk hedging, simply –as per the boast in the Porsche advertisement — there is no substitute.

For when you go from a principle to execution, things are much more complicated: the output is simple to the outsider, the process is hard seen from the inside. Indeed, it takes years of study and practice, not counting natural edges and understanding of the payoffs and probabilistic mechanisms.

For I said earlier that Mark’s edge came from pit trading and a natural (non contrived) understanding of the mathematics of tails. Not quite. His edge has been largely behavioral and my description of hardheaded was an understatement. Perhaps the most undervalued attribute for humans is dogged, obsessive, boring, discipline: in more than two decades, I never saw him once deviate a micro-inch from a given protocol.

This is his monumental f*** you to the investment industry.

Safe Heaven was originally published in INCERTO on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

How do you learn a language? There are two routes; the first is to memorize imperfect verbs, grammatical rules, future vs. past tenses, recite boring context-free sentences, and pass an exam. The second approach consists in going to a bar, struggling a little bit and, out of the need to blend-in and integrate with a fun group of people, then suddenly find yourself able to communicate. In other words, by playing, by being alive as a human being. I personally have never seen anyone learn to speak a language properly by the first route. Also, I have never seen anyone fail to do so by the second one.

It is a not well-known fact that mathematics can also be learned by playing –just watch the private correspondence, discussions and pranks of the members of the august Bourbaki circle. Some of us (and it includes this author) do not perform well on tasks via “cold” approaches, unable to muster the motivation to do boring things. But, somehow we upregulate when stimulated or when there is play (or money) involved. This may disturb many people married to cookie-cutter pedagogical methods that require things to be drab, boring, and bureaucratic for them to be effective –but that’s reality.

It is thanks to Maestro Alexander B. that numerous people have learned mathematics by the second route, by playing, just for the sake of entertainment. He helped many to make it their hobby. His mathematical website cut-the-knot has trained a generation –many seemingly approached the problem as hobbyists then got stuck with it. For, if you liked mathematics just a little bit, Maestro Bogomolny made it impossible for you to not love it. Mathematics was turned into a frolic.

I discovered his riddles on social media. (Alexander B. does not like the word “problems”. I now understand why.)

Social media brings out the best and the worst in people. He was rigorous yet open-minded, allowing people like me (who did some mathematical economics and finance) to cheat with inequalities by using the various canned methods for finding minima and maxima. He even tolerated computerized mathematics, provided of course there was some rigor in the process. I initially knew nothing about him but could observe rare attributes: an extraordinary amount of patience and a remarkable sense of humor. One summer, as he was in Israel, I informed him that I was vacationing in Lebanon. His answer: “Walking distance”. He always had a short comment that makes you smile, not laugh, which is a social art.

Alexander B. created a vibrant community around his Twitter account. He would pose a question, collect answers and patiently explain to people where they were wrong.

I, for myself, started almost every day with a puzzle, with the excitement of unpredictability, as it took from 5 minutes to 4 hours to complete –and it was usually impossible to tell from the outset. For a couple of years, it was the first thing I looked at with the morning coffee. There was some mild competition, mild enough to be entertaining but not too intense to resemble an academic rat race. Once someone got a proof, we had to look for another approach so it paid to wake up early and beat those with a time zone advantage.

In the two years since he left us there has been no Saturday morning –104 of them –that I did not solve a riddle randomly selected on the web in his memory. But, without him, it is not the same.

***

How did Alexander Bogomolny get there?

I met him in an Italian restaurant in New Jersey. I was surprised to see a mathematician who looked much more like a maturing actor than someone in a technical specialty: tall, athletic, jovial, and with a charismatic presence. But, as he had warned me, he had a severe hearing problem, the result of a medical treatment for the flu.

This explained to me his veering away from an academic career to get involved in computer pedagogy. His hearing was worsening with time. It is hard to imagine being a professor with reduced auditory function in one ear (in spite of a hearing aid) and none in the other.

There was something fresh and entertaining about him. He was happy. One could talk and laugh with him without much communication.

He was neither interested in money nor rank –something refreshing as I was only exposed to academics who whether they admit it or not, are obsessed with both. When I asked him about commercializing his website cut-the-knot his answer was “I have two pensions. Next year I turn seventy”. He wasn’t interested in poisoning his life for more money.

Why did I start nicknaming him Maestro? Because it was pretty much literal: he played math like a master would with a musical instrument –and mostly to himself. He was physically bothered by a sloppy derivation or an error, as if he heard a jarring note in the middle of a sonata. It was a joy to see someone so much in sync with his subject matter –and totally uncorrupted by the academic system.

