Rex Kerr
2 min readJan 6, 2024

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This is something of an aside, but: don't one's own biases also swarm like murder hornets?

This sounds like an amazing way to reinforce one's own biased outlooks--because by design one only asks tough questions when that would let you confirm your biases not deny them--and drive everything toward a division between ingroup angels and outgroup demons. This seems a very bad way to be perceptive about the totality of a situation.

Now, I do like your positioning of it as a game. Games are things you play for fun; you don't necessarily take the outcome all that seriously, even if you care enough about it to play. If you literally do take it as a game, it's a lot less likely to actually cause a problem. But the AtOQ formulation treats it as serious business, which to me just sounds like full-throated embrace of confirmation bias.

More on topic, though I haven't read Antifragile, it's not inconsistent to take a narrow view and also think an evolutionary outlook is a good idea. It depends on whether the goal is to document the process of evolution or simply to reap the fruits of evolution.

Evolution finds winners by starting with diversity and throwing most of it away, then diversifying anew and iterating over and over. If Taleb draws from a deep, narrow intellectual "winner well" then it's totally consistent with his thesis. It just doesn't document to us that his thesis is correct; for that he'd need to show us the diversity that existed, how the other ideas were less useful, etc. etc..

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Rex Kerr
Rex Kerr

Written by Rex Kerr

One who rejoices when everything is made as simple as possible, but no simpler. Sayer of things that may be wrong, but not so bad that they're not even wrong.

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