Taleb has a heart of gold, he did endorse Ron Paul for President a decade ago, but unfortunately also a vanity that extends beyond the solar system. He’s committing the same intellectual sin he constantly attributes to his opponents: building a strawman caricature of his opponent, and then dismissing them entirely. Sad that he included Ioannidis, an intellectual superior to him in every way, in the graph.
Here is the hall of “experts”:
3-4 down out of 12 (includ. civilized debate w/Ioannidis), but others would be scraping the bottom of the pot.These “experts” are being used for backup by the politicized no-mask-virus-is-a-hoax mob (see from @BallouxFrancois‘s feed). pic.twitter.com/u7MjSPx5rQ
— Nassim Nicholas Taleb (@nntaleb) August 24, 2020
I rarely come across anyone that believes “the virus is a hoax”. I do, however, encounter greater numbers of people realizing that COVID-19 isn’t aerosolized Ebola, that it’s far less dangerous to children than the flu, that it doesn’t kill randomly but targets a very specific group of people with very specific symptoms, that masks, unemployment, and school closings pose a clear and present danger to children, and that allowing COVID to spread among the non-vulnerable population (which makes up over 99%) of everyone will protect the vulnerable far more than cowering in hypochondriac terror for the remainder of their lives. Do the elderly really want to spend their remaining years mired in this fear, hidden behind several masks and an eye shield?
Taleb’s ego is apparently preventing him from admitting he’s been on the wrong side for months. Does he ever mention lockdowns as a cause of apocalyptic devastation of the very most vulnerable in society?