Now, probability. In one conversation, I mentioned to him that probability riddles would be very useful for people who want to get into the most scientifically applicable scientific subject in the world (my very, very biased opinion). What I said earlier about play is even more applicable to probability, a field that really started with gamblers, used by traders and adventurers, and perfected by finance and insurance mathematicians. Probability applies to all empirical fields: gambling, finance, medicine, engineering, social science, risk, linguistics, genetics, car accidents. Let’s play with it by adding to his feed some probability riddles.

His eyes lit up. Hence this book.

I thank Marcos Careira, Amit Itagi, Mike Lawler, Salil Mehta, and numerous others who supported us in this project.

And a special gratitude to Stephen Wolfram, Jeremy Sykes and Mads Bahrami for ensuring that Cut-the-Knot stays alive and that this book sees the day. Additional thanks to Paige Bremmer,Glenn Schloebo, and other members of Wolfram Media for editing the manuscript.

Cut the Knot: Probability Riddles, by Alexander Bogomolny, published by Wolfram Research in collaboration with STEM Academic Press, $19.95. On Amazon.

Maestro Bogomolny was originally published in INCERTO on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

“This city,” [Constantinople] says he [Gregory of Nyssa], “is full of mechanics and slaves, who are all of them profound theologians; and preach in the shops, and in the streets. If you desire a man to change a piece of silver, he informs you, wherein the Son differs from the Father; if you ask the price of a loaf, you are told by way of reply, that the Son is inferior to the Father; and if you inquire, whether the bath is ready, the answer is, that the Son was made out of nothing.”, via Gibbon, Hist. of The Decl. & Fall, Chapter XXVII.¹

The collective historical attitudes of Catholics aren’t necessarily from the theologies of Catholicism, those of Sunni Muslims not from the theology of Sunni Islam — it just happens that:

1. Religion either creates a distinct polarized group and people start imitating one another within that group, or
2. Groups find some tiny theological wrinkles (almost always of no real substance) to separate from others (say, Northern Europe from Southern Europe via the reformation, or the Egyptian Copts from the Greek-speaking Byzantines via monophysism), while historical analysts get it backwards, attributing the differentiation of the groups to theological wrinkles.

So my point here is that the Weberian narrative built on the notion that religious transformations (say, as with the reformation) determine attitude and culture fails historical logic. And trying to change the theologies and doctrines makes absolutely no sense. You need to change the mentalities, and cultural norms — if you can.

The robust alternative, that people imitate the (contagious) mores of those of their group, traditionally defined by religion, makes vastly more sense. People like to dress, act, even think in broad terms within the style of others members of their group, people they identify with — what we tend to loosely call “identity”. We will see further down that schisms and heresies look theological but, typically, in an inverse manner: group invent theological differences in order to separate — heresies have the attributes of ethnic or cultural separatist movements.

Weber introduced, or promoted the idea that Protestants have a certain work ethics thanks to the values imparted by their religion. The idea — like almost all of sociology — is marshmallow-soft. Consider the reverse: that Protestants at the time happened to have a certain culture, and other protestants were likely to embrace the culture of their peers because religion acted as an attractor for identities. For one can always find (thanks to the narrative fallacy) some stuff in a religion that confirms a given theory. Weber and the Weberians missed that the Industrial Revolution hit very early on northern France and Belgium (both extremely Catholic), while the Catholic South remained agricultural and socially conservative, so one can see with the naked eye that it cannot be about something proper to the theologies or the associated doctrines and practices. It is just that cultural norms are contagious within identities, and too mush so. Incidentally such cultural norms haven’t yet hit the Mediterranean since it skipped the industrial revolution. To any statistician, the “Protestant ethics” is a North-South marker, not a Protestant-Catholic one.

Unlike other networks and pagan creeds, the three Abrahamic religions are mutually exclusive — owing to the minority rule — even if somewhat backward compatible (Islam accepts, theologically, Christianity and Judaism but not the reverse; Christianity unrequitedly integrates the Old Testament). You could worship both Jupiter and Baal, just as you can have Franco-Japanese cuisine, but must be either Christian or Muslim. And the differentiation — and the loss of synchretism — which started in Judaism during the rabbinical era, has accelerated in modern times: Jews and Muslims in Morocco shared shrines; at some point it was the same for Shiites and Maronites in Lebanon. It is that absence of media and television allowed local customs to override remote religious edicts. In Doura Europos, c. the 6th C., the same room acted as synagogue, pagan temple, and church. And in Lebanon for a long time the difference was between Qaysi and Yamani (Northern and Southerner), a wedge perhaps inherited from the Byzantine Green and Blue, and that cut across religions (the Druze Qaysis viciously battled the Yamanis in their largest battle, Ayn Dara, leading to the resettlement of the Yamani Druze in the Golan heights).

