1

Principia Politica:
Politics under Scaling and Uncertainty
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Fifth draft, May 2020

C ONTENTS XV Ergodicity 23

XVI Nature and Significance 24

I Scalability 4
XVII Historical Narratives and Agency 25
II Coercion and
Nudging 6
XVIII Religion and Legal Systems 26
III Scalability XVIII-1 Interactions . . . . 39
and Ethics 7 XVIII-2 Scale transforma-
tion and emer-
IV Greek gence properties . 39
vs Roman 8 XVIII-3 Nonlinearity . . . . 39
XVIII-4 Nonprobabilistic
V Liberty modeling . . . . . . 39
must be scale invariant. 9 XVIII-5 Computational
opacity . . . . . . . 40
VI Progressive
XVIII-6 Fat tailedness in
vs Conservative 10
distribution space . 40
XVIII-7 Self-organization,
VII Morality
absence of
does not aggregate 12
centralized control 40
VIII NonNaive
References 41
Universalism 13

IX Racism,
Homophily, and Xenophobia 15

X Neither
Minority nor Majority Rules 18

XI War and
Peace from the Bottom 19

XII Precautionary Government 20

XIII Risk
Asymmetries 21

XIV Governance vs Democracy 22

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Figure 1. Self organization: a flock of birds exhibiting swarm behavior.

M
OST OF THE TENSION resides often incoherent –and that at many levels.
between 1) embedded, uncertainty Scale, for many functions, matters more than
minded, multiscale fractal localism the political regime.
(politics correctly seen as an The best way to summarize Fractal Localism
ecology/complex adaptive system), (which we capitalize) is by its opposite: abstract
and 2) abstract one-dimensional universalists universalism.
and monoculturalism (politics mistakenly seen
as a top-down engineering project). "Right" vs.
"left" is often
The above distinction becomes clear once we incoherent;
move away from the verbalistic, use nonlinear O RGANIZATION rigorous vs.
unrigorous and
properties, uncertainty approaches, information the- effective vs.
ory, and probabilistic rigor to look at politics The book is organized as follows. We introduce ineffective is a
with the same eyes as when we examine highly the Incerto project to link it to the current treatise. more accurate
representation
dimensional interactive elements such as nature, We then present general principles , followed
biological systems, internet networks, and medical by specific articles of conduct and general rules
Verbalism is very issues. in the articles,. We have specific questions and
general in areas
still mistaken We provide precise definitions of verbalism answers in Quaestiones, sectionXVIII.
for scholarly and show how many political concepts fall un- A structured summary of complexity and is-
der such a category. For instance the "left" vs. sues that differ from the common approaches
"right" distinction is something verbalistic and to political philosophy is in the final section
 3

XVIII. Contra and Limitations

There is a tension between the ex post Anglo-

T
HE I NCERTO(of which this is a
Saxon common law based on torts (see Skin in
part) can be summarized as
the Game) and the regulatory framework ex ante
follows: while there is a high
required for precautionary action (since harm was
uncertainty (and causal and probabilistic
not done). The solution proposed in [1] is to
opacity) in the world, what to do about
limit such action to systemic ills that the tort
it –which option to take– is always
system is incapable of handling.
certain.
In a way it is no different from military pro-
Furthermore, paradoxically, the more un-
tection.
certain the world’s outcomes are, the more
certain the optimal policy. It is the most At a higher level, it means to insure ergodicity.
prudent one with the most convex outcomes,
that is, the one that, first, is precautionary
and insures survival and, second, carries
the most beneficial second order effects.

The idea is to (re)build political and economic

systems based on axiomatic and derived principles
Uncertainty that accommodate uncertainty and fragility:
makes decisions
straightforward 1) Dynamic, never static (i.e. no analysis de-
signed for single period should ever be used
dynamically)
2) Multiscale, never single scale (i.e. no in-
terpretation should extend beyond the scale for
which it was designed)
3) Precautionary at higher scale, i.e. the business
of the state is what risk management and control
The state should that cannot be done at lower levels.
not be like
an intrusive Absence of information is, simply, uncertainty.
Lebanese mother, As an example, if you are unsure about the
rather like a
rich Lebanese
reliability of the airline, you drive or take the
uncle to help train; if you do not know whether the water is
when needed. poisonous or not, you just avoid drinking it. Many
modelers fail to realize that model uncertainty
and disagreements about, say, a certain policy,
is itself potent information that command the
maximally prudent route.
As an application to climate change: the most
contradictory the models, and the wider the gap
between their results, the more uncertainty in
the system which calls for precaution, even if
one disagrees with the models.

The man of the system . seems to imagine that he can arrange

the different members of a great society with as much ease as
the hand arranges the different pieces upon a chess-board. He
does not consider that the pieces upon the chess-board have no
other principle of motion besides that which the hand impresses
upon them; but that, in the great chess-board of human society,
every single piece has a principle of motion of its own, altogether
different from that which the legislature might chuse to impress
upon it. Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments.
 4

PRINCIPLE I S CALABILITY fractal strata under monolithic absorbing concepts.

Everything More technically, groups are never one (you)

P
nonlinear has a RINCIPLE 1 Never describe, compare, or infinity (mankind plus living things), but renor-
scaling problem; malize into clusters of intermediate sizes.
responses
or assess the effectiveness of po-
are either litical systems without reference to Interactions are local at different hierarchies.
locally convex scale. No local interaction should be superceded by
or concave
command and control guidance. It is easier to
gauge micro-performance than macro-performance,

F
RACTAL L OCALISM: Between the particularly to the visibility of some side effects
concrete individual and the and the more limited percolation of the local.
abstract collective there are

L
a certain number of tangible fractal OCALISM as proposed is not a polit-
gradations. ical system but a rigorously defined
political structure that can accom-
modate various systems, which can even Scaling and
An immediate implication: dynamics are
include communism, libertarianism –though
missed in the
not anarchism as naively presented. The

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OLITICSis not scale-free. One can verbalistic
be "libertarian at the federal level, main aim is to fit the dynamics to the literature
Republican at the state level, Demo- proper scale.
crat at the county level, socialist within Hence this is not a discussion on localism
the commune, and communist at the family but rather one on scale.
and tribe level."
The fragility interpretation Scalability is a simple
Minorities property of an object that has a concave or
are choked
To understand localism: on August 6, 1806 the
in centralized Holy Roman Empire was abolished. "Goethe noted convex response. For instance an elephant has
systems that day that the people staying in the same inn more fragility than a mouse for an equivalent
as him were far more interested in the quarrel proportional random shock. See further down and
between their coachman and the innkeeper than in Antifragile [3].
in its demise."[2].
Scale and Nonlinearity The impossibility of
The supply of "international" news diverts from
Anarchy is the municipal nature of interests. comparing two items of different size without
not scalable. scale transformation is illustrated as follows. Take
Localism is Nationalism vs Globalism The conflict "national- a human and increase his or her size. Contact
ism" vs "globalism" is ill defined. Both ignore with the floor would grow by squares, while the
volume is cubic, therefore increasing the pressure
on the bone architecture. The compensation would
change the shape of the limbs. Few realize that,
unlike in the movies, a "giant" human would
end up having to look like an elephant –and
a tiny human would look like an ant.
Scaling and the individual Libertarianism is ill
defined since, as we saw in the central vignette
on fractal localism, it does not take into account
the renormalization into groups.
Renormalization and Minority Rules Thanks to
the mechanism of renormalization, an open univer-
salist system, that is, built on nonfractal structures
Figure 2. Networks. To the left is a central government (even if (without layering), will be taken over by the
it composed of many factions), to the right is the initial behavior
of leaderless movements. At the center is a Barabasi and Albert
intolerant asymmetric minority.
scale-free network. Furthermore a centralized space with non-
 5

C
intolerant non-asymmetric minorities will be ENTRALIZATION takes away from
taken over by the majority. (Tocqueville’s point governance and democracy owing
in favor of federalism). to the concentration of signals.

