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Why I Am Not a Vegetarian (and You Might Consider Not Being an Idiot, Too)

Published 2018-03-09 by StartUp Daemon
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“Skin in the game is about honor, courage and sacrifice. If you don’t take risks in what you do, you’re nothing.” – Nassim Nicholas Taleb

You will want to read and reread every word of this missive because

FAILURE IS OUR ONLY CONNECTION TO REALITY.

And by abolishing failure, we are making our world ever less authentic. Our impending immortality will complete our Fakehood.

INCERTO above the Treetops

Although I have been following his missives and the INCERTO, I’m not going to read Nassim Taleb’s new book “Skin in the Game” until I have published this anti-review. The main objective of the anti-review is to put some of the high-level ideas behind “SITG” and the INCERTO through an empirical test for “authentic knowledge” (accessible mostly to non-idiots), for whether one mind can “grasp” another more in action and decision and less through the mist of semantic systems. The anti-review relies on NNT’s his writing, public appearances and activity on and off the Internet, as he has talked about and practiced SITG for many years. I have only caught glimpses of what some have said on Twitter about “SITG”(no media reviews or anything long-form) and a skim-through the book’s contents pages. You will see the method to this madness as you read on. As anti-semantic praxis, I’m also publishing the anti-review in both French and English, so that bilingual readers can experience the Myst for themselves.

While I had no doubt that “SITG” would be remarkably good, I did not expect it to surpass “Fooled by Randomness” as Maestro Taleb’s most game-changing work. I was wrong. SO WRONG.

Here is but a smattering of subjects that SITG touches and transforms like the wand of a grand master wizard:

  • Why you have decided before you decide
  • What we are and how we came to be it
  • Why analysis is paralysis and action is liberation
  • Why Big Media are a poor source of information
  • Why science has become ever more scientistic and charlatan as it becomes more complex and centralized
  • Why subjecting your life and work to a savage beating in the public forum makes it more robust and credible
  • Why large organizations and governments underperform smaller ones
  • Why “limited liability” forms of ownership strangle innovation and prosperity
  • Why savagery is better in every way than enforced “decency”
  • What “intelligence” and AI is
  • Why you’d want to be Authentik (can you?)

Don’t believe anything said here. Don’t even believe nothing. Just read with an open mind while paying close attention. All will become manifest in your mind. You will see Nassim Taleb’s INCERTO with a new clarity, one that is instinctively complete and consistent with your everyday experience. And please don’t take any of this “seriously”. Just set your mind free and see where it takes you. If this missive fails, let it fail for my delusions and not yours.

How I Failed

And I have known failure so many times that I can’t even begin to count them. I failed most miserably when my actions were motivated by the avoidance of failure:

  • I failed to take enough risks in my younger years out of fear and stupidity.
  • I failed to disrupt my parents’ self-destructive relationship even when I had the power to do it.
  • I failed as a trader on the financial markets, making and losing a lot of money.
  • I failed to test my ideas in action, wasting years on unproductive thought.
  • I failed to understand the importance of eating healthfully – and investing money in it – for many years, although I started nutrition experiments from an early age.
  • I failed to go all the way in helping a raped friend deal with paranoia and psychosis although I had the wizard skills to make it happen.
  • I failed to leave academia as soon as I realized it was not for me because of comfort.

I also failed to understand Plato.

Plato the Bumbling Idiot

In high school, I took philosophy as a mandatory elective just because I had run out of useful things to take (geography, mathematics, history etc.). Most of it wasn’t altogether boring, but I can’t say it improved my thinking much. There was one author, though, who made a mark. That was Plato.

Plato became a momentary obsession for two reasons. There was something about his writing and ideas that felt transcendent, although I found them obtuse, inaccessible and culturally narrow (a lot of that was due to the semantic mist created by academic interpreters, teachers and translators, but the responsibility to do the work and figure things out was ultimately mine). Plato fascinated me and frustrated me at the same time, and I didn’t know why. I attributed it to my then obsession with history – an obsolete thinker who had spiked my curiosity only for his presumed eloquence and the distance of time, but without much practical relevance in the present. The quintessential analydiot, I did not know to trust my instincts over “rational thinking”.

