I don’t think I will face much opposition when making the claim that two of the most interesting thinkers in the world today is Nassim Nicholas Taleb and Jordan B Peterson. Regardless if you agree with them or not you have to admit both of them have an impact. Taleb has been a prolific writer for many years while Peterson has only recently become an internet sensation. Both of them challenges the status quo within their respective fields but neither is trapped within their domain, they think far and wide and are incredibly well read. Neither one of them has ever bored me, regardless of how distant the topic is from my usual interests. If anything they make every topic they approach appear so compelling that I immediately expand my reading list by a dozen books. I think Taleb alone is responsible for at least 20+ books on my kindle that I have to read.
On the surface Taleb and Peterson are nothing alike. Taleb is a mathematician and trader. He is brash, arrogant and acerbic and lashes out at people for the slightest thing. He is a tremendous author but, to be honest, a sometimes rather incoherent speaker. He is a skilled mathematician but never loses track of the ability to, in writing, clearly express ideas with words alone. His primary topic is fragility (or lack thereof) in complex systems and based on that work he draws far-reaching conclusions about the most down to earth issues. One moment he can be writing about the fragility of the global financial system, the other he is explaining why a taxi driver has a more robust career than a typical middle class office worker.
Taleb’s main drawback is his abrasiveness, he is so quick with the insults and attacks on anyone that disagrees that it is hard to know what point he is trying to make. That behavior has given him an internet following consisting of sycophants that are rather tedious as well. One might ask how much of that behavior is acting though given that he is in a position, as he explores in his books, where pretty much any publicity is good publicity.
I don’t necessarily agree with everything he writes, but everything he writes is certainly worth reading. His books The Black Swan and Antifragile are fantastic and I am very much looking forward to his next book. Be warned though that with Taleb there is an “easing in” period. When reading his books one doesn’t instantly “get it” and in some cases, one might even be compelled to step back and call him a charlatan. He rips apart models without giving better models because his whole point is that in many cases you can not make predictive models at all. That is a hard pill to swallow, especially for engineering types like myself that love to calculate everything. It took me a long time to come around to those concepts in The Black Swan.
Peterson, in contrast, is humble, often openly emotional but always logical and a fantastic speaker (I have yet to read his written works so I can’t comment on his authorship). I can listen to his videos and podcasts for hours without ever getting bored. He is a psychologist and historian that focuses a lot on the psychological meaning of religious symbolism, but it is clear he has thought deep and hard about an assortment of other issues. Many of his views seem to, in one way or another, boil down to the psychological and societal consequences of the lack of an ethical/moral compass after “God died”. His recent climb to fame is based on his relentless fight against restrictions on free speech brought about by the postmodernist identity movement. That fight has expanded into an all out defense of the foundations of western civilization.
What is so fascinating to me, and the reason I lump them together here is that they, despite their disparate backgrounds and personalities, essentially draws the same conclusions on various topics. Especially the value they both put in religion. Both of them seem to be either atheist or so unorthodoxly religious that one would not identify them as religious in any traditional sense. Despite that, they both think religion plays a crucial role in the world and shun the view that it is obvious that a secular world would be a better one.
Peterson has come to religion from a mythological point of view. He has studied the mythology of religion, what the stories tell us about our psyche, how it gives rules and purpose to our lives and how it has been crucial for the development of the modern world. A world which rests on a foundation of Christianity that is so deeply rooted in the fabric of our society that we don’t even recognize it anymore. The culmination for Christianity in his view is the idea that the individual has a value that can not be willy nilly sacrificed for the collective, an idea which is perhaps the very foundation of Western Society. Note that Peterson makes no statement that religious mythology is true or not, he thinks it has a value regardless.
Taleb approaches religion in a slightly different way which can be summarized by the Lindy Effect. The Lindy Effect is the observation that the longer an idea has survived, in say the form of a book, the higher the probability that it will survive at least that timespan further into the future. In essence, the older an idea gets the higher its probability of surviving even longer. Taleb speculates that the cause of the Lindy effect is that ideas that survive for a long time have utility, useless ideas are discarded and useful ones stick. Crucially, just like Peterson, Taleb doesn’t think an idea has to be true for it to be useful. Simply put usefulness trumps truth. Survival determines utility, not truth. Just uprooting traditions and beliefs that have survived millennia is not a good idea, especially not if it is enforced from the top down.
Both of them recognizes that if we just remove religion the mind will latch itself onto other types of beliefs that might be far worse, for instance, socialism and naive rationalism. Peterson thinks the horrible socialist experiments in the soviet union and nazi Germany would not have been possible without the vacuum left by the sudden removal of religion.
I have always been a rather militant atheist, but I have to admit that Taleb and Peterson have radically changed the way I think about these things. In turn that made me receptive to Tom Woods excellent book How the Catholic Church Built Western Civilization, a book I probably would not have fully appreciated just a few years ago. The content of that book fully lives up to its title and it is an excellent work that needs to be part of the history education of any curious mind. Like Taleb say, the existence of God is such a minuscule part of religion. If one completely focuses on the question whether or not religion is true, as most atheists do, one completely misses the role and importance of religion as guidelines on how to survive and prosper.