Amin Maalouf, another Christian Lebanese, understood the problem rather instinctively and saw the contradictions in the current historical accounts². How come Islam is the one currently associated with intolerance, when it was the Catholic Church that’s traditionally held that role. Just consider the obvious evidence: you find many more Christian minorities in the traditional lands of Islam than the reverse. It was Catholic groups that did the (viciously murderous) Albigensian crusade, the Great Inquisition, the St. Bartholomew’s Day massacre, and others. Catholicism has not changed; people and their culture did. Last time I checked, the scriptures have not been modified; they were the same during the Inquisition, before the inquisition, and now.

And, of course, Sunni Islam’s attitude towards Christianity has changed over time: a rise in intolerance since the late 18th C. Consider the continuous drop of Christians in the Levant.

Nor does comparing theologies make sense, unless of course one has been brainwashed by sociology texts and becomes unable to think with minimal clarity. The (Protestant) Puritans who inhabited New England and the Salafis of Saudi Arabia and the Persian Gulf have nearly identical theologies, based on shared communitarianism (refusal of a centralized authority), iconoclasm (absence of representation, of saints, and of any elaborate aesthetics), absence of an organized “church”, and very stern practice of the religion. And never forget that it is the exact same God that they are worshiping.

This identity-mentality business is responsible for many other things. Suicide bombers in the East Mediterranean and the Middle East weren’t initially Salafi Muslims; it was in the late 20th Century that the practice (reintroduced almost two millennia after the sicarii) started spreading, with Greek Orthodox Pan Levantine followers of Antun Saadeh. Nothing to do with the virgins one meets in heaven, the kind of ex post attribution one hears today.

So, it matters, for economic development, who you identify with. You embrace their appetite for boring, repetitive tasks, a focus on industrial growth and working in a hierarchy, the extraction of an individual from her or his family, the appetite to wait in line for hours without beating anyone, virtues (or defects) that allowed for the West’s industrial revolution.

In the early 1900s, urban Sunnis in the Levant identified with the Ottoman upper class, hence were readily “Westernized” as the Ottomans Westernized, but in the Eastern Mediterranean/Eastern European way: the Ottoman bourgeois class looked more, for identity, to resemble Greeks and Bulgarian Christians than Germans or other Northern Europeans. The Lebanese Sunnis later on, after Turkey became Turkey, identified with the Middle East, owing to the movement called “Arabism” and changed their mentality and habits. Today Lebanon’s Shiites identify increasingly with Iranians (the people, not the regime), and are embracing social behavior similar to the Iranians, with a focus on study, industry, etc. — ironically much more Western in spite of the theocratic regime. Amine Maalouf detected (as explained to me by the geneticist Pierre Zalloua) that Christians in Lebanon identified with the West, and the differentiation between them and the Muslims started increasing. The religions, meanwhile, stayed the same.

Your way of thinking changes along with the identity, which includes approaches to problem solving. Even such things as “IQ” testing (which measures mostly the ability to test well on that specific test) has yielded an alteration of the hierarchy of results as populations started identifying with a different group than the original one they belonged to: the European Union made the test results of the Irish and the Southern Slavs converge to that of the mainstream.

I explained in Skin in the Game that dietary laws act as social barriers: those who eat together bind together. The onerous Jewish dietary laws helped create separate diasporas which allowed for survival, and prevented social dilution. Now consider the following: there is nothing particularly strong in Islam’s holy text against drinking alcohol, just a rather vague recommendation of avoidance of intoxication while facing the creator. But it made sense for social habits to interpret such a law as a firm interdict to avoid socialization with Christians and Zoroastrians in Bagdad when it was the capital of the Califate and Arabs were in the minority. It was the mentality that found theological backing, rather than the reverse.

