Arquivo de philosophy | Page 133 of 137

The Contingency in Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Nassim Nicholas Taleb, a mathematician well known in Brazil, now that marketers have learned to use his name to sell consultancies, is certainly much more than a trader. If most idiots who sell buying recommendations in the stock market had read Taleb, they would learn the following: man cannot predict the future. Taleb, whose work invalidates almost everything that has been produced in modern finance, teaches that risk calculation is problematic because it seeks to establish future behaviors based on past behaviors. And that, as usual, whenever we try to predict the future, we will be held hostage by uncertainty. It is funny, because the human brain seems induced by an uncontrollable temptation to systematize the unknown; we simply do not accept the uncertainty, the absence of logical response, and then we put ourselves to elaborate theories, to risk explanations for the phenomena that surround us, seeking an objective pattern of events’ sequence and considering that patterns necessarily repeat themselves, since the universe is governed by static laws. According to Taleb, whenever we risk forecasts and leave no margins for an unexpected event, or when we project the future based on the past, we will be fragile. Mathematically speaking, this means that we cannot consider that something will not happen just because it has not happened before. That is: the estimated probability of nothing, and absolutely nothing, can be zero, because estimates require a margin of error. Every time I read Taleb I get the feeling that betting on the unlikely can be more coherent (besides having higher payoff), and that contingency, issue already addressed philosophically with several names (uncertainty, randomness, fate, fortune…), seems to be the true driving force of the determining events of history. That is why I disdain smiling of the meteorologist and his tare for quantifying future events, while I learn to respect the Indian, who, looking impassively at the sky, knows himself hostage to his own luck.

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Nietzsche and the Impotence of Language

Nietzsche was a critic of language. Wisely realized that it is only able to generalize, simplify the world and falsify the real. Pascal said something similar following the same logic: the essence, or the knowledge, is not liable to be put into words — or seized. For Nietzsche, language is a translation, and our cognitive apparatus gives us nothing but a perspective of reality, that is: we are not able to define the thing itself, and knowledge is a question of interpreting and seeking for master the chaos of appearance. Very well! Then I look around and only see convictions, truths, sensible opinions, grounded interpretations, empirical conclusions, all wrapped in an absolute maniqueism. Caution and doubt today are signs of weakness and lack of erudition. So I recognize my absolute incompatibility with my time and my deep contempt for the people around me.

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Hope: the Holy Hootch

If, by one side, hope is supreme stupidity, “the policy of the poor,” the “weed that eats all the other better plants” — paraphrasing Machado de Assis, — by the other side, hope is virtuous, indispensable, so that, abstaining from it, life easily appears unbearable to us. So, and then? What to decide? What to make of this holy hootch? Drink it or not? Of course, each of us should sip the amount one want most — treating abstinence and gluttony, as always, to point out who the imbeciles are.

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Chinese and Vanity

I have been a neighbor of a Chinese family’s for almost a decade. For this reason, I had the opportunity to meet and talk to more than a dozen of them. And recently, for no apparent reason, I began to articulate: it seems to me — I may well be mistaken… — that the Chinese, as a rule, is less vain than the Westerner. Deepening my investigation, I found that in China there is not, for example, political debate. Oh, look at that! I always thought that a world without political debates would be less rough and that, summarily, every debate of ideas is, rather, a war between vanity. And ordinary Chinese feel no need to see debaters vying for intelligence, proving to the public the wisdom of their own ideas! And ordinary Chinese do not turn on the radio to hear the political commentator say, “I have the best analysis!”, or to hear the economic commentator predict, “Such a measure will fail!”. Ordinary Chinese, it seems to me, makes taking care of their own life; and China, it seems to me, is hardly going to burst into debates, controversies, seeing hatred shed anywhere one looks, with its citizens in a fight, aggressive with each other, almost killing themselves by stupid personal opinions on issues that, not enough the ignorance, they do not keep them the slightest possibility of effective action. For a moment, I find ordinary Chinese superior to the greatest of our scholars.

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