Like Taleb say, the existence of God is such a minuscule part of religion. If one completely focuses on the question whether or not religion is true, as most atheists do, one completely misses the role and importance of religion as guidelines on how to survive and prosper. Petersons is trying to bring into consciousness all the things we have subconsciously assimilated from our religious foundation so that we can separate it from the supernatural and preserve it in our secular world. He repeatedly makes the point that all our moral values are the result of millennia of Christianity and we can not just assume that we will maintain those values naturally now that we are no longer Christian.
This post is getting long enough and I am still just barely scratching the surface on what those two has to offer. Taleb’s books were the impetus for me to slowly give up any remnants of social democratic ideas that still festered in my mind after the Swedish school systems rather successful indoctrination. Taleb clearly explains that big systems are fragile and that small is beautiful, especially in the realm of human affairs. It is hard to make a stronger utilitarian case for libertarianism, especially considering that Taleb isn’t even being overtly ideological. I don’t think Taleb is a full blown anarchist, he refuses to be put into any ideological box, but it seems to me like if one takes his ideas to the logical endpoint anarchy is where one ends up. Maybe he doesn’t find anarchism Lindy proof? On a more trivial level, but still important, Taleb’s work utterly changed the way I think of the safety culture within the nuclear industry. I work in the nuclear field and for a long time I was yet another “safety first” drone that mumbled the mantras without really thinking deeply about what safety really means.
Peterson has a wealth of free material and lectures on mental health, happiness, how to live a fulfilling life, goal setting and a variety of other topics. I haven’t even begun to process most of what I have learned from him yet, he gives you pieces of advice you can incorporate into your life right here and now. I can already tell his works will fundamentally change how I approach life and I already bought into his self-authoring program. Peterson’s dissemination of the flaws of postmodernism isn’t really the most interesting work he is doing, but it is perhaps the most important work. It explains a lot of what one observes in the political world today. Getting at least a shallow understanding of postmodernist ideas is a must to at all be able to comprehend how progressives think and act.
In summary, if you are looking for some intellectually stimulating material then give either one of them a chance. The depth and clarity of their thinking and their refusal to simplify complex topics or bow to political correctness is utterly refreshing after a steady diet of shallow IFLS pop-science profiles like Dawkins, degGrass Tyson and similar. If I were to compare them to anyone it would be to Freeman Dyson. Dyson’s books are also gems, especially Disturbing the Universe, but Dyson doesn’t have any coherent philosophy behind his idea, he just present great interesting insights into various things he has encountered through his long and interesting life.
For me, the hallmark of a great speaker or writer is how much ideas they generate in my mind. When I listen to Peterson or read Taleb I frequently have to pause and just spend some with all the branches of thoughts and ideas that their work triggers in my mind. So go ahead and buy their books, read their articles, listen to their podcasts and interviews and let a million thoughts spring to life!
Petersons interviews by Joe Rogan is fantastic.
Disclosure, I might earn a small commission if you purchase something through one of the Amazon links in this post.
Source: In the Madhou.se – Taleb and Peterson
“Taleb’s main drawback is his abrasiveness”
Not really. His main drawback is how biased his abrassiveness is. He may lash out at an academic for what he sees as an overstatment how representative sub-saharan africans were during the roman empire, but has no problem with Trump misrepresting mexican as criminals.
Everyone pics their battles. There are plenty of Mexicans alive today that can fight back against Trump comments like that, but there are no Romans around to talk about how many/few sub-Saharans where around.
Taleb is also obviously adopting an anti-SJW stance so why would be spend time commenting on things that the SJW MSM is already commenting on daily?
Thanks for this, I have just come across JBP and the first thing I thought was how he seems the natural companion for Taleb. I cant wait to delve deeper. So exciting.
Taleb would have no problem with what Trump says basically because he is an imbecile and you expect imbeciles to say imbecilic things. Academics on the other hand should know better.
I think I am not that disturbed by Taleb’s abrasiveness as that is the shortest way to put across a point to a person who is uninitiated to his work and attack a BS vendor. Generally also he is not of the view that a competent person has to be humble. Yes, he will though not highlight the good (which he agrees) of his opponent and bad of somebody he supports. I always deeply believe that a guy who is smooth talker is more hollow than who writes well. This is because a guy who is good, coherent speaker sometimes is more concerned about winning argument at any cost and many a times subverts his intellectual integrity. With Peterson I find the same, lack of overall scientific rigour. He is kind of already decided what is good and bad and finds arguements. Not necessary that they are wrong. But in that approach you dilute the rigour. Talent mostly tells how to decide which one to believe more than what to believe. Skin in the game, Lindy effect, ergodicity, are those examples. Peterson on the other hand have already chosen for u what is right.
Both are though correct about religion. I have long argued that time has now come for many of us that we can understand the message (religion) with out the messenger (God). In that regard from being militant atheist ( I think it has to with age) , I can see lot of wisdom in Hinduism which is Magnum opus in terms of the knowledge it contains ..Lindy effect at play as it is very old philosophy originated from a land which had abundance instead of scarcity.