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#thoughts #books #music

I'm going to start by declaring that the more I read his books, I have found a certain personality/academic affinty with Nassim Nicholas Taleb. I tend to attribute this “closeness” to the fact that he is one of the few people that I have read recently who have written non-fiction in a way where the personality and style of the author really shines through. [I wonder how many fights he must have had with his editors...] The fact that he is also an avid humanities, philosophy and classics reader (yes, please!) shines through his book. However, I can see how people would be bored by that and would deem those references as pretentious or even pernicious to his core argument. I've heard many people say that in order for your argument to be effective with a wide audience, you need to make it as easy as possible (I don't think you always want/need to appeal to a wide audience). I'm pretty sure that Taleb wrote it in such a way where the book would find its audience and not à l'envers. After all, appeal and fame is not everything, according to him. Moreover, it would seem that he derived much more pleasure from writing it his way rather than conforming with editorial directions. In spite of the possible critiques that one could make to his style or the extensive usage of references to epistemology, philosophy or greek classics; if you are into those things (as I am), you will like it.

In a way, Taleb approaches the subject of randomness and probability in a very elegant way. He also really does take utter care in not giving you the slightest clue as to how he actually applies these principles to his work (as a “no-nonsense trader”) or in life (as a “part literary essayist”) besides some very broad ideas like “benefiting from black swan events or taking a trading approach that is deviced against our own psychological reward system. The above means that this is not a book for people looking for a direct formula that will make their lives (or their wallet) richer. This book, I'm sure, is for people interested in a stoic, skeptic way of thinking/living that want to hear how some of the Popperian, Solonian & Wittgensteinian arguments would apply to their systems of thought. However, these same people should not expect an in-depth analysis of these author's thoughts. Taleb uses them practically but also in a very familiar way – as if he was quoting ideas shared by these philosopher friends over dinner. Because of this, I'm happy he included a section called “a trip to the library” where notes and further readings are recommended. The teasers and philosophical punchlines serve to excite the reader enough for them to go into this section to profit from the wealth of titles quoted throughout the ~250 pages.

Taleb's ideas are really strong and well argumented but again the style employed means that the reader needs to be “okay” with following the author's train of thought (digressions and all) through the book. Don't expect this to be a fully linear, logically argumented disclosure of the arguments. And even though he derives some of his most interesting parallels and examples from classics and philosophy most of his arguments are rooted in behavioural economics, psychology and a strong understanding of statistics (read here Daniel Kahneman, Herbert Simon among other illustrious authors).

If anything, and I do not pretend to make a reduction of Taleb's arguments, I'd consider the following phrase as a summary of his thought: “We favor the visible, the embedded, the personal, the narrated, and the tangible; we scorn the abstract. Everything good (aesthetics, ethics) and wrong (randomness) with us seems to flow from it.” It is this idea that human psyche is inherently lacking in adaptation to understand an increasingly complex world where noise (a.k.a. randomness) is impossible to distinguish from causality. In fact, as I studied Political Economy and Public Policy, one of the paradigms that stuck with me is how it is most of the time it is impossible to device a way of measuring performance/causality for public policies or people. It is impossible for us to distinguish between one subject/project A that is inherently better but had bad luck versus one subject/project B that is inherently worse but had good luck; because we lack the methods to discount noise/luck/randomness. In this example, choosing strategy A is optimal every time but given noise (and our anchoring/narrative biases) we might end up believing B was better overall, generating a positive-feedback loop that transforms itself into a vicious cycle. Some wisdom mentioned by Taleb on these points: don't be married to your positions (e.g. if you bought a home for a 100 and now it's worth a 1000 and you wouldn't buy it for the current price, you are married to your position) and every day is a clean slate to make decisions.

Expanding on the issues above, one of the things that I like the most in life is out-growing ideas – or what other people would like to call “contradicting myself”. I don't believe we can successfully grow if we don't have our own internal battles and we allow ourselves the freedom to switch positions after we've evaluated new evidence (in spite of society looking at us as lunatics). In fact, Walt Whitman is from the same school as Taleb and I:

“Do I contradict myself? Very well, then, I contradict myself; I am large — I contain multitudes”.

And so is Nietzsche:

“Only idiots fail to contradict themselves three times a day”.

By and large this means that we are slightly less biased, we are more Popperian/Lakathonian (aka. more scientific; we are willing to change paradigms if proven wrong) but, most of all, we are freer to live how we want.

Taleb's book is an ode to knowing our own limits, the limits of science, economics and, the understanding that randomness plays a much bigger part in our lives than we care to accept or understand. But, every now and then it is also a life-manual based on the inverse idea that uncertainty and heuristics can prove very much useful to make day-to-day decisions: “we are meant made to live like fireman with downtime for lounging and meditating between calls under the protection of protective uncertainty”. As with everything Taleb, given his French education, he manages to strike nuance in a way that is palatable and not a contradictio in termini. We need to learn to live with the fact that most things, including randomness and uncertainty, cannot be fully prescriptive and linear. But remember, we are not wired to be okay with this.

See you on the next adventure,

W.

#books

This mammoth of a book came into my hands highly recommended – not only by the wise internet crowds and professional book reviewers at prestigious news papers – but also by trusted friends: the very few that were brave enough and had the discipline to read through the sometimes immensely emotionally taxing 1288 pages of this book (well, that's the count on the edition I was able to procure from my favourite bookshop before it closed down because of COVID-19).

