Thinking about Nassim Nicholas Taleb always makes me sad. My brother handed me a copy of The Black Swan twelve years ago and it was a revelation, it

Shallow Feedback Hollows You Out - by Ivan Vendrov

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2024-12-31 23:30:14

Thinking about Nassim Nicholas Taleb always makes me sad. My brother handed me a copy of The Black Swan twelve years ago and it was a revelation, it blew my intellectual world open - Taleb seemed the perfect embodiment of the gentleman-scholar I’d always hoped to become. He saw through the pseudo-intellectual bullshit drowning the world and was working on the most fundamental questions, working at whatever hours he felt like, flaneuring around cities, reading classics and proving math theorems.

Now I can’t even look at his Twitter because of how sad it makes me. He seems to become a cartoon version of himself, engaging in petty fights and finding the 500th way to express his hatred of bitcoiners or his love of squid ink pasta. There is no way he could write a masterpiece like Antifragile today, even though at age 64 he should be at the height of his powers as a writer. (If Taleb somehow finds this and reads this, I’m sorry, I know it’s a cruel thing to write, but I’ve heard people say it privately enough times I’d rather it be out in the open where it can be refuted).

Since then I’ve seen the same thing happen, to varying degrees, to other writers who for a time seemed to be The Writer In the World Most In Touch With The Truth - Noam Chomsky, Sam Harris, Eliezer Yudkowsky, Curtis Yarvin, and Jordan Peterson. They go from saying beautifully original things with every breath to becoming a shell of themselves, repeating the same talking points endlessly, totally unable to engage with or integrate feedback or criticism.