Yeah, Taleb was a covid ultra-complier and stands by that decision as a Black Swan event. I don't think a worldwide epidemic would even naturally occur in the manner he's afraid of. Viruses tend to get less severe in their infection, but more contagious as they mutate. Not to mention even absent government intervention a lot of people will voluntarily take action to minimize risk. Taleb is also big on Christianity whereas I see the older versions of Christianity to simply be a strategic synthesis meant to convert a largely illiterate vitalist population to their foreign univeralist, but philosemitic religion. I think the reason societies moved away from skin in the game systems was because of the judaification/abrahamification of society to include over indexing on legalism versus previous systems which relied more on shared cultures, practices, and blood to unify context. The move also led them to persecute their fellow people who worshiped their old gods and give up the control of money/banking to jews who didn't have the prohibitions against usury. Giving control of your banking system to a hostile foreign ethnicity (a huge part of Judaism is converting the rest of the pagan population to noahide compliant religions like Christianity and Islam) is generally not a good idea regardless of what your views on them might be broadly. In old Norse societies they actually generally had legal processes of handling your own business without getting permission from the ruling authority and then being willing to defend your actions if questioned later. Taleb also makes the typical academic mistake of having too much veneration for aristocracy and institutions IMO.
Yeah, Taleb was a covid ultra-complier and stands by that decision as a Black Swan event. I don't think a worldwide epidemic would even naturally occur in the manner he's afraid of. Viruses tend to get less severe in their infection, but more contagious as they mutate. Not to mention even absent government intervention a lot of people will voluntarily take action to minimize risk. Taleb is also big on Christianity whereas I see the older versions of Christianity to simply be a strategic synthesis meant to convert a largely illiterate vitalist population to their foreign univeralist, but philosemitic religion. I think the reason societies moved away from skin in the game systems was because of the judaification/abrahamification of society to include over indexing on legalism versus previous systems which relied more on shared cultures, practices, and blood to unify context. The move also led them to persecute their fellow people who worshiped their old gods and give up the control of money/banking to jews who didn't have the prohibitions against usury. Giving control of your banking system to a hostile foreign ethnicity (a huge part of Judaism is converting the rest of the pagan population to noahide compliant religions like Christianity and Islam) is generally not a good idea regardless of what your views on them might be broadly. In old Norse societies they actually generally had legal processes of handling your own business without getting permission from the ruling authority and then being willing to defend your actions if questioned later. Taleb also makes the typical academic mistake of having too much veneration for aristocracy and institutions IMO.