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OCAL V ILLAGE There is convexity
to localism as follows: you build
stronger bonds overall in meeting These arguments miss the fact that –no matter
a person five times than in meeting five the regime –central states had at that time a
people once. very limited reach over citizens owing to reduced
This illustrates the impossibility of a global communications. The involvement of the states
village. in the 1900s was (across the world) an order
of magnitude lower than today’s, as measured
by the share of GDP coming from the central
government –and limited to armed forces. Some
Biologists and just so stories Many inferences European countries had 5-10% of GDP controlled
about ancestral conditions miss scaling, and the by the government, most are now at 50-70%.
mean-field problem (appendix) plagues evolutionary Centralization By the argument of fitness to
biology and psychology: a raw average is not a current time, centralization can show immediate
function of an average. Here we can see it in benefits. But these wane as the signal from
its clearest and mildest form in the following. A the environment gets dulled.
The only reader wrote: "One of the things that upset me Mechanisms of interaction are muted by dom- A Lebanese
places where as a primatologist is that experts on bonobos fellow said,
communism has inant signals. criticizing
been relatively will describe how a small group of apes make my hyper
Further Comments
successful are sure everyone in the group is fed, and then localism: "but
the Kibbutz, they use this to suggest socialism, when they do Note that centralization will necessarily show suc- there is a lot of
Moshav, and cess in its early stages of implementation. corruption within
similar tiny not realize the group is more akin to a family municipalities".
communes than a society. They ignore scale completely." Answer:
"Corruption
Contra and Limitations shows very
One cannot compare scales across heterogeneous easily within
municipalities"
items. A scale for restaurants and land animals
differs from the one for distribution of houses
Technology and marine mammals.
facilitates the
state’s grip Scale is something gauged empirically, based
on society on convexity effects.

Further Comments There are potent arguments

that the fragmentation of what were then Ger-
man states and statelings led to Napoleonic, then
Prussian dominance. But dominance needs to be
defined: whether it is integration in a nation
state (France, Bismark’s Germany) or some vassal
condition.

One person to a future spouse:"I will deal with silly and

insignificant mundane matters: where to live, what and when to
eat, where to shop, what to buy, where to educate the children,
where to go on vacation, etc. You will focus on centrally important
and vital questions: geopolitical relations, tensions with Russia, the
future of technology, space travel, and such indispensable matters."
Let the State do the important things...
 6

PRINCIPLE II C OERCION AND Commentary

N UDGING Avoid golden rules (a la neocons). Golden rules
("treat others the way you’d like to be treated")

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RINCIPLE II No entity, governmental invite busybodies to change other people’s lives,
or otherwise, should be able to while silver rules ("don’t treat others the way
coerce an individual into a political you wouldn’t like to be treated") is more robust.
and economic system against her or his Silver rules require skin in the game (cf pple),
will. though necessary but not sufficient.
In return the individual must reciprocate. Contra
Exceptions (François Benoux) in the tails of the
Thanks to distributions:

N
nationalism, UDGING and any form of creepy - seat belts
people are
coerced into
intervention violates a person in- - taxation (mandatory)
an ethnocultural dividual’s rights.
identity that’s
- bioethics (can’t sell my own kidney if I
not the one wanted)
they would - education (children coerced to learn even

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normally choose. UDGING individuals violates scaling
rules. The result on the collective in homeschooling)
might not translate, as discussed - army (in war to defend nation)
with the scaling of morality. - treatments (e.g. drug addicts)
- jury duty (mandatory)
See the section VIII on how morality does not
aggregate.
In economic terms, consider the rationality of
investing in the stock market "in a diversified
way" assuming we start initially at period t
when it is deemed safe and low-risk. Then ev-
eryone having a diversified portfolio will cause
the various formerly independent stocks to now
move in locksteps.
Individual
rights: the
For instance, nudging people into investing their
liberties of each retirement savings into basket strategies might
individual to be beneficial for a single individual taken in
pursue life and
goals without
isolation, but will not translate into benefits for
interference from the collective –it will remove the effects of
other individuals, diversification.
groups,

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established RINCIPLE (Isocrates)
monocultures, or
the government. Powerful countries need to apply
the silver rule in foreign affairs by
treating weaker ones the way they would
like to be treated if the roles were reversed.

The idea is to propose the broadest political

system possible.
Nudging assumes the nudger knows and takes
responsibilities which violates Principle XIII on
risk asymmetries and skin in the game.
Nudgers have been actively opposed to skin Figure 3. To understand Isocrates’ rule for international affairs
in the game. from multiscale localism, keep scaling the notion up.
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PRINCIPLE III S CALABILITY Further, in conditions of severe societal break-

AND E THICS down, many additional risks will emerge for all
agents that can’t be reduced to the initial short
term risk of infection to the individual.

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RECAUTIONARY decisions do not
In the current COVID-19 outbreak, such ef-
scale. Collective safety may
fects can be observed by a complete inundation
require excessive individual risk
of hospitals and their ICUs as local outbreaks
avoidance, even if it conflicts with an
take hold. This and other less visible thresholds
individual’s own interests and benefits. It
change the dynamic of the pandemic as they are
may require an individual to worry about
exceeded. Initially small risks become amplified
risks that are comparatively insignificant.
and produce novel and unanticipated risks as
the contagion makes impacts system-wide.
Assume a risk of a multiplicative viral epi- For these reasons, the prudent and ethical
demic, still in its early stages. The risk for an course of action for all individuals is to enact
individual to catch the virus is very low, lower systemic precaution at the individual and local
than other ailments. It is therefore "irrational" scale. The breakdown of scale-separation that
to panic (react immediately and as a priority). a multiplicative contagion induces connects the
But if she or he does not panic and act in an individual to the collective, making everyone
ultra-conservative manner, they will contribute to both a potential bearer and source of risk.
the spread of the virus and it will become Commentary
a severe source of systemic harm. Precaution scales
Example: John Ioannidis found out that the odds in a convex
Hence one must "panic" individually (i.e., pro- for an elderly to die on the road exceeds that way for cross-
duce what seems to an exaggerated response) in from Covid-19 (the statistical claim was effectively
dependent small
idiosyncratic
order to avoid systemic problems, even where wrong, but let’s ignore). Consider a collective, risks that end
the immediate individual payoff does not appear that is a sum of individuals. Because deaths up dynamically
You are harming to warrant it. extremely large
others by not on the road are independent (hence allow for at the systemic
"overreacting" This happens when the systemic risk is small the workings of CLT, the central limit theorem) level.
to the individual but common to all, while an and the ones from Covid dependent (hence do
individual’s other idiosyncratic risks dominate her not scale by CLT), you witness a reversal of
or his own life. The risk of car accident may the source of risk. How? The odds of a 100
be greater for an individual, but smaller for elderly dying from Covid exceed the odds of
society. the same number dying in car accident, even
In short you will
end up harming
Under such conditions it becomes selfish, even if one person is individually more likely to die
yourself by psychopathic, to act according to what is called on the road.
ignoring these "rational" behavior – to make one’s own im- Further Comments
"irrational" risks
mediate rankings of risk conflict with those of This explains the classical problem that skills
society, even generate risks for society. This is in treating individuals (say, doctors) does not
similar to other tragedies of the common, except lead to understanding the risk of tail events.
that there is life and death.
Additional Comments
In addition, there is a tradeoff short-term vs.
There is a severe problem with rationality defined
long term for idiosyncratic risk. Over the long
as individual trade-offs; it does not aggregate to
run, there is convergence between idiosyncratic
collective rationality. The reverse is also true:
and systemic: your risk rises if all others are
collective rationality is not reached via individ-
infected and the risks of survival from other
ual one. As we saw, it is a good idea to
diseases drop.
ensure a high savings rate in the population and
For instance, during a pandemic that mostly enforce diversity of investments ; but "nudging"
spares young, healthy individuals, an independent individuals into diversifying is counterproductive
emergency that would typically be routine may because it increases co-movements between the
become untreatable because of lack of resources. aggregates and make the tail risks of various
previously independent markets co-dependent.
With Joe Norman
 8