The big hook for my fascination was Plato’s cave derangement. The “allegory of the cave” puzzled and annoyed. Every interpretation of the Platonic grotto that I have yet seen boils down to a brain-in-a-vat parable about the illusoriness of what the senses deliver. Yet, Plato’s device is detailed and elaborate, one might even say viciously playful. Why put a fire in the cave and have people shuffle about with figures behind a wall instead of just using the light of the Sun and the shadows it casts? And why chain prisoners in a cave instead of just having them look at reflections off the waters of a lake? If “reality” (the outside world) is inaccessible, why speculate about one of the prisoners chained to the walls of the cave escaping and being blinded by the Sun? Why talk about that enlightened person being ostracized and considered crackers upon return? Why use such silliness to illustrate the difference between the world we experience and the real “world of ideas”? None of it made sense. It sounded like the deranged drivel of a useless philosopher with an unhinged imagination and too much time on his hands.

I thought Plato was a hallucinating academic warped in his own mind. I thought he was an idiot. I now see the idiot was I.

The Artifice of Intelligence

Seeing oneself to be an idiot is encouraging because intelligence is based on a form of idiocy (so there is hope!). To make this idea manifest, consider yourself when going out in the morning. When you walk by a tree, your brain changes if the tree is in your field of sight even if you are distracted staring at your stupiphone and the tree never enters your “consciousness”. Let’s call the difference between your brain “state” before and after (not) observing the tree a sensory representation. It is not unreasonable that other brained animals would be affected similarly by their surroundings in the present. Based on observation, many animals must also have “memory” – the ability to store/recall important parts of sensory representations or at least use them to make better decisions (i.e., avoid a water hole where predators were spotted previously). To the non-idiot, it is obvious why such faculties would have evolved through survival. Because our neurophysiology was shaped in the most direct way by the savage machinery of survival, it is also not unreasonable that these sensory representations are about as “authentic” with respect to the outside world as our cognition can get.

But human brains can do much more than store vague sensory representations. In the native processing of your brain (it’s not processing, it’s memorying) there were no words, just the object representations. Therefore, the brain must have been able to create artificial representations of representations – such as categories (a form of analogy). The next tree you see down your morning walk is more different than similar to the first, but you still think of it as and call it a tree. In the world we perceive, there is no such thing as a generic tree – every tree is unique – and categorization is simply a form of delusion we call “meaning”. But it is a useful one. The tree-representation of the specific tree you saw generates huge economies by omitting a lot of (perfectly visible) details. The generic tree-representation increases those economies by shedding even more details, which saves both energy and “storage capacity” in the brain. The meaning of “tree” is therefore hugely dilutive relative to any one tree you see. It gets even worse when you try to convey that meaning to someone else.

The brain was plastic enough to represent words (groups of sounds) but even to represent things which have never been experienced (the “meaning of 486”). We know this because there were no words before words were created and no numbers before numbers were created. Language (gesticular, spoken, written) made derivative representations (meaning) even more valuable. Speech made it possible to connect an ordered set of sounds to a categorical representation such as a tree to communicate it quickly and efficiently to others in the group.

These inventions added survival benefits for both the individual and the group as a whole. While it is all but certain that the tree-representation in your brain is different from the tree-representation in your neighbor’s, survival would have encouraged some functional convergence between those representations so that both of you know that trees can be felled and burnt. Convergence could also be possible through the generations (not just individual lives) because survival might predispose brains to developing useful and consistent tree representations through social coevolution.

Observe that this convergence of meaning (semantics) would be stronger when you have exposure to the object and its functional relevance to your personal survival (SITG). The more dependent you are on the group for tree-related activities (i.e., you stay away from lumbering and carpentry) and the less relevant trees are to your personal survival (you live in a clay hut and use oil for heating and cooking instead of wood), the less likely that your tree-representation will converge functionally with others’. For example, you may have never had a need to get involved in any woodwork, but you could make a living selling rope to lumberjacks. In this case, you have little skin in the game of lumberjack safety because you can’t be killed by a falling tree because of your defective rope. SITG must be introduced Hammurabi-style in order to align the rope seller’s goals with those of the lumberjack.