As with all accounts of historical events there's no 'absolute truth' and in 1200 pages you are most certainly going to find inaccuracies and mistakes. However those faults do not take any merit away from the point that Fisk was trying to make in his 'opus magna'. In fact and, if anything, the central motivation of this book was summarised by him quoting Amira Hass: “There is a misconception that journalists can be objective ... What journalism is really about is to monitor power and the centres of power.” This is his account of Middle Eastern history and a very personal one at that.

Robert Fisk spent the best part of 30 years living and reporting – mostly as a war correspondent – some of the most crucial events of modern Middle Eastern history: The Iran-Iraq War, The Gulf War, The Iranian Revolution, The Afghanistan Wars (both the Soviet and the American one), The Iraq War by the US, The Palestinian Intifada ... Based out of Beirut he was able to spend time and see, with his own eyes, the truths that lie behind “war as politics by other means” to quote Carl von Clausewitz.

His book – which, let's be honest here, could have been separated into volumes or even into separate books – portrays the crude consequences of war to the point of nausea: pages on end of torture, war crimes, tragedies, death, hypocrisy by Western Powers and the permanent grievances on the Arab people created by them. In all fairness, this is a real account of what war really does to people: a non romantiziced version of it that couldn't be further away from the heroism that what we see in the movies or even on TV, reinforced by the deliberately sneaky discourses of the politicians who sent people to die in the first place.

However, he also did make some space for topics that, I believe, underly all of the chapters and essentially could be considered as the fundamentals of his view: the lack of responsibility assumed by western powers and weapons-dealers, the misery instilled into Arab people by draconian treaties, the faulty logic used to wage war (including committing horrifying war crimes) in the Middle East, etc.

For me, this book is essentially about: (1) the hypocrisy that permeates international politics; (2) and more importantly, this a treaty on understanding the need for bravery and plurality of visions and empathy towards others. Robert Fisk challenges the accepted monolithic and manichean discourse that fuels the conflicts in the Middle East: “if you are not in favor of US/Israeli Policies you are in favor of terrorism”. For once we get to see a clear account on what that means and on the consequences of ensuring that a dehumanising logic like that one is dominant.

I consider this to be mandatory reading for anyone interested in the Middle East and International Security / Politics. The only thing that I wished is that we had a more accesible version of it so that more people would be exposed to Fisk's magnificently crude and dark vision of events.

See you on the next adventure,

W.

#books

'What made you decide to operate in our country?' 'Can't you see the state in which the peasants live?' Che asked. 'They are almost like savages, living in a state of poverty that depresses the heart, having only one room in which to sleep and cook and no clothing to wear, abandoned like animals ...' 'But the same thing happens in Cuba', Selich retorted. 'No, that's not true,' Che said. 'I don't deny that in Cuba poverty still exists, but the peasants there have an illusion of progress, whereas the Bolivians live without hope. Just as he is born, he dies, without ever seeing improvements in his human condition.'

This biography achieves what I thought was inconceivable when dealing with a figure like Ernesto “Che” Guevara: being relatively objective.

Jon Lee Anderson's depiction of this complex figure starts with an overview of the Guevara household – a bourgeois family that fell into disgrace. Ernestito had a complicated childhood tainted mostly by his fight against asthma, a disease that would surface during the most tense moments of his life (e.g. the Sierra Maestra campaign, his Congo Expedition and his final moments in Bolivia). “Che”, however, made up for his physical shortcomings by exerting ferocious self-discipline, a trait that would frighten both his enemies and his revolutionary camaradas in the future.

Ernesto was certainly influenced by Socialist literature and ideals that grew in his fertile mind. As per Anderson's tale, it seemes that he was the real ideologue of the Cuban Revolution and the influence he had over Fidel (who bestowed the first comandante title of the Cuban Revolution on Che) can be seen throughout Cuba's political decisions.

Because of these ideals, Che's ruthlessness is one of the points that sticks out. Both the extrajudicial killings in the Sierra Maestra and the use of forced labour camps for civil servants that didn't perform according to expectations were some of the uses of violence by Che. However, this violence was only a means to an end in his mind. Che's ultimate ambition was to forge a society made up of real socialist men and women – people that would have a supreme collective ideal – and the only way to do so, in Che's mind, was through armed struggle. Interestingly, most, if not all, of Che's guerrilla incursions were accompanied by both a sense of doom and a sense of absolute duty to the revolution (“consider yourselves dead men” is what Che would say when sending people into battlefield).

As a means to justify this violence, Che was, in a way, the best embodiment of a socialist and political commissar: he refused extra privileges, kept everyone else around him in check, despised the Soviet Union leaders for living lush lives and he was always thinking about the collective. However, these ideals didn't always translate well into real life: part of Cuba's failed economic transformation into socialism, was due to Che's work in Government.

Che was the eternal foreigner motivated by the belief of a better way of life (in his late writings, he even critiqued the Soviet Union's economic paradigms of planned economy, which were also dogma in Cuba). In a way, his death in Bolivia seems to serve as a symbolic representation of his life: your own personal image and your view of the world might not be accurate reflections of reality. In fact, in spite of his beliefs, he wasn't the great strategic guerrilla commander he thought he was (as proven by his failures in Africa, Argentina and Bolivia) and in the places where he tried to export his struggle people were not so interested in the revolution as he estimated. His strategic principles worked in Cuba because of the Castro brothers' leadership. In short, it seemed like he was able to see the grand strategy but not the small human elements that make up the bigger picture.

Che's final words allegedly were:

“shoot coward, you are only going to kill a man.”

In that moment of final clarity, he knew he represented more than just himself even though he had failed to prove to himself that he would be able to export the Revolution.

Jon Lee Anderson's Che is absolutely recommended if you are interested in Che and in early modern Cuban history as both are one and the same.

See you in the next adventure,

W.

#books