An Ode to Nassim Taleb and the Darwin Awards

In Nassim Taleb's 2018 NYTimes #1 bestseller entitled Skin in the Game:  Hidden Asymmetries in Daily Life, he has a chapter entitled, The Intellectual Yet Idiot.  Taleb is no dummy.  His 2007 book, The Black Swan, was hailed by Britain's Sunday Times as one of the 12 most influential books since WWII.  The year following his publication of The Black Swan, in which he predicted an impending banking and economic disaster, international markets collapsed because only a few of the "experts" were willing to recognize the black swan in their midst.  We all took a hit in those days.



Anyway, in his most recent book, Skin in the Game, he turns his attention to a term he introduced several years earlier, The Intellectual Yet Idiot, about which he wrote:

What we have been seeing worldwide, from India to the UK to the US, is the rebellion against the inner circle of no-skin-in-the-game policymaking “clerks” and journalists-insiders, that class of paternalistic semi-intellectual experts with some Ivy league, Oxford-Cambridge, or similar label-driven education who are telling the rest of us 1) what to do, 2) what to eat, 3) how to speak, 4) how to think… and 5) who to vote for.

But the problem is the one-eyed following the blind: these self-described members of the “intelligentsia” can’t find a coconut in Coconut Island, meaning they aren’t intelligent enough to define intelligence hence fall into circularities — but their main skill is capacity to pass exams written by people like them. With psychology papers replicating less than 40%, dietary advice reversing after 30 years of fatphobia, macroeconomic analysis working worse than astrology, the appointment of Bernanke who was less than clueless of the risks, and pharmaceutical trials replicating at best only 1/3 of the time, people are perfectly entitled to rely on their own ancestral instinct and listen to their grandmothers (or Montaigne and such filtered classical knowledge) with a better track record than these policymaking goons.

Taleb is an intellectual who understands his own kind all too well.  He's not referring to smart people, per se, but to smart people (especially decision-makers) who have no skin in the game.  Those are the ones we must keep an eye on.  Taleb says they are the most-likely candidates for intellectuals yet idiots, and he cites numerous examples.



Being book-smart is commendable.  Nothing wrong with it in the least.  Our education system is built on the premise that book-smart people tend to do better financially than most others, and they do.  Plus, they contribute admirably to society.  No complaint there.  Who wants a dummy for a neuro-surgeon or a lawyer?  But Taleb points out that many book-smart people tend to have a difficult time surviving on Main Street aside from their connections, inherited bank account, licensing pedigree or glib tongue, unless they stand to lose just as much as the people who suffer from their bad judgments.  IYIs can make decisions and hold opinions that are as idiotic as the dumbest guy in their high school graduating class, and oftentimes more destructive, if only because they have no skin in the game.  Ask the honest among them and they will tell you so themselves.  Hence Taleb's intellectual yet idiot. 



If you want to get into the Way Back Machine, here's Milton Friedman in the 1970s doing his best impression of Nassim Taleb with an IYI (-- ignore the ads on the screen;  I couldn't find the original video on short notice):









In other words, don't sell yourself or the wisdom of your ancestors short.  Common sense, humility and shared responsibility are good things.  For those who smugly disagree, there's always a life in politics, academia or the annals of the Darwin Award.