SITG is how you learnt language as a child, and why adult language learning is different. Children learn language experientially: “getting” words by filtering through the effectiveness of subsequent reactions and “selecting” words by whether they get the desired outcome from their parents. If the needed outcome doesn’t occur (for example, a feeding), the brain simply produces another trial word (drivel/delusion) until it works. Obviously, brains which do not tackle this process well will have a smaller probability of survival and reproduction. When you learn a language as an adult, you have to conjure up the SITG filtering (Did this person understand me? Did I say something embarrassing? Am I getting the outcome I was gunning for?) and the stakes are very different.

We have no way of knowing for certain whether speech, gestures or pictures were the first semantic system to emerge as a result of these survival benefits. But in the past few thousand years humanity’s invention of new semantic systems has accelerated. One of the most important semantic systems we use is mathematics (yes, this is totally going to be a troll for the mathematicians amongst you). Yet, mathematics is altogether removed from sensory perception. Anyone with a brain would recognize that there are no straight lines or perfect circles in the world we see, yet those are foundational objects for geometry. The same applies to numbers. Nevertheless, and despite the difficulty of learning its higher levels, the use of mathematics has grown and propagated into other (applied) fields such as chemistry, engineering and computing. Because, when applied correctly, this useful fiction helps convey information across geographies, languages and generations as well as a wide range of practical disciplines, and forward skills which would be very costly to acquire experientially time and time again.

The brain, however, cannot be contained to what is useful because usefulness can only be determined after the fact and through repeated testing. Before testing, any new meaning is, by definition, a delusion. Counterproductive meaning can catch on and survive for many generations because personal SITG is not the only survival mechanism. Delusions (and their hosts) can also survive through consensus – if enough members of the group buy into the delusion and feed it, alongside its host. The larger and more centralized the group, the easier it is for untested delusions to catch on and persist, especially from the top down. The implications are grave when events running contrary to the delusion occur only in the tails and over extended periods. In that case, the entire group could perish when the delusion is “tested” by a Black Swan event. SITG throughout society is the only way to minimize the risk of such delusions’ persisting and of their hosts’ parasitizing on the broader community.

Because meaning appears to be functionally impossible if delusion is impossible, intelligence requires the ability to be delusional. At least as far as human brains are concerned. A lion could probably hallucinate (have inconsistent sensory perceptions) but it could not harbor a delusion simply because it cannot produce semantic systems. The same is true of computing. AI will only become possible with the possibility of delusion. Contemporary computing is discrete and based on numerical accuracy, which almost automatically rules out meaning-creation. Any AI system must be able to create meaning (whether that meaning is relative to the perceivable world, a surrounding software environment or something else). AI must be able to self-program because that is the essence of what we call intelligence. Such an ability makes AI inherently dangerous because of what happened to the cavemen.

The Semantic Mist

Once upon a time, a caveman saw a big tree, which was more important and valuable to his and his family’s survival than other trees (for its nutritious sap, or its profuse fruition, or its pliable wood). And he called it a Bigtree. It made survival sense to distinguish between it and other trees, so the meme stuck. Then the caveman ventured upon a big fish, which was more important to his and his family’s survival than other fish (for its nutritious meat that could be smoked and stored, or its size that could feed a few for days, or its supple bones that made good hooks and needles). And he called it a Bigfish. It made survival sense to distinguish between it and other fish, so the meme stuck. Then the caveman explained the Bigfish to his sons: “The Bigfish is to fish as the Bigtree is to trees.” And they all got lost in the semantic mist. You could fell a Bigtree with fire and axes just like any other tree, but you couldn’t catch a Bigfish like any other fish because it would break your spear and rip through your net.

Analogy is the original bullshit. You can use analogy to speed up the introduction of a new concept, but you’d only stop at analogy if you are a BS vendor. You can’t stop there because the new concept you are illuminating is a new fucking concept. Economics became a BS vending discipline largely because it applied by analogy tools (game theory, linear optimization) which were useful in other domains (evolutionary biology, engineering) to solve different (and frequently nonexistent) problems. Sometimes economists even imagined problems (created meaning) just because they had tools to transfer from other domains in need of a problem to solve. The spears broke and the nets were ripped repeatedly, but others had to pay for them because economists had no skin in the game. As a result, academic economics and its peer-“reviewed” journals are the ultimate breeding ground for collective delusions, mass hysteria (à la Krusty Krugs), scientistics and BS vending. Foremost credit for this flourishment goes to Milton Friedman (tellingly, a “Nobel prize” in economics) who actively propagated the nonsense that assumptions (domain-relevance, semantic stretching) don’t matter.

