Ben Tolkin
Aug 22, 2017 · 1 min read

It’s rather too soon to tell if civilization was a good idea for survival, isn’t it? If we use it to avoid being wiped out by a meteor that would destroy an unscientific people, then yes; if we kill everyone with nuclear weapons first, then no. And right now we have lots of nuclear weapons and no way of stopping meteors.

Also, it might not be the case that beliefs enhance survival value “exactly” as they correspond to reality; that was Donald Hoffman’s paper that got a lot of buzz a few years ago. Shifting the definition of “rationality” towards enhancing survival rather than the usual definition of mathematical consistency and truth is provocative, and difficult to do in reality, but the point is that the old definition was incoherent anyway. Truth is unknowable, and truth is definitely unknowable if you don’t survive, and rational beings do irrational things all the time to survive; if you dig really deep into what was meant by “rationality” before, it’s hard to come up with a definition that satisfies. Actual science doesn’t proceed just by traditional scientific methods of looking for germs and antibiotics, but from a tangled mixture of those methods, superstition, luck, and evolutionary selection; we would never have figured out the existence of germs or antibiotics without an incoherent mess of guesswork and intuition in the middle of our scientific method. Might still be too provocative and unwieldy to be useful, but hey, that’s Taleb.

tl;dr: taleb is a postmodernist who accidentally gets read by people who think they hate postmodernism

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    Ben Tolkin

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