PRINCIPLE IV G REEK Contra and Limitations

VS ROMAN Accepting the interactive and local behavior of
complex systems doesn’t mean raising one’s hand
and stepping aside completely. It means the fol-
lowing: priority must be first given to the self-
The reason the organizing attributes, which is not exclusive.
state should

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not act like a RINCIPLE IV The main differences Under opacity the focus is on the unknown,
Lebanese mother between political attitudes should not the known Complex system have survived,
is that often
in engineering be judged in terms of effectiveness, which is potent statistical and phenomenological
results are never intentions. The real difference in pol- information (see further with the discussion on
unexpected itics isn’t the "right" vs "left" verbalistic ergodicity).
side effects of
the process. gradation but rather "Greek" vs "Roman". People have a hard time shedding socialism
"Rational" "Greek": puts theory above practice. because it makes a lot of sense and appeals
outcomes do not "Roman": puts practice above theory. to our deep sense of justice. What makes a
necessarily flow
out of "rational" lot of sense, historically, doesn’t really make
process (the a lot of sense; the fact is obvious but hard
Clearly this is a metaphor for intentions vs.
teleological to remember when swayed by abstract justice
results not an ethnographic statement (in fact
fallacy).
arguments. Consider modern Northern European
Byzantines were deliberately "Roman" in that, as
monarchies, particularly the Scandinavian ones –
well as many other, senses of the word). It is
they offer the highest degree of governance.
inspired from the fact that the Romans got their
political system by tinkering, not by "reason".
Polybius in his Histories compares the Greek
legislator Lycurgus who constructed his political
system while "untaught by adversity", to the more
experiential Romans who, a few centuries later,
"have not reached it by any process of reasoning
[emphasis mine], but by the discipline of many
struggles and troubles, and always choosing the
best by the light of the experience gained in
When people go disaster" (Plutarch).
to the dentist,
they judge by

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results never EVER judge a policy by its inten-
by intention. tions or the reasoning behind it,
However this
reverses when except for the application of the
it comes to precautionary principle.
politics. It
remains however
that for risky Other inspirations: the episode when Cato the
decisions naive
assessment of elder sent Greek philosophers packing; Plato’s
results fail to disastrous chance at governing in Sicily; the Re-
capture the public, perhaps what Popper deemed the most
quality of
the decision. destructive book ever owing to Plato’s intellectual
brilliance. Note that Anglo-Saxon common law
would be the best idea of a self-correcting model.
Background
The difference goes deeper; it has much to do
with both teleology and acceptance of opacity.
The "Greek" assumes that the fact that I) there
is a cause to things immediately implies that II)
such cause is visible to them, without making a
link between I and II.
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PRINCIPLE V L IBERTY
MUST BE SCALE INVARIANT.

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RINCIPLE V Liberty is fractal;
it should be exercized to all
collective units at all scales, that
is, communities qua communities, all
the way from n = 1 to n = ∞, with
minimal scale transformation.

An individual is free under constraints; so

should his or her community under different
constraints. We have moral revulsion at states
of serfdom; none for tribes in similar situations.
Some entities try even to eradicate collective
Liberty requires "identities".
coherence
across scales Commentary
This fractalization allows an intellectual bridge
between localism and libertarianism; rather shows
how libertarianism implies localism but not nec-
essarily the reverse. It is inconsistent to allow an
individual a certain degree of freedom, but not
fractalize it to groups of individuals constituting
a political unit. It is even more inconsistent
to allow an economic entity, say a corporation,
the same freedom and almost similar rights as
individuals, but not do so to political units.
Tribes should be free under the condition that
they accommodate the freedom of other tribes.
Contra and Limitations
The right to secede is a problem if it entails
violations of commitments, and carry side ef-
fects, but such a right remains inviolable, just
as individuals should have the right to change
citizenship.
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PRINCIPLE VI P ROGRESSIVE Contra and Limitations

VS C ONSERVATIVE It is hard to assess if a new state is "better"
than the previous one without relying on specific
metrics and systems of value; such metrics can be

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RINCIPLE VI Never use terms such (as has been the problem with metrics) incomplete
as progressive or conservative with- and easily gamed.
out reference to a rate of change

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ROGRESSIVE and conservative are ill
defined terms, verbalistic labels. It
is required to specify a rate of
change for every specific domain.
Rationally progressive means embracing
progress by accepting a certain rate of
change deemed optimal.
Too high a rate of change cancels the
gains from previous mutations; while too
slow a change leads to misfitness.

The designations "conservative" or "progressive"

are meaningless in that sense. Both may just
want progress at different speed and lose context
under gargling verbalism and ill-defined terms.
This is one instance where the distinction "left"
vs. "right" is verbalistic, obsolete, and downright
silly. Consider that too fast a rate of change leads,
simply, to regression. The concept of "ratcheting
up" (that is, locking up at a new state deemed
preferable to the previous one) is developed in
Antifragile. The speed of change is a direct
function of the fragility of the system. Aquinas:
"a blind horse should be slow" (via R. Read).
Note the metaphor: driving at 600 mph is
certainly never the fastest way to get somewhere.
Background
There was a time where "conservative" was, owing
to verbalism, considered backward, represented as
resisting all progress. Hayek had to go out of
his way to separate himself from conservatives
in his Why I am not a Conservative [5], prompting
a chain of such denial of guilt, with Buchanan’s
Why I too am not a Conservative [6]. All these
discussions are grounded in lack of sophistica-
tion in complexity, and misunderstanding of the
relation between speed and fragility or, more
generally, the notion of tail risk in interactive
systems.

Compare Popper’s utopian engineer to the piecemeal engineer,

in the Open Society[4], Vol I.
 11

Figure 4. Movement of packs of wolves over the summer of 2018. Voyageurs Wolf Project, h/t Gore Burnelli. These wolves speak the
same language and have the same religion. Yet, there are separable entities.
 12

PRINCIPLE VII M ORALITY the attributes of the individuals.

DOES NOT AGGREGATE Contra and Limitations
Make a distinction between vices that harm the
agent and those that harm others. One may
Non-aggregative properties of morality and so-
hold high standards for private virtue. But it is
called pursuits of truth.
inconsistent to use the argument of such morality
on grounds of public good unless one can also

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RINCIPLE VII Group morality is not
accept absence of scale transformation.
the sum of individual morality.
Never make moral inferences about Adam Smith rejected Mandeville’s focus on
an aggregate or a group from attributes of vice (replacing it with the milder self-interest)
individual members and vice versa. Under but nevertheless seems to have taken the idea of
adequate legal and institutional structure, scale transformation from him –as reflected in his
the intentions and morality of individual famous quote: "It is not from the benevolence
agents does not aggregate to groups. And of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that
the reverse: attributes of groups do not we expect our dinner, but from their regard
map to those of agents. to their own interest."