Probability theory (like mathematics) cannot be tested as authentically as a spear can be tested for breaking. Its usefulness (survival) can only be tested indirectly through applications in other fields which have authentic contact with the “real” world and are subject to skin in the game (e.g., gambling, engineering). This problem of semantic stretching has led to the proliferation of bullshit inference in social science and financial economics because neither of those domains is subject to SITG (academics get tenure and banks get bailouts). It is no accident that Nassim Taleb distinguishes on his Twitter profile between probability (philosophy), probability (mathematics), probability (logic), probability (reallife) and deadlifts. Different principles apply in different domains and the “probability” frame is just a useful shortcut which must be adapted to, tested in and engenders different results for each of these domains. SITG is the only weapon we have to ensure that testing does take place in every corner of human society, and that the possibility of delusion and parasitism is minimized. The antithesis of SITG is the Base – the deluded parasite.

Semantic stretching applies to any other semantic system, including mathematics, languages and programming. When you attempt to solve a “similar” problem in a different programming application you either break your code or find out that the programming language you are using simply does not allow the approach that worked elsewhere. Even if you have no experiential knowledge of any STEM domain, you can observe semantic stretching in translation between spoken languages. The Myst thickens when you attempt to carry an idiom or parable from one language to another. Often you find that the problem isn’t the lack of a catchy word-translation but simply that the underlying authentic knowledge does not transfer to another culture and geography. Because the adage emerged and survived in the context of a particular semantic system evolved to serve a specific culture in a specific geography. In the new language, the authentic knowledge supporting the survival of the idiom in the original language simply does not exist, so the idiom cannot catch on even if it rhymes well. It translates without translating.

The Great Unfitting

Semantic incongruity is dukkha, and dukkha is everywhere. The concept comes from Buddhism (philosophy) and is frequently translated as “suffering” (or, worse, as “pain”), which is extremely unhelpful to anyone who doesn’t speak Pali (just about the perfect example of dukkha, as you will see). Dukkha simply means a “mis-fit” – the misfit between what is and your expectations, wishes or anything else you identify with. This is the best definition of suffering that I have encountered, but I had never heard it (in any language) before discovering Buddhist philosophy. It is immediately obvious what dukkha means when defined as a lack of fit. The same unfitting occurs between the world we experience and the semantic systems we use to operate within it, including to program each other. Meaning is distant from authentic experience because meaning is but a substitute, by definition. The more “meaning” in one’s life, the less authenticity, the more suffering.

You may have noticed that people most frequently seek meaning in their identities. But in many – if not most – cases identities are just signaling shells for group consensus rather than authentic commitments to action. Consensus (however fake) can provide validation for the signaling imbecile without the authenticity of skin in the game. Individuals too often have more skin in staying in tune with the group than in testing authentic action against the vagaries of experience. The problem worsens as the group (organization, corporation, state etc.) gets larger and with the passage of time (because more uniformity and repression of dissent). Until the group implodes most spectacularly because of its fakery. A big reason for such terminal events is that identity signaling detracts individuals from authentic action and testing, thereby euthanizing innovation and risk-taking for the group as a whole. Which is why I am not a vegetarian.

What follows will surprise many of you who are familiar with my work and there is no way to soften the blow, so I’ll cut straight to it. I don’t eat meat. If you have read Blood in the Game, you know that I spent much of my childhood on a farm and wasn’t afraid of blood. But one day I figured I couldn’t kill the animals I was eating because I didn’t need to. You eat what you kill, so I don’t. There are many other reasons I could bring up, but ultimately there is only one explanation for anything we do: “because I can”. Because the opposite would not be authentic to me. Simple as that.

To be a vegetarian would mean to be associated with a litany of pretentious soydiots and fad dieters. The same would apply soon if I joined the carnivory (or whatever) movement. Such categories and identities are mental crutches and economizers for the low-IQ and the indecisive, for those who haven’t bothered to figure out what their life is about the only way we can – through risky action. I don’t need a crutch because it doesn’t get any simpler than this: I don’t eat meat. That’s it. I’ve tested it for decades and it works – for me. You do what works for you, but remember to take risks carefully and test repeatedly, so that you don’t become turkey fillets or follow the herd off the edge of a cliff. This is what SITG is all about.