Finally, we tend to attribute religious conflicts to religion, rather than cultures that want to cluster away from each other. “Scholars” keep discussing the theological wrinkes that differentiate the Maronites, Nestorians, and Copts from the Greek-Byzantine Orthodox Calcedonians. Few get that these heresies had to do with hatred of the Greco-Romans by people in the countryside who did not share the Hellenisms of city dwellers — again, to a statistician’s eye, here the marker is linguistic: Aramaic/Syriac or Coptic on one hand, Greek on the other (or Mediterranean urban Rum vs. inland or mountain Semitic-speaking peasantry). You find some theological disagreement that few non-initiated understand and the crowds will finally find a way to split along highly polarized lines (consider the absurdity of the filioque controversy or that great wedge between ὁμοιούσιος and ὁμοούσιος separating Eastern and Western identities). The same with the Irish-English divide. And the Shiite vs. Sunni wedge has little to do with the Calife’s succession and a lot more to do with groups that did not want to be part of the larger Sunna — recall that Shiites had, until fifty years ago, taqiyya, a form of Gnostic dissimulation, just like the Alevis, the Allawites, and the Druze, and that the exoteric must necessarily be different from the esoteric, so nobody alive may have a real clue about the true nature of the conflict.

Notes

¹ The original: Πάντα γὰρ τὰ κατὰ τὴν πόλιν τῶν τοιούτων πεπλήρωται, οἱ στενωποὶ, αἱ ἀγοραὶ, αἱ πλατεῖαι, τὰ ἄμφοδα· οἱ τῶν ἱματίων κάπηλοι, οἱ ταῖς τραπέζαις ἐφεστηκότες, οἱ τὰ ἐδώδιμα ἡμῖν ἀπεμπολοῦντες. Ἐὰν περὶ τῶν ὀβολῶν ἐρωτήσῃς, ὁ δέ σοι περὶ γεννητοῦ καὶ ἀγεννήτου ἐφιλοσόφησε· κἂν περὶ τιμήματος ἄρτου πύθοιο, Μείζων ὁ Πατὴρ, ἀποκρίνεται, καὶ ὁ καὶ ὁ Υἱὸς ὑποχείριος. Εἰ δὲ, Τὸ λουτρὸν ἐπιτήδειόν ἐστιν, εἴποις, ὁ δὲ ἐξ οὐκ ὄντων τὸν Υἱὸν εἶναι διωρίσατο. Οὐκ οἶδα τί χρὴ τὸ κακὸν τοῦτο ὀνομάσαι, φρενῖτιν ἢ μανίαν, ἤ τι τοιοῦτον κακὸν ἐπιδήμιον, ὃ τῶν λογισμῶν τὴν παραφορὰν ἐξεργάζεται.

² Amin Maalouf wrote back to me in response to this piece to convey the following, with an extract from his book Le dérèglement du monde:

Ma conviction profonde, c’est que l’on accorde trop de poids à l’influence des religions sur les peuples, et pas assez à l’influence des peuples sur les religions. A partir du moment où, au IVe siècle, l’Empire romain s’est christianisé, le christianisme s’est romanisé — abondamment. C’est d’abord cette circonstance historique qui explique l’émergence d’une papauté souveraine. Dans une perspective plus ample, si le christianisme a contribué à faire de l’Europe ce qu’elle est devenue, l’Europe a également contribué à faire du christianisme ce qu’il est devenu. Les deux piliers de la civilisation occidentale que sont le droit romain et la démocratie athénienne sont tous deux antérieurs au christianisme.

On pourrait faire des observations similaires concernant l’islam, et aussi à propos des doctrines non religieuses. Si le communisme a influencé l’histoire de la Russie ou de la Chine, ces deux pays ont également déterminé l’histoire du communisme, dont le destin aurait été fort différent s’il avait triomphé plutôt en Allemagne ou en Angleterre. Les textes fondateurs, qu’ils soient sacrés ou profanes, se prêtent aux lectures les plus contradictoires. On a pu sourire en entendant Deng Xiaoping affirmer que les privatisations étaient dans la droite ligne de la pensée de Marx, et que les succès de sa réforme économique démontraient la supériorité du socialisme sur le capitalisme. Cette interprétation n’est pas plus risible qu’une autre ; elle est même certainement plus conforme aux rêves de l’auteur du Capital que les délires d’un Staline, d’un Kim Il Sung, d’un Pol Pot, ou d’un Mao Zedong.

Nul ne peut nier, en tout cas, au vu de l’expérience chinoise qui se déroule devant nos yeux, que l’un des succès les plus étonnants dans l’histoire mondiale du capitalisme se sera produit sous l’égide d’un parti communiste. N’est-ce pas là une puissante illustration de la malléabilité des doctrines, et de l’infinie capacité des hommes à les interpréter comme bon leur semble ?