O
NE DOESnot necessarily build a vir-
The standard mechanism is well grasped: com- tuous political system with virtu-
petition makes prices adequate by pushing them ous agents. Likewise a collection
towards the margin; price formation has nothing of malicious agents can produce a virtuous
to do with the individual intentions of agents. system.
But it is the second step, the wedge between
intentions and outcomes, and, more generally,
scale transformation, that is not generalized. It is
easy to get that the reintroduction of predators
such as wolves in the U.S. and Europe would
lead to the flourishing of other species, by the
logic of interactions and scales. Translating that
into socioeconomic life appears to be hard.
Commentary
Mandeville argued (correctly) that "vices" in the
Christian sense, such as the desire for luxury,
Science is not a represent fuel for economic activity. Consider that
sum of scientists,
rather the tail. by buying expensive perfume to satisfy your
vanity, you help pull people out of poverty. It is
accepted that capitalism has, as of the time of
writing, pulled a billion people out of poverty,
nearly eliminated childhood mortality, increased
the life expectancy of people in places where
sanitary conditions made it dire, etc. But the
next step, "by whom", is rarely evoked. There
is neutralization at the group level.
Note that people live under the illusion that if
science works in getting us closer to truth, it is the
result of the fact that on balance individual scien-
tists are attempting to get us closer to truth. This is
clearly false under scale transformation; it is similar
to the aggregative properties of markets: scientists Sometimes we get the reverse, sayings about good people
collectively bad: Senatores boni viri senatus mala bestia (Senators
might be just trying to pursue self-interest and it is are good people, but the Senate is a bad animal), falsely attributed
the rules that allow the truth to progress inspite of to Cicero.
 13

PRINCIPLE VIII N ON N AIVE

C
OROLLARY (Survival and Tribal
U NIVERSALISM Committments)
Collective survival necessitates
a minimum level of fractal tribalism,
though tribes don’t necessarily mean
related people.

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RINCIPLE VIII Never conflate local-
Commentary
Fughedaboud ism with monolithic, absorbing na-
Kant... The tionalism. Tribes can be composed of nonrelatives as,
general and say in the military, where people take the bullet
the abstract for their friends and co-fighters, not a particular
tend to attract Commentary cause.
self-righteous
psychopaths. Intuitively, people do better (to the least, act Nobody has managed to prove that abstract
differently) as floormates than roommates. Any (particularly Kantian) universalism can ensure in-
idiot realizes that in his or her own life but misses tergenerational survival.
the point when it comes to political systems. This
The saying if you are friends with everyone, you
is best illustrated by either Phoenician-style (non-
are nobody’s friend. And if you treat all mankind
Punic) decentralized localism or the fractalism
the same, in other words without some preferential
of Switzerland.
treatment to your own children, you will turn out

K
ANT ’ S NAIVE universalism consists to be an unreliable parent –eventually threatening
in the elimination of context their own survival. Pure universalism at its ad
to build a stripped-down, naive, absurdum limit implies you drop off a kid at
static, low-dimensional object out of a school in the morning and randomly pick another
rich, fractal, dynamic, interactive structure. in the afternoon.
The rules of societal symmetry cannot hold
without some structure: you form a group with
Some things generalize and are scale free
your own family; I form one with my own. This
(morals, rights), others don’t and remain
renormalizes to tribes that can be as self-defined
scale-dependent (nature of relations).
as needed. The mechanism is convexity. You
Background do better protecting your child with intensity
There has been notions of "nationalism" retroac- 1 than protecting 1000 children with intensity
tively flown back into earlier time, when polities 1
1000 .
were organized as a triad: 1) empires under a Recall that Byzantine theology was at least
king promoted into the rank "emperor", 2) nations partly driven by competition between partisans
under a king not yet promoted to the rank of of rival teams (blue and green) in chariot races.
emperor and therefore often depending on one,
Background
and 3) city-states (usually maritime and mercan-
tile: Mediterranean or Hanseatic) and statelings Yoram Hazony detected the necessity of tribal
(usually agrarian), both necessarily vassalized. fractality (not his words): society can only work
under such structures that have switching in-
Nationalism in the modern sense seems to
group vs. out-group behavior: "Me and my brother
correspond to tribal structures grouped under some
against my cousin; me, my brother and cousin
royal authority —thus nationalism is exactly what
against the outsider", etc. (Note that this should
is not fractal, that is, monolithic, and aims at
not lead to "Nationalism" that by definition wants
eliminating fractal layering.
to eradicate lower layers: Hitler’s idea is a Ger-
The danger of monolithic nationalism, that is, man monolithic entity that absorbs all what’s
non-fractal tribalism, is that it creates collectives perceived to be its regional subparts). What we
vastly more biased and xenophobic than the sum did here is embed it in a convexity argument,
of individuals. See the comment in [7] on how the refusal of the defective simplification via
Polish antisemitism was more of a collective mean-field.
than an individual phenomenon.
 14

Further Comments
Unruly Mediterranean mountain tribes that man-
aged to resist invaders (e.g. Sicily, Crete, Mount
Lebanon, Corsica) often have a tradition of local
vendettas that are suspended whenever an outside
threat emerges. One can argue that such fractal
vendettas are mere training programs and exercises
in vigilance (An antifragily argument).
 15

PRINCIPLE IX R ACISM , a French citizenship to a newborn issue of French

H OMOPHILY, AND X ENOPHOBIA parents in Mongolia while not doing so with
other babies in the same hospital is not racist.
Claiming to be doing so because of French

D
EFINITION : Racism vs. Xenophobia.
ethnic superiority is.
Racism has two conditions: 1) im-
parting population attributes to ran- Background
domly selected individuals or sub-groups The strategy to degrade groups’ intergenerational
from such a population; that is, in the genetic endowment, as represented by the activism
association of abilities, personality traits, of Charles Murray’s (co-author of the statistically
and disposition with ethnicities and clas- flawed The Bell Curve and the fake research
sification. Human Accomplishment –as busted by this author)
It leads to treating a person with pre- under tame designations (or the elevations of some
sumed population traits rather than the id- groups as the BS vendor Stephen Pinker did with
iosyncratic ones (that is, top down vs bot- Ashkenazis, attributing to them unique genetic
tom up). traits) is clearly racist, particularly since the argu-
ments repose on fake statistical associations and
2) holding the belief that such presumed
ignorance of probability. While low-dimensional
population traits and dispositions are inferior
traits are heritable (height, skin pigmentation, etc.),
to one’s own.
a higher dimensional composition of these has
Homophily consists in preferring people not been shown to be so.
similar to oneself for social or cultural Simply, a nonlinear function of x is statistically
purposes, though not political, economic, removed from x. The author has shown where
or functional ones (where its pathology be- IQ scores (which are claimed to be heritable) are
comes nepotism). only good at predicting testing abilities (or special
Xenophobia consists in pathological ho- needs) and are marred with severe nonlinearities
Racism is mophily, disliking strangers qua strangers. that overestimate "correlation".
misapplication
of the a law of Much of the "centrist" positivist movement in
large numbers addition to being eugenists, are ignorant of prob-
It is very common to conflate differences be-
abilistic inference: statistics is not a tool for veri-
tween groups and difference between individuals.
ficationist scientism and confirmatory empiricism,
You should not say "a 53 year old African- but a method to not be fooled by randomness.
American" or, worse, "person of color" but rather,
If (i) abilities are environment dependent (a
simply "Joe". The less background information,
Maserati optimized for a race course will not
the more you are dealing with him as a hu-
fare well in the Corsican mountains, compared
man. And the more universals you bring into
to a goat) and (ii) the environment is not pre-
a situation, the more violations of scalability.
dictable, one needs a measure that predicts both
Notice how this racial focus can be absurd: you output and environment. It is hard to figure
do not hire someone of a specific origin for a out why some people are much better house
specific function: one does not hire an Ethiopian painters than carpenters –things break down under
for long distance running and a Scandinavian nonlinearities. It is mathemati-
for weightlifting cars: you hire the person with cally impossible
Finally, scaling prevents transferring intelligence to prove the
the required abilities and there will be an ex
from individuals to groups, and vice versa. De- heritability
post correlation. of higher
velopment and cultural formations are functions dimensional
Commentary of collective not individual contributions –ethics traits
Giving favorable treatment or inheritance to a
relative or a family member cannot be considered Joe Norman: "Because they’ve understood something about
evolution, that it involves inheritance, they believe they should
racism although the link with that person is be able to reduce every complex trait of a human being down
primarily genetic, particularly if the person is to a neat-narrativized story of inheritance problems (...) when we
recently discovered half sibling. On the other hand realize our most complex traits arise out of interactions, and are
not reducible to more directly-heritable sub-systems or modules –
claiming to be giving such favorable treatment even the interactions of traits between just two people (parents)
"because of skills" is racist and eugenist. Granting leads to very-difficult-to-predict emergent outcomes."
 16