Why You Make Decisions Before You Make Them

SITG is profoundly important because thinking is not what most think it is. The thoughts that you become aware of are the product of unconscious processes that you have little control of. You can’t think of something until you think of it. What is typically called “thinking” is mostly rationalization and processing, a looping back over what has already been experienced unconsciously. There is plenty of experimental neurophysiological evidence that we make decisions before we make them, before we become aware of them. Like the INCERTO, your decision-making firmware is all about heuristics and biases, and this is no accident.

The “heuristics and biases” meme became prominent in the work of Amos Tversky and Danny Kahneman. In his “Thinking: Fast and Slow” summarizing decades of studies and experiments, Kahneman articulated a binary model of cognition composed of a fast System 1, which is unconscious and does not require “effort” or “willpower”, and a slow and effortful System 2, whose outputs become manifest in “consciousness” and which can be directed to completing specific tasks. (No, imbecile, this does not refer to the two hemispheres or any other areal division of the brain. It’s a model of cognition.)

System 1 appears to be the more powerful system. If true decision-making is unconscious, it must reside there by model construction. There is good reason to consider this most probable. System 1 is almost certainly the one which evolved first and the one handling our sensory inputs – our most authentic connection to the perceivable. Therefore, System 1 must have been tested for much longer and is exposed to the world more directly. It makes little sense that survival would all of a sudden hand the reins over to the newer, slower and delusional System 2, which deals with meaning and analysis (although technology might change that). As said David Hume: “Reason is, and ought only to be, the slave of the passions and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them.”

System 1 handles “authentic knowledge” – it is the proverbial gut. System 2 deals with “semantic knowledge” – analytical, slow and muddled by the distorted reflection of the semantic mist. System 1 is the “irrational” one in economic scientistics’ terms and the authentic one in the perspective of the INCERTO. Call her Barbella because she generally produces barbell-shaped decision making geared towards survival-optimal redundancy and risk asymmetries. Fiery Barbella is inaccessible to us, yet she is the only one which illuminates the “perceivable” because she is the one who arose most authentically from it. She is also the one who controls your outputs into the world – the movements of your muscles and the “thoughts” that come out of your mouth, even if they appear motivated by “thinking” in System 2. However, Barbella is ill-prepared to deal with complexity and the scaling of social systems.

Barbella’s younger sister System 2 is an “aggregating” or “synthesizing” system better oriented towards consensus and conformity. Because she deals with the mean of the crowd and with meaning, let’s call her Minnella. Whereas Barbella is geared towards individual survival “in the wild”, Minnella is effective in optimizing for herding behavior and thereby increasing survival odds as part of a social group. Although secondary, Minnella appears capable of overriding some of Barbella’s intuitions in order to conform to and take advantage of widely held beliefs. This may have been her evolutionary advantage and origin: Minnella was born in pictures and language and what you call consciousness, as they emerged in the social. She has a tricky bug, which is in fact a feature: the ability to generate new semantic systems detached from immediate communication needs (buying food v. a new branch of mathematics). These systems of meaning need to be filtered through social consensus and Barbella’s “emotional” core before they touche on real-world failure/survival. Minnella is therefore quasi-ludic and in dire need of SITG to be at her most effective. But she is also the one which allows us to understand or, at least, manage complexity.

Therein lie the problems with lack of SITG in society. Junk thoughts produced by Minnella can get “stuck” in the meme pool for a very long time if natural selection is relied upon because individual survival weeding can be negated by consensus. Where evolution fails generally, one must put skin in the game individually. NNT’s intuitive grasp of personal psychology is eery. Minnella introduces a bug at the group/evolutionary level, which NNT corrects by applying the SITG  mechanism at the individual level. But the eeriness hasn’t even started yet because the principles of the INCERTO are all around you. All the way down to the bottom of Plato’s filthy cave.