Pour en revenir au monde musulman, si l’on cherche à comprendre le comportement politique de ceux qui s’y réclament de la religion, et si l’on souhaite le modifier, ce n’est pas en fouillant dans les textes sacrés qu’on pourra identifier le problème, et ce n’est pas non plus dans ces textes qu’on pourra trouver la solution.

Religion, Violence, Tolerance & Progress: Nothing to do with Theology was originally published in INCERTO on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Let me explain. Natural systems overcompensate, bounce back from stressors quite effectively. If I stress my body by lifting weight, it will grow muscles, improve bone density and my overall health. If I pop pills, the opposite would happen. If I lower my voice or whisper, forcing you to make an effort to hear me, you will upregulate and thanks to the additional exertion, concentrate better on what I am saying (and remember the conversation for much longer). See Antifragile for more details. But note that 1) all stressors are not necessarily good (falling one meter is good for your bone strength, ten meters… not so much), 2) overcompensative responses require, to take place, a healthy overall environment.

So the worst thing you can do to a country is give it oil or some valuable resource, and not just because of the so-called Dutch disease (resources wreck the rest of the economy). Unlike today’s Saudi Arabia, the Phoenicians (coastal Canaanites) had practically nothing (except wood) and no copper when it was fashionable to have some (that is, during the Copper Age). So they learned to sail largely to get the mineral from Cyprus (incidentally named after it), and the rest of the overcompensation is history. Once you learn to go to Cyprus you can figure out how to go elsewhere, once you learn to buy you figure out how to sell, and once you learn how to build a network, you exploit it to the hilt. Similarly, today, Singapore and Honk Kong are the most successful economies, while devoid of resources — Singapore needs to import water. The same applies to similar historical successes: the Dutch Republic, Venice, Genoa, Carthage. Consider the postwar bounces by Germany, Japan, Soviet Russia, etc.

So we are entering a phase in Lebanon when people are suddenly forced to remember there is such a thing as a soil and something called agriculture, so they have started focusing on home grown items — when their ancestors had toiled to terrace the mountain to squeeze every grain of sorghum or wheat from it.

The other positive element is that people in Lebanon are starting to understand that the central government has been too incompetent to improve things — actually, the government has been (and will be) the problem. Municipalities had to take matters in their own hands, some with extreme success (Zahle). The geopolitical discourse (Saudi Arabia vs. Iran, Neptun vs. Saturn, etc.) became finally stale: localism got a boost, as people are now realizing that garbage collection, water and electricity matter more than global affairs.

Finally what are the conditions for positive adaptations? All we need the government is to ensure good communications (i.e., now, good access to the internet), safety and — whether we like it or not — a freely floating currency. For the most important condition for a real bounce is a good educational system and, what is not well known, Lebanon has comparatively extremely high level of technical sophistication, as evidenced by the chronic brain drain. (I explain in Antifragile why high school matters far more than college). And the brain drain has been stopped by COVID 19 — in fact many Lebanese in the tech industry are telecommuting, as work visas in the West have been frozen. And while the state Ponzi killed the small crafts (carpentry, artisanal workshops) it has, so far, preserved the educational level of the youth. Something in the Lebanese culture still favors antifragile responses.

Note: Any newspaper or blog in Lebanon can translate, republish (except for L’Orient Le Jour), provided it is in full.

Comment 1: The Lebanese are too fixated on corruption. It is bad, it causes a loss of social trust, it brings unfairness. But corruption does not necessarily slow down economic activity — red tape and patronage do. Just consider how many places thrived (Rome, Renaissance Italy, the Industrial Revolution, etc.) in the presence of a high level of corruption. Furthermore, localism tends to reduce corruption.

Comment 2: BANKING. The idea of “financial center” is obsolete. Banking is no longer a “thing”, and will be even less so in the future, partly because of an acceleration of disintermediation (funds), alternative clearing methods (Paypal, Apple cash, Google, Venmo, etc.), letters of credit alternatives. It is now associated with the state Ponzi. Banking, to summarize, is now a technology thingy.

Comment 3: UNIVERSITIES. Also a thing of the past, which is why I insist on high school education. You don’t need too many university classroom lectures, rather tutors & examiners guiding students through the web. 90% of the courses can be subcontracted. I’d rather see students learn from a top computer scientist on Zoom under the supervision of a local tutor than some local professor. We moved #RWRI to 100% online and many Lebanese are participating remotely. Universities are now a social media thingy.