Nassim Taleb and Skin in the Game: Rules of Honor that Build Civilizations

Is this person an offspring of Ayn Rand?

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Interesting question. And I think there are parallels. Ayn Rand was focused on the cultivating the power of the individual against the State and low expectations. Rand lionized an individual man’s achievement against all odds. That was her savior of civilization.

Clearly Taleb treasures the entrepreneur as the basic building block of commerce. Beyond that, its about having the right systems — the correct framework to fight bureaucracy, diversify, and put people in authority at the local level (”bottoms up”). That’s my take.

For example, if you're a journalist, the honorable thing is to not follow other journalists. But in practice, journalists are afraid of being ostracized if they don't follow the tags of the pseudo-Left.

If you are a journalist, then, you are only as good as the risks you take because newspapers were supposed to be here to take risks exposing power, not playing the system.

The wire services are the death of journalistic independence. Before the advent of the AP, newspapers were mostly weeklies, and printers didn’t have independent sources of news of far-flung disasters. So newspapers were about the opinions of their printers - much like the EIB is about the opinions of Rush Limbaugh.
It took a generation or two, but the fact that wire services are continual virtual meetings of all major journalist - and the veracity of
People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices. - Adam Smith, Wealth of Nations (1776)
combined to produce the “objective journalism” cartel which promotes the opinions of journalists as a class. And that class is anti fragile at the expense of the fragility of society. That is, journalism is the bad news business, and as such it profits from disaster. Society, OTOH, is damaged by it.
Worse, the “objective journalism” cartel promotes the fellow travelers of journalists - whom journalists call “liberals,” and whom journalists promote to infest the government. Government “liberals” also are anti fragile at the expense of society. Which is another way of saying they don’t have skin in the game.
The advent of the wire services created the “objective journalist” myth. With that myth firmly established, the Warren Court in 1964 unanimously awarded journalism the New York Times Co. v. Sullivan decision, which awarded the “objective journalism” cartel freedom from any duty to be truthful. It did so by dismissing almost two centuries of jurisprudence with the fatuous claim that
". . . libel can claim no talismanic immunity from constitutional limitations. It must be measured by standards that satisfy the First Amendment”
The framers of the Bill of Rights were all about suppressing controversy over the effect of the Constitution on the rights of the people. Assaying to modify libel law would have been a funny way indeed of assaying to suppress controversy, and before 1964 no one seriously suggested that they had done it.
Since Republicans are the only ones who get libeled by “objective journalism," Republicans must sue for the dismantling of the (inherently anticompetitive) wire services (their raison d'être, the high cost of telegraphy bandwidth, is ancient history in the Internet era). And sue for libel in the teeth of Sullivan. I see no other way that the truth crisis of journalism can be ameliorated.

Thanks, conservatism_IS_compassion. And pleased to hear you liked Taleb's perspective. There are quite a few of his Youtubes out there. I like converting to MP3s and listening to them on my daily walks.

You added some nice analysis, as well, on the no-skin-in-the-game journalist set. I liked reading about how the libel laws have changed to support today's status quo. Interesting.

I think you're right about the wire services. The richest of the kingpins of wire services, of course, is Michael Bloomberg. The local newspapers liked the economics of relying on national stories instead of hiring a lot of reporters. That and the rise of social media, Youtube, and internet is causing major pain.

As a tech industry journalist and analyst myself, I can see how useful an independent observer can be in getting practical information distributed and helping create a marketplace for industry innovation.

The town and small city newspapers live off the local community, the restaurants, car dealers, etc.

But there are also plenty of American businesses that are usually B2B and national/international in scope -- software firms, franchises, industrial product firms, even cloud franchisers.

I did a back-of-an-envelope analysis and figured there's room for another 4,000 journalists in America to follow these national and international business segments, many of whom don't have a educational outlet to reach their markets effectively.

But the national journalists who cover government and big business chose the dark side, with Watergate and the rise of "tough guy" like Dan Rather and Sam Donaldson.

And as Taleb pointed out, the reality is these nose-in-the-air columnists like George Will, Paul Krugman, and Thomas Freidman are actually Intellectual Idiots.

Finding dirt and exposing fraud was sexier, paid better, and earned more Pulitzer Prizes than explaining the ingenuity companies bring to market. 20 years ago Fortune Magazine was great at cheerleading American business, but no longer: see my 2019 vanity: Fortune Cookie News: American Business Magazine a Propaganda Tool of China?

Trump is doing the best you can do -- expose their lies, laugh at them, embarrass them, and shame them to the point where being a journalist isn't something you can brag about at the Thanksgiving dinner table.

Finally, to your point of making the society more fragile, I made some comments in that direction in a meme about Angry Red Hens.

Cheers, my FRiend.

pleased to hear you liked Taleb's perspective.

I’ve read, and given a copy to a friend, of The Black Swan. And I have Fooled by Randomness and Skin in the Game as well.
I found it interesting that in one of his books Taleb showed that some economics theory depends on a mathematical mistake - in which an integral is evaluated after a variable is taken out of the integral. Treating a variable as a constant is definitely not cool.

I think you're right about the wire services. The richest of the kingpins of wire services, of course, is Michael Bloomberg.

Huh! Somehow I hadn’t thought of that! Only of his news channel. And since I eschew general circulation news in general and breaking news in particular, Bloomberg has never really been on my radar screen.
For many more years than I like to remember, I wondered what changed “the press” between the founding era and the Vietnam era. I thought maybe the high speed printing press was the culprit. Then one day I saw a book in the library which referred to the telegraph - and the answer hit me like a ton of bricks. Of course the telegraph transformed journalism!!! By the mechanism of the wire services. How could they fail to homogenize journalism?

20 years ago Fortune Magazine was great at cheerleading American business, but no longer: see my 2019 vanity: Fortune Cookie News: American Business Magazine a Propaganda Tool of China?

Read and bookmarked.

to your point of making the society more fragile, I made some comments in that direction in a meme about Angry Red Hens.

Sounds interesting, next on my list.

to your point of making the society more fragile, I made some comments in that direction in a meme about Angry Red Hens.

As I suggested above, IMHO overturning the New York Times Co. v. Sullivan decision would go a long way towards ameliorating the problem.
As matters now stand, your “Red Hens” can act out without any legal accountability. Allowing presses to be used to endanger. Sullivan’s disabling of the right not to be libeled empowers presses to be reckless. It is as if the Second Amendment were read to allow people to shoot out the windows of the houses of politicians they disagreed with. Or even to shoot Steve Scalise.

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