Plato’s Fire

The fire in Plato’s cave represents System 1 (our senses and intuitions), which we cannot see, yet it is the only one that illuminates the perceivable world. The shadows visible to the prisoners represent meaning, thinking and consciousness (System 2). Barbella’s fire is the driving force of cognition because without it there would be no shadows. The prancing figures are the narrow band of the perceivable that is accessible to our senses: sensory inputs. We cannot observe directly the workings of our neurophysiology, hence the fire is hidden behind a wall, as are the sensory processes generating the grotesque parade of figures. The prisoners’ chains represent rationalism, scientism and other forms of ignorance, which deny the fakery of System 2 and the authenticity of System 1. All of this is confined within a cave representing the extreme limitations that our biology imposes on our ability to “see” what is “real”. The escape and return signify the possibility of transcending our corporeal boundaries through authentic knowledge, which would appear to the unenlightened as madness and irrationality.

Here are the words that typed themselves when, thanks to the INCERTO, I first became aware of Plato’s intuitions barely a few weeks ago:

IT IS SO OBVIOUS YOU FUCKING IDIOT.

Of course, this interpretation of Plato’s cave could be just another analytical delusion. It had to be tested repeatedly. The more I tried to undermine it, the more I was shocked by my own ignorance and the level of derangement in academic interpretations of Plato’s life and work.

Some representative analydiocy regarding Plato is evident in the following passage from the Wikipedia page on Heraclitus (a major influence):

Plato argues against Heraclitus as follows:

“How can that be a real thing which is never in the same state? […] for at the moment that the observer approaches, then they become other […] so that you cannot get any further in knowing their nature or state […] but if that which knows and that which is known exist ever […] then I do not think they can resemble a process or flux.”

In Plato one experienced unit is a state, or object existing, which can be observed. The time parameter is set at “ever”; that is, the state is to be presumed present between observations. Change is to be deduced by comparing observations and is thus presumed a function that happens to objects already in being, rather than something ontologically essential to them (such that something that does not change cannot exist) as in Heraclitus. In Plato, no matter how many of those experienced units you are able to tally, you cannot get through the mysterious gap between them to account for the change that must be occurring there. This limitation is considered a fundamental limitation of reality by Plato and in part underpins his differentiation between imperfect experience from more perfect Forms. The fact that this is no limitation for Heraclitus motivates Plato’s condemnation.

This “analysis” is infected with semantic delusions and out of context because earlier in the dialogue Socrates identifies the problem of semantic systems:

How realities are to be learned or discovered is perhaps too great a question for you or me to determine; but it is worth while to have reached even this conclusion, that they are to be learned and sought for, not from names but much better through themselves than through names.

Socrates only asserts that semantic systems (names, meaning) cannot be relied upon to achieve true knowledge of the nature of reality (a position also suggested in the Republic and in Plato’s unwritten teachings as reported by Aristotle). The dialogue itself concludes inconclusively:

But if there is always that which knows and that which is known – if the beautiful, the good, and all the other verities exist – I do not see how there is any likeness between these conditions of which I am now speaking and flux or motion. Now whether this is the nature of things, or the doctrine of Heraclitus and many others is true, is another question; but surely no man of sense can put himself and his psyche under the control of names, and trust in names and their makers to the point of affirming that he knows anything… Therefore you must consider courageously and thoroughly and not accept anything carelessly – for you are still young and in your prime; then, if after investigation you find the truth, impart it to me.

To the non-idiot it is obvious that Plato does not criticize Heraclitus’s view that the perceivable world is in flux, let alone condemn it (Plato’s acceptance of the impermanence of the perceivable is attested elsewhere in his writings). Rather he builds on it to transcend it. “If everything is in flux (as it appears to be), then any complete knowledge or knower must exist outside of what is perceivable or analyzable.” It is Plato’s indirect way of suggesting that only some fundamental principles or “laws” of reality outside of what can be directly observed may be allowed “permanence”. Plato uses the discourse to suggest that state and object do not exist outside of faulty perception and delusion – the opposite of what the analydiots hallucinate – and perfectly consistent with Heraclitus. Plato’s intuition is the archetype of NNT’s Turkey Problem – inductive knowledge is never to be considered permanent or complete. This is but one of many examples of misconstruing Plato’s ideas and practice.