Figure 5. The mechanism of aggregation of individual preferences. There are two tribes, the red and the blue,; each square is
occupied by individuals or empty (left in white). Each person has a preference of not being in the minority, expressed as the minimum
threshold x% of people of the same tribe they would like to have as neighbors. We start by allocating people randomly on the map,
and they move if their preferences are not met –cellular automata algorithms makes people move in locksteps until we converge to
the standstill composition (or close to it), where (almost) nobody is motivated to move as all preferences are met. We can see how
non-xenophobic individual people with a weak preference of not being in the minority create segregated neighborhoods. There is a
compounding effect of preferences on the neighborhood. A minimum preference of 40% produces clearly segregated neighborhoods.
Credit: Diego Zviovich

P
are driven by minority rules not aggregation of RINCIPLE IX A (CHROMOCLASSIFI-
personal preferences. CATION) Tagging people with top-
down classifications and "identities"
that stifle the idiosyncratic attributes of the
individual is fundamentally racist.
Chromo-categorization using terms like
"white" and "PoC" (people of color)
is fundamentally racist and inspired by
colonial classifications –even when used
by the "left". The "left" tends
to use the same
White is indicator of purity, not race. language and
Someone partially white is generally not frame problems
in the same way
classified as white in Anglo-Saxon dom- as the "right"
inated countries.
 17

In addition, chromatic classification on a scale numerous situations of scale transformations via

with "white" and "black" is necessarily ordinal minority rules.
and hierarchical; geographical one do not. Contra and Limitations
When people of Northern European ancestry This does not mean that every nearly homoge-
talk dismissively about "whiteness", they are prac- neous neighborhood is the result of the nonlinear-
ticing second order racism, implying some su- ity of the aggregation of collective preferences:
periority in the process and patronizing other some fundamentalists in hyper-monotheistic reli-
classes of people. gions actively exclude others on religious grounds
(e.g. Salafis in some neighborhoods of Tripoli,

T
HE N ONELEPHANT A NIMALS Lebanon).
problem (or "Mary Beard Problem")

C
consists in creating classifications OROLLARY: Groups and Individuals.
with "other", classifying people with An attitude towards groups is never
reference to a class that has an implied the same as one towards individ-
referential purity to it. In the Mary Beard uals. All preferences are scale dependent.
story, Romans were not "others" but
Mediterraneans from outside what is now
the European Union fell anachronistically Some people are crusading bigoteers against
under the "others" tag, when these people racism but have never invited a minority cab
were much closer to the Romans than driver for tea. Indeed this is common as theo-
to the native English. retical anti-racist stances constitutes a cheap ex-
hibition of virtue. And in reverse: some people
deemed extremely "racist" against a certain group
It is more
qua group may in person marry a person of

P
rigorous to RINCIPLE IX B Never mistake
use "Nordic
homophily for xenophobia. A weak the group without seeing any inconsistency.
supremacy" in
place of "White form of homophily (preference for Examples
supremacy" similar people) is not to be confused with Arab tribes typically exhibit excessive hospital-
xenophobia (distaste of the foreigner), ity towards individual strangers that venture into
even if it undergoes a collective scale their territory, but slaughter marauding groups.
transformation and looks like outright So would that be, nonracism for n < 5 or so,
segregation. But there do exist various racism for n > 5? For which k : n > k are
forms of xenophobia. you racist? Practically nothing is scale-free.
Further comments
Example The defeat of stereotyping is that an individual may
A collection (Southern) Italian Americans with belong to more than one group. Further we may be
a weak preference of living within reach of oblivious to some oppressed groups: an unattractive
Italian grocery stores will end up creating what person (in looks) suffers more than a person of the
looks like a segregated neighborhood, without wrong race in the midst of the most racist crowd.)
anyone having any preference to exclude others Implication of no variance
from it.
Commentary
A group of people with a very weak preference
of not being in the very small minority produces
clustering and what may seem segregation may
be just negative preferences (the desire to not
be alone). See Thomas Schelling’s argument [8]
developed by cellular automata. There is a stan-
dard scale transformation from micro decisions to
"macrobehavior", asymmetric to the transforma-
tions in the opposite direction. One can generate
 18

PRINCIPLE X N EITHER
M INORITY NOR M AJORITY
RULES

P
RINCIPLE X Neither the minority nor
the majority should be able to im-
pose their preferences on others.

The general principle is no coercion of individuals

by a given collective.
Commentary
It is clearly unreasonable that geographically dis-
tributed communities that represent .1% of the
population impose their preferences on others,
particularly when there is a high cost to that,
and no ethical requirement or symmetry. But it
is necessary that these individuals be treated with
the proper amount of fairness. Just as Tocqueville
praised the U.S. federalism and constitutionalism
as a counter to the domination of the majority;
one needs structures that can prevent excessive
over-reach by the intransigeant minority. Having
local not global laws prevents renormalization. The
electoral college prevents (among other things)
minority rules. The United States, one needs to
be reminded, is not a republic but a federation.
Commentary
An expansion to the concept "leave me alone
and, in return, I will leave you alone".
Background

P
RINCIPLE Government as precaution-
ary entity The government’s role
is survival and ruin avoidance –tail
risks. Hence, necessarily, ergodicity.

Commentary
Via negativa is discussed in Antifragile. Its main
property is the avoidance of iatrogenics.
 19

PRINCIPLE XI WAR AND

P EACE FROM THE B OTTOM

P
RINCIPLE XI War and Peace] Top
down conflicts have different prop-
erties from local ones, and different
resolution methods.

Figure 6. No bureaucrats should be involved in peace discussions

without, of course, some supervision by businessmen and more
adapted people.

Corollary 1: No Bureaucrats in Peace Ne-

gotiations
No bureaucrat should ever be involved in
peace negotiations without the presence of
businesspeople.

C
OROLLARY:[Peace from the Top]
Peace from the top works if and
only if war is from the top.

The Palestinian Israeli disputes and anti-localism

 20

PRINCIPLE XII P RECAUTIONARYbut common to all, while an individual’s other

G OVERN - risks dominate her or his own life. The risk of
car accident may be greater for an individual,
MENT but smaller for society.
In a way it becomes selfish to act according
to what is called "rationally" –to put one’s own

T
HE G ENERAL (non-naive) precaution-
rankings above those of society.
ary principle [1] delineates condi-
tions where actions must be taken Similar to the paradox of thrift.
to reduce risk of ruin, and traditional cost-
benefit analyses must not be used. These are
ruin problems where, over time, exposure
to tail events leads to a certain eventual
extinction.

While there is a very high probability for hu-

manity surviving a single such event, over time,
there is eventually zero probability of surviving
repeated exposures to such events. While repeated
risks can be taken by individuals with a limited
life expectancy, ruin exposures must never be
taken at the systemic and collective level. In
technical terms, the precautionary principle applies
when traditional statistical averages are invalid
because risks are not ergodic.

