“Never read a book written by a journalist”  Nassim NicholasTaleb

Here’s my new piece of confirmation bias. Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s either/or worldview. Which seems to be rapidly spreading to all of his legions of followers. In this world, you’re either a no-skin-in-the-game charlatan, or one of the rare cluster of types – entrepreneurs, artisans, etc – that might be described as skin-in-the-game-Taleb-friends.

The world is only either/or if we lack a modicum of creativity.

When we give ourselves permission to think creatively, we rapidly realise it is always possible to achieve both/and solutions.

Per my last post, there aren’t two types of people in the world, there are four:

There are people who are just idiots (95% of the population), there are the ‘journalists’ subjected to Taleb’s ire, there are his Friends, and – top right – there are people who both have skin-in-the-game and can contextualise a wider world that those with the skin-in-the-game usually can’t see.

Admittedly, this last group is the smallest of the four. But it does exist. And the only reason it’s the smallest, I’m convinced is because influential flâneurs like Nassim Nicholas Taleb don’t seem to be able to (or want to) recognise that if we’re creative, we can have our cake and eat it too.

We’d all be a lot better off, I think, if instead of making futile either/or attacks, we’d start looking for, encouraging and recognising the people in the top right hand corner of the matrix, the ones that solve the contradictions.