Rob Old
Rob Old
Aug 23, 2017 · 1 min read

I’m surprised by the failure to address the adverse effect that religion can have upon an individual’s survival: whether it’s a jihadist with a suicide belt; a Catholic or Protestant martyr during the religious turbulence of the Tudor period in England; or a Jehovah’s witness who refuses a life-saving blood transfusion.

Perhaps Taleb would argue that this is analogous to a ‘misfiring’ evolutionary adaptation, much as a moth used to navigating by moonlight flies into a candle flame. But surely an essential aspect of genuine rationality is to strip away the dead wood of ‘what works’ to understand why, and more importantly (from the point of view of ‘risk management’), when it works — like extracting aspirin from a tree bark.

I also find Taleb’s condescension towards psychologists uncalled for. As a former hard-nosed maths and physics student, my university friends who studied psychology actually spent far more time than I did using statistics, and it’s frankly bizarre to insist that they don’t. Furthermore, a large part of the book ‘Thinking, Fast and Slow’ by Daniel Kahneman -a psychologist who won the Nobel in Economics for his contribution to behavioural economics -concerns itself with exactly the question of what people are willing to risk at what odds in gambles, and why our instinctive management of risk often doesn’t match up with what a mathematician would advise us to do.

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    Rob Old

    Written by

    Rob Old

    Fortunate enough to earn a living turning coffee into software.