P
RINCIPLE XII The central govern-
ment principal role is precautionary,
according to the non-naive precau-
tionary principle, and limited to tail events.

P
RECAUTIONARY decisions do not
scale. Collective safety may
require excessive individual risk
avoidance, even if it conflicts with an
individual’s own interests and benefits. It
may require an individual to worry about
risks that are comparatively insignificant.

Assume a risk of a multiplicative viral epi-

demic, still in its early stages. The risk for an
individual to catch the virus, is very low, lower
than other ailments. It is therefore "irrational"
to panic. But if she or he does not panic and
act in an ultra-conservative manner, the virus
will spread and it will become a severe source
of risk.
Hence one must panic individually in order
to avoid systemic problems.
This happens when the systemic risk is small
 21

PRINCIPLE XIII R ISK

A SYMMETRIES

P
RINCIPLE XIII Risk asymmetries
(Multiscale)
No risk asymmetries should be
present in the system: every single person
and every single entity needs to have
skin in the game.

Modernizing Hammurabi’s rule.

Background
The Generalized Bob Rubin Trade (GBRT) is
named after Robert Rubin, a rent-seeker who
was boss of the U.S. Treasury then subsequently
worked for Citibank where he collected $120
million or so in compensation over a decade
preceding the crash of 2008-2009. Owing to Ru-
bin and other’s policies or building hidden risk
(low probability of blowup, high impact from
blowup), Citibank was insolvent, bailed out by
the taxpayer. But Rubin kept his $120 million.
This compensation arbitrage is what Hammurabi’s
article was meant to solve by making people
accountable so they cannot hide delayed risks.

P/L

time

Some very unfortunate,

highly unexpected event,
often called "Black Swan",
Steady small returns for which we apologize
profusely but we are
excused as nobody can
predict these things.

Figure 7. The Generalized Bob Rubin Trade (GBRT): losses are

unwittingly paid by the taxpayer ignorant of the dynamics.

N
O DECISION should ever be taken
by someone who does not exit the
pool in case he or she is wrong.

This is a case of filtering, not just incentives

and disincentives. See Skin in the Game.
 22

Figure 8. Rent seeking

PRINCIPLE XIV G OVERNANCE

VS
D EMOCRACY

P
RINCIPLE XIV Governance, not
just democracy, is the objective
function –democracy can be gamed.

Commentary
 23

PRINCIPLE XV E RGODICITY

P
RINCIPLE XV Ergodicity. No static
analysis for dynamic processes, par-
ticularly those that depend on ab-
sence of ruin.

Inequality should never be measured statically

Commentary
The payoff over time for one unit is differ-
ent probabilistically from the multi-world scenario
approach as it has been shown [9] that the law
of large numbers operates differently, particularly
under the situation of an absorbing barrier.
 24

PRINCIPLE XVI N ATURE AND

S IGNIFI -
CANCE

P
RINCIPLE XVI (Nature and Statistical
Significance)
Never invoke evidence of absence
for nonnatural introductions and technolo-
gies; never invoke absence of evidence for
natural things.]
What Mother Nature does is rigorous
until proven otherwise; what humans and
science do is flawed until proven otherwise.

This should feed the precautionary principle

 25

PRINCIPLE XVII H ISTORICAL

N ARRA -
TIVES AND
AGENCY

P
RINCIPLE XVII No historical study
or account should be considered
without filling-in the gaps of non-
events, or events that do not reflect the
agency of some top-down ruler or "leader".

Peace is boring. Historical accounts are, by their

very structure, biased to overestimate agency in
human affairs (such as the role of "leaders"
and the "state"), as well as conflicts dealt with
from the top, as well as the devaluation of
the properties of the system.
By their very focus on wars, historians see
history as wars punctuated with episodes of
peace, not peace punctuated with episodes of
war. This misfocus increase representativeness,
exaggerates the role of meetings, decisions,
and recorded "events". By their very definition
recorded events are not random samples but
glorifications of salient happenings.

C
OROLLARY: "Leadership" is merely
procedural Evolution (hence
improvement) never happen from
the top via positiva. But degradation takes
place from the top via interventionism and
side effects of policies. And improvement
from the top is necessarily obtained via
negativa.

Commentary
It is well understood how natural systems blow up
when altered from the top. The journalistic notion
of "leadership" applied in political discourse is
an insult to systems. Even elementary reform via
change of minister prove ineffectual as ministers
never really control the ministries.
 26

PRINCIPLE XVIII R ELIGION

AND
L EGAL
S YSTEMS

P
RINCIPLE XVIII Never conflate reli-
gion and legal system. "Christian"
or "Judeo-Christian" values are not
about religion, but the reverse: a secu-
lar tinkering tradition that arose principally
from the separation of church and state
in the West. Sharia is both a legal and
a religious system.

Commentary
Ecclesia vivit lege romana: Christianity needed Ro-
man law, unlike Islam that was law and could
thrive outside the Roman world. Shedding Chris-
tian values and thought is shedding the past
accretions of Western Civilization. See Skin in
the Game. Distinction should not be made reli-
gious/nonreligious but rather tolerant/intolerant of
other’s beliefs.
 27

P
RINCIPLE Godel-Popper limit No
person or group should ever be
allowed to use the voting system,
and more generally voting institutions,
to run on a program with elements of
anti-democracy.

Hitler came to power via elections. Sharia pro-

moters must never use democracy.
 28

A RTICLES (P OLITICAL Article 4: A Partisan’s opinion is analyti-

D ECISIONS ) cally invalid on its own, without comparison
with that of another partisan.
A partisan’s or an ideologue is defined as
someone who’s assessment of a situation
Article 1: Iatrogenics doesn’t depend on the situation. A partisan’s
opinion has no analytical value; it is merely
First, do no harm.
representative when it corresponds to a voting
group.
The iatrogenics of some policies are unknown;
but what policies can be carried out are clear.
Inconsistency within monocultures: a narrative
E THICS OF OFFICE
is fallacious 1) if it is logically incompatible
with other narratives also held true by the same
Article 2: Every dollar made by a former agents, 2) if it leads to the statistical clustering
politician or civil servant thanks to the of causes that should be random, or, to the least,
fame and connections imparted by the office uncorrelated. This heuristic can help us identify
belongs to the taxpayer. monocultures, usually artificially propped up by
some lobby. It is always suspicious when a
person’s ideas line up exactly to a specified party
It is vastly more respectable to come to politics –as when someone embraces all ideas wholesale,
rich than come out of it rich. Consider Tony without any idiosyncratic modification. The rest
Blair, the Clintons, Al Gore, and... the Obamas. of the public needs to know they are arguing
Politics is not a résumé enhancement move. with a shill: you can observe futile exercises of
Contra and Limitations people engaging in argument with a Monsanto
A successful former president may claim that the shill or an operative for Saudi Barbaria thinking
source of income isn’t the fame from government, they will convince him or her of their point.
but a natural charisma and intelligence that got Example: there is a cluster for the advocacy
her or him elected in the first place. of both GMOs and Glyphosate, when there is no
Duration of institutions particular logical link between the two positions.
Well, there is a link: Monsanto sells both; and
Article 3: No public institution or agency GMOs are actually an excuse to sell high doses
should be created without an expiration of glyphosate.
date. Likewise, some nonrandom clustering of people
who decry civilian casualties in Aleppo but forget
about it in Mosul.
Chateaubriand: "Les institutions passent par trois
périodes: celle des services, celle des privilèges,
celle des abus." Once public institutions are ini- Article 5: Bailout
tiated, it is impossible to remove them; they are Every company operating thanks to the back-
therefore extracted from the bottom-up selection stop of the taxpayer should be treated like
mechanism and evolutionary pressures. If a public a utility, with its executives compensated like
institution or agency is vital, then it will be other civil servants.
renewed.
Contra and Limitations Bankers tend to hijack the state. argument of
It may be burdensome to the system to need to "no cost to the taxpayer"
continuously reinvent institutions. Some mecha-
nism of "justification", an intermediate one my
work under the condition that it does not lead
to automatic renewal.
Partisanship
 29

Figure 10. Identity politics gone wild. The exposition "Art and
Identity in the Ancient Middle East" at the Metropolitan Museum
in New York was a showcase of tagged exclusive identities brought
from top-down; Edward Said-style identity mongers proceed to
destroy the notion of cosmopolitan localism/Mediterraneanism
of the Phoenicians by classifying them into the "Middle East".
This shows the incoherence of non-localist Nationalism. Since c.
1100 BC Phoenicians (subsequently "Lebanese") have been the
most Mediterraneans of peoples: look at food/behavior/looks. But
since 1860 some low-Intellect Westerners (Arabists and founders
of AUB, etc.) have decided de-Mediterraneanize (initially de-
Ottomanize) to satisfy "identity" concepts.