Academic Plato Authentic Plato
philosophy academic idealism or realism, static realism with savage updating because the “real” is inaccessible
method of reasoning discourse/debate, “thinking” (deductive) + observation of mind and senses, analysis of “data”, testing in experience and discourse (inductive)
method of teaching lektchur/discourse/debate + Zen koan, meditation, confusion, triggering
good (“ethics”) metaphysical doxastic, based on what works in experienced intuition, post-analytical
dialogues represent and expound Plato’s philosophy teaching tools incorporating the ideas of Socrates and others to provoke and advance “true understanding” through indirection
cave brain-in-a-vat model of perception, delusion and authentic knowledge
ψυχή soul (often essentialist/dualist) cognition or “life force”
ἰδέα form (as in visible “shape”) principle, “natural law”, “curvature of reality”, “shape” as in string theory
ἀγαθοῦ the good, the noble what works, is authentic to survival/”true” knowledge or pertains to “big/heroic action”
ἀγαθοῦ ἰδέα “form of the good” “principle” of inaccessible reality underlying doxastic (authentic) knowledge

In the “Republic”, Plato provides the perfect shorthand for how the acquisition of authentic knowledge works. At the lowest level, there is εικασία (conjecture) based on primary sensory experience, followed by πῐ́στῐς (trust, “persuadedness”), which adds a functional aspect to the sensory image (“goat” v. “how to raise and milk a goat”). Then comes διάνοια – our reasoning and scientific (not scientistic!) methods and systems. This is where lower-level information is processed to produce and test generalizations. But there is a level beyond that, which is the highest and hardest level of knowledge – νόησις, authentic knowledge or true understanding, from the gut, from (informed and tested) intuition. For Plato, νόησις is hypothesis-free and thought-free (beyond semantics), but has to be reached by climbing over the other levels of knowledge, as attested in his practice as a teacher. The parallel with Talebic epistemology is shocking.

Platonistan Talebistan Interpretation Example Opposite
εικασία (conjecture) observation conjecture, object representation sensory input, data hallucination (anti-survival)
πῐ́στῐς (belief) pisteic “belief” functional or experiential knowledge, “trust”, the “how” artisanship, practice incompetence, inexperience
διάνοια (thinking) epistemic “belief” model, hypothesis, “reasoning”, the “why” mathematics, science delusion, bullshit
νόησις (understanding) doxastic “belief” authentic knowledge, understanding, “getting it”, “seeing” “foie gras”, unfake because, “instinct”, applied intuition ignorance (fueled by delusion & incompetence)

Plato’s metaphysics can be divided into three “realms”: the conscious (shadows), unconscious (fire and figures) and the real (which is inaccessible to our senses and semantics). Perceivable φαινόμενα (appearances) are simply projections of “real” εἶδοι (forms). The highest and noblest “form”, which he calls ἀγαθοῦ ἰδέα, is simply that principle or “natural law” in inaccessible reality which underlies/makes possible doxastic knowledge in the perceivable world. The etymology of ἀγαθοῦ points to the meaning “of great/heroic action”, not received wisdom or dogma, let alone “thinking”. Thus, ἀγαθοῦ ἰδέα can be construed as “reality principle underlying great/heroic action”. In the extreme, SITG takes the form of heroic action testing one’s convictions – the epitome of doxastic practice. This is precisely the meaning that δόξα had acquired some thousand years after Plato’s time in Neo-Platonism and Eastern Christianity. “Orthodoxy” simply means “right belief” or “right faith”: one forged in Right Action.

To Plato and his contemporaries, nobility (“rightfulness”) was a matter of testing through action, not some conferred accolade. Without skin and blood in the game, there was no “good” because induction. Furthermore, Plato considered all other forms (and the corresponding ethical categories – beauty, justice etc.) subordinate to the ἀγαθοῦ ἰδέα. In the perceivable world, that would mean that all ethics is founded on doxastic knowledge and, ultimately, skin in the game. Again, his insight is shocking. Because nowadays we find that any innate sense of beauty, justice, fairness etc. arises from millions of years of evolution through survival (even though this is not the same as skin in the game but operates at the level of the generations). This is just the perfect projection of Plato’s lesser “forms” from the real world onto the perceivable world, appropriately subordinated to the survival-testing of evolution.