Figure 11. Verbalism: For the Irish, Gaelic roots are held to be
"left wing" and supported by the Palestinian activists. For the
Lebanese, Phoenician roots are considered "right wing".

Figure 9. Monofractal: layers of self similarity between branches

and trees. Branches look like small trees. There is no centralized
control, simply collections of local rules. Article 7: Abstract scale-free universalism
a
No situation should ever be dealt with in
more abstract form than required. Life is about
a collection or particulars that do not neces-
sarily generalize without scale transformation.
Article 6: Non Governmental Organizations
a Not to confuse with the universality laws in physics
Nobody should be ever involved in an NGO and complex systems.
without residing permanently in the place
where it is active.

NGOs can be agents of virtue merchandiz- Article 8: Chromoracism

ing. This is to avoid the Bill Gates syndrome Never designate races by color, rather by
of promoting such "improvements" as GMOs in geography of origin: Caucasian, Subsaharan,
remote places where he does not reside, and East Asian, etc.
therefore will not pay for long term side effects.
 30

Commentary Article 9: Negative democracy

Background
Removal of long-ruling "leader".
The problem with identity politics and the di-
versitymongers is that they create exactly the
same categories as stereotyping. Both identitar-
ians and prejudicedtarians fail to get that the Article 10: Visibility of Minority Rules
difference between groups, assuming they exist, Minority rules need to be made visible and
do not show in small samples. Assume a certain explicit.
race (people from planet X) have the usual small
but "significant" differences in what is called
I.Q., assuming we know how to measure it for
nonnerds (we don’t). If you hire 1000 such
people, the difference between samples will be
evident, thanks to the workings of the law of
large numbers. But at the level of a single
person, there is only a tiny probability the effect
will be present —particularly when there is a
high variance across the population concerned
and there is variance for the very same person.
"Life is in the preasymptotics" [10]. This chro-
mogenderidentitystereotyping is the same statistical
error as the one journalists made in discussing
Fooled by Randomness, ironically a book about
statistical errors: they mistook the statement "life
contains more randomness than it appears" for
"it’s all random, there are no skills involved".
Further Comments
Often racial identities are bogus, anachronistically
made up, in a framework constructed to empower
Northern European supremacists (by linking them
to classical civilizations from which they were
(very) remote at the time and separating Western
Eurasian groups, particularly Mediterraneans, into
"European" and "non-European"); all done in the
ignorance of genetics, culture, mapping, statisti-
cal representation, and genetic distances. Labeling
Aristotle as a "dead white male" but not Omar
Khayam or Algazel is quite suspicious since 1)
people who originate from the Zagros-Caucasus
had patently lighter skin than Greeks and other
Mediterraneans, 2) people from the Med, Aristotle
himself, put themselves in a category that is
equally separated from Northern European as it
was from tribes from much further South.

Many people otherwise careful in "political correctness" (at

least cosmetically) commit the violation of ageism. Saying "Math-
ematics is a young man’s game" is always interpreted as such, not
as statistical statement: "Mathematics is most often a young man’s
game".
 31

ARTICLES (P OLITICAL Article 14: Second Order Bigotteering

B EHAVIOR ) Siding with the accusatory party for such a
label (say racist or sexist) because one belongs
to the tribe or political group of the accuser,
Article 11: Political Ad Hominem
without without even investigating the source
Never reject a political move by a political of the problem.
rival (or "enemy") in office doing good things,
defined as otherwise acceptable if you would
accept them had they been proposed by others. Commonly practiced by the children book au-
thor J.K. Rowling –such as siding automatically
with Mary Beard in an intellectual conflict with a
man simply because Mary Beard was a woman,
Article 12: Bigotteering, I without understanding the nature of the dispute,
No attribution of a label (racism, sexism, then spinning arguments to explain her support.
ageism, etc.) should be made unless 1) there is
no other explanation, and 2) an explanation is Article 15: Retrospective Bigotteering
needed. The burden of the proof lies with the
Accusing ancient individuals or groups of vi-
accuser.
olating today’s ethical norms.

Originates with Tim Ferriss, describes tagging Talmud: people

someone (or someone’s opinions) as "racist", Saying "Aristotle was sexist" or "Nietzsche can only be
"chauvinist" or somethinglikeit-ist in situations was racist" should only be used in what proba- critical of others
where these are not warranted. This is a bilistis call "filtration at time t" (their period) not of their own
generation.
shoddy manipulation to exploit the stigmas the current period. There is nothing particularly Rashi: "Noah
accompanying such labels and force the opponent wrong in reporting that ancients deprived a given was ethical for
to spent time and energy explaining "why subgroup of equality. It is not fair to use a or his generation.

he/she is not a bigot". Note that it is the to flow back isms in time with the negative
true victims of racism that are insulted by connotation they convey. Moral values might have
virtue-peddling bigoteers. Example: Both the been different at the time; they progress just like
Kurds who are asking for independence and knowledge progresses. Using isms is no different
the Arabs who refuse to grant it accuse one from blaming the ancients for not understanding
another of "racism". the existence of germs and calling them "ob-
scurantists". The very accusation is equivalent
to saying that moral values do not evolve!
Article 13: Bigotteering, II, Use of Labels
Note that there are historical characters one
Never use labels unless they satisfy the rigidity can be harsh with, such as Napoleon who, among
criteria. other iniquities, reinstated slavery in the French
colonies and overrode the abolition by the French
Christian Lebanese and Phœnicianists – Revolution.
Phœnicianism is a brand of localism – have
been called "right wing" or "isolationists" by Article 16: Ministries
the Arabist and Arab imperialist propaganda,
Employees of ministries should never be per-
as well as the Palestinian machinery. Many
manent.
separatists have been selectively smeared using
the right wing label. Note the inconsistency
from the previous point: the Palestinians (and Governments come and go, bureaucrats stay. Min-
the group of thinkers loosely called "Arabists") istries aren’t run by ministers or transitory fig-
supported Irish separatism and the localist ureheads, but by a "deep local microstate" of
agenda of the Irish Republican Army (IRA), civil servants who have been there for decades
while attacking the nearly identical Lebanese and "own" the inside.
localism.
 32