Much of what you have herein read, Plato’s Timaeus explains thus in the eponymous dialogue, using Plato’s customary indirection:

we may assume that words are akin to the matter [subject] which they describe; when they relate to the lasting and permanent and intelligible, they ought to be lasting and unalterable, and, as far as their nature allows, irrefutable and immovable – nothing less. But when they express only the copy or likeness and not the eternal things themselves, they need only be likely and analogous to the real words. As being is to becoming, so is truth to belief. If then, Socrates, amid the many opinions about the gods and the generation of the universe, we are not able to give notions which are altogether and in every respect exact and consistent with one another, do not be surprised. Enough, if we adduce probabilities as likely as any others; for we must remember that I who am the speaker, and you who are the judges, are only mortal men, and we ought to accept the tale which is probable and enquire no further.

The similarities with NNT do not end here, as Plato appears to have been active on Twitter as well: “he who has knowledge of the just and the good and beautiful […] will not, when in earnest, write them in ink, sowing them through a pen with words, which cannot defend themselves by argument and cannot teach the truth effectually. The gardens of letters he will, it seems, plant for amusement, and will write, when he writes, to treasure up reminders for himself, when he comes to the forgetfulness of old age, and for others who follow the same path, and he will be pleased when he sees them putting forth tender leaves.” These words by Socrates in “Phaedrus” reveal not just Plato’s view of the weakness of words, but also are a key to understanding his dialogues and his method of teaching – indirection and provocation rather than lektchuring.

Plato says as much in his seventh letter: “concerning all these writers […] who claim to know the subjects which I seriously study […] it is impossible, in my judgement at least, that these men should understand anything about this subject. There does not exist, nor will there ever exist, any treatise of mine dealing therewith. For it does not at all admit of verbal expression like other studies, but, as a result of continued application to the subject itself and communion therewith, it is brought to birth in the soul on a sudden, as light that is kindled by a leaping spark.” If they don’t know, you can’t tell them.

The Authentik

Back in high school, I couldn’t be told either because I didn’t know. I failed to understand Plato for reasons which are all made manifest in the INCERTO. I didn’t have the smarts and curiosity to take risks. I didn’t have the knowledge and experience – from the gut – of individual psychology, languages and the scientific (not scientistic!) method. I didn’t have skin in the game and didn’t need to put any in because I could get a great grade by BSing my way forward – and I did. Meanwhile, I was obsessed with useless endeavors such as trying to find meaning to life. I was making my life faker instead of pursuing authentic value. Because I didn’t know what that was.

If living is becoming, authenticity is overcoming. And this is the most personal message of “SITG”. Unless you take risks, you are nothing. That ethnic, religious, professional, political or whatever other identity you carry on your sleeve counts for shit if you don’t act on it in an authentic way. Testing through risky action is our only method of reaching for reality; failure is the strongest signal we can get out of it. Action precedes belief, knowledge, science and any other delusion you might nourish. Belief can be stable and frequently toxic. Action is spastic, but authentic. The search for meaning in itself makes your life less authentic and more distant from “reality”. The further you wade into risk-taking on your authentic instincts, the faster you will forget any compulsion to seek “meaning” because your genuine actions will transcend the semantic mist.

Think of action as that which causes us to become knowing of things, to become cognizant of their latent existence. Things do not “happen”; they become manifest. You become manifest by taking risks, taking the blows of failure and then taking more risks. This is the path of the Authentik. Maestro Taleb’s INCERTO is a personal manual on how to walk it without necessarily blowing oneself up, so get “Skin in the Game” now and read it into a pulp. Read slowly, getting it. Before you move forward, relate the ideas, anecdotes and principles to specific events in your life. Think about how you could have avoided past failures and unpleasantness by applying them. See if you can prove the monumental asshole wrong. Learn how to spot cowards and bullshitters and remove them from your life. Make all the insights relevant to your experience and test them against it. Warm your hands on Plato’s fire. You will see your life improve within hours. There will be light.

I do not ask of you to believe any of this because if I’m right I’m certainly wrong. I will not tell you how to live your lives for the simple reason that I cannot. No-one but you yourself can. You alone can have the authentic knowledge to decide what to do from moment to moment.

Do you have it?

 

StartUp Daemon

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