in which case one is not a scholar. Example of

cherry picking: U.N. reports (perhaps to justify
their funds) present environmental situations as
dire without counterpoint or global statistical rep-
resentation. They will show "deforestation over
[span years] without longer periods (say past 25
years), this fitting a window or noise variations
to their story rather than the true trend.
Clearly you will always find a period during
which, or a region where there was degradation.
In combination with bigoteering: such a false
accusation of bigotry, particularly if the accuser
knows it is not the case, should cause a penalty
to the bigoteer as if he/she were bigots.
Note that "false accuser" was the original meaning
of the Greek word sycophant before drifting in the
English language.
Figure 12. Pedophrasty is an effective strategy as it provides
arguments to strike before the evidence is formed. People are Exploiting the unsavory attributes of one party
nudged into "doing something". in a conflict without revealing those of the other
party . Example: "He is a dictator".
The problem can take absurd proportions: in
Article 17: Pedophrasty the Syrian War, was used by interventionistas
Never manipulate using children as arguments describing the "dictator" without mentioning that
to suspend skeptical inquiry. his opponents are Al-Qaeda head-cutters.
You can detect partializing and dishonest think-
Argument involving children to prop up an ing when the same people arguing for the removal
argument and make the opponent look like an of some dictator praise Saudi Barbaria forgetting
asshole, as people are defenseless and suspend all to use the argument in such cases.
skepticism in front of suffering children: nobody
has the heart to question the authenticity or
source of the reporting. Often done with the Article 19: Support for a person holding
aid of pictures. office
Can also describe the exploitation of babies Support policies or specific actions, never in-
by beggars who rent them from their parents. dividuals in office.
It has its most effects on actors, journalists
and similar people deprived of critical judgment. The counterpoint is never systematically attack
Example: Pedophrasty has been commonly used or stand against a person, rather focus on specific
in the Syrian war by such agents as Julian policies.
Röpke supplying the German public with pictures
of dead children.
Article 20: False Accusation
You can see the na´’iveness of
Any person making a false accusation needs to
be penalized as if they committed the violation
Article 18: Cherry Picking themselves.
One cannot be both scholar –or judge – and
advocate. In many legal systems, since Hammurabi’s arti-
cle, calumnies and false accusations are punished
It is highly non-philosophical and unscholarly as if the accuser committed the infractions him-
to present a one-sided argument, even if correct self. Nabothizing: Production of false accusation,
–unless one declares plain unmitigated advocacy, just as Jezebel did to dispossess Naboth.
 33

Article 21: Lobbying and Professional Ad-

vocacy
Any form of paid advocacy aiming at causing
imbalances in governance should be illegal.

Paid advocacy should be limited to courts of law,

not to dealings entailing governmental decision-
makers. Unpaid advocacy can be acceptable so
long as it puts the lobbyists back at the level
of the collective. All discussions between paid
citizens and public officials should be made pub-
lic and easily accessible. The temporal ban on
lobbying by former government employees is not
sufficient.

Article 22: Risk Transfer

Article 23: Bailouts

 34

Q UAESTIONES Quaestio 3
We know that current risk management meth-
Quaestio 1 ods such as VaR and others derived from Mod-
Is the argument for or against regulation? ern Portfolio Theory based on Gaussian and
near-Gaussian distributions are useless and
harmful to their users. But they help students
Regulation is to be used only in cases where get a job. Don’t you think the obligation of the
skin in the game fails, that is, where there is university is to give the students skills in the
no immediate visibility of the exposure, such marketplace?
as in the generalized Bob Rubin trade (GBRT).
But unlike with the Bob Rubin trade, that can
be solved by forcing someone to claw back past The collective comes first. Never harm the col-
profits, and compensate others, thus representing lective. And never help individuals get an edge
a clear and effective deterrent, there are situations over the collective.
where this cannot be easily done. If Monsanto The primum no nocere applies to the higher
can, thanks to GMOs, transfer risks into the layer first, lower layers later.
future, without anyone penalized by it, then we
need tail protection.
Recall that the main government job should
be systemic tail protection, not letting busybodies Quaestio 4
such as Sunstein and Thaler experiment with You run into a lobbyist (or an employee of a
our lives. foreign funded think tank) in a social setting,
Regulatory recapture is a real thing. say a cocktail party. Can you chat with him or
her?
Note that in countries that inherited rigid codes
(codes said "Napoleonic") the laws may not be No.
adapted to modern environments.
Quaestio 5
Quaestio 2 Can politicians who privately educate their
Can someone be a genuine, uncorrupted, aca- children ethically take a policy position on
demic? state education when in office?

Most certainly, but the problem is that people Yes, 1) under the conditions that the children
socialized into a system get eventually corrupted are no longer in private school at the time of
without realizing it, from simple things such as this policy stance if the politician is in favor of
fear having to eat alone at the school cafeteria. increases in funding funding public education,
This means that, argument for argument, more 2) unconditionally if the politician is against
weight should be given to the works of an funding for public education.
independent scholar. It does not mean that inde- More generally, one should apply retroactive
pendents scholars are necessarily credible (any- rules only to situations where there is the pos-
body can claim to be an independent scholar sibility of tacit collision (say a regulator moves
and the domain is rife with bu***ters), only to the private sector, say Monsanto, hence his
that conditional on having the same rigor, their past actions are tainted by a behavior in favor
arguments are more genuine and less prone to of the industry that allowed him to get the job,
corruption. or former Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner who
At the end, an opinion is validated the most got a big payoff from the industry he helped
by the risk someone takes to voice it. get yuuge bonuses in 2010).
 35

Quaestio 6 Fat Tony would of course say that someone

stoopid enough to trust a journalist deserves such.
University and tuition costs have far exceeded But the question goes beyond: can the private
the pace of inflation for over 20-years. This is be publicized?
principally driven by no economic incentives
No.
for universities to share in the risk/cost of
student debt. Should the federal government The journalist violated a principle of ethics
charge back universities for defaulted loans? as he was approaching you socially, not in-
formationally.
The question goes beyond. Say you had a
Yes, absolutely, to remove the agency problems. falling out with a friend. Can you use information
Students are financing 1) academic tenured game- you got from him or her while friends, against
players, 2) real-estate developers, 3) bureaucrats. him or her later? Never (I’ve almost done it
The trick to make it work is immediate: once, then retracted and felt better after my
make universities liable for defaulted student retraction).
loans encourage the suing of universities in the
event of misfitness of the degree and mismatch to
promises made encourage apprenticeship models
Quaestio 9
Is showing off a departure from virtue?

Quaestio 7
Not at all. Showing off is what makes us human.
If you believe that awards, honors, and such It is just that showing off without risk is a
items are an abomination that turn people violation of the principle of the privacy of virtue.
into (zero-sum) spectator sports, and marks a So long as you take risk.
departure of the recipient from virtue, should
one advertise the turning down of a prize?
Quaestio 10
Never. It is your obligation to get in contact with Fat Tony took out his fair share of enemies. Is
those who grant the prize and let them know there a SITG rule for when you must do the
that you do not wish to be under consideration, dirty work yourself vs when you let others do
and give them a chance to withdraw it quietly. it?
Or post on your site that you refuse awards,
which simplifies the problem. Inverse virtue is The very idea of taking justice in your own hands
not virtue: if you are against awards because violates symmetry if you don’t want others to
virtue should not publicized, its rejection too take justice with their own hands and violate due
should not be publicized. process. The entire Western civilization’s idea of
More significantly, if you do not like money, justice (which starts in Babylon) is based on such
or have anti-materialistic aims, you should not idea of socialization of judgment and punishment
publicize it as it too violates the principle of –though Roman law, socialized judgment but not
the privacy of virtue. punishment or restitution which you would have
to carry out yourself.
However there are plenty of degrees of freedom
within the law. Self defense is one, if you
Quaestio 8 sort of see what I mean. Fat Tony would say
that only morons violate laws or, even more
You tell someone something in private, as
Fat Tonyish: only morons get caught violating
a person, then he goes and publish it in a
laws.
newspaper. This is standard methodology by
journalists who cozy up to you as a strategy There is the argument of failure of the law,
to extract information. It is unethical? sort of the equivalent of market failure. Even
then the answer is, dura lex, sed lex.
 36

Quaestio 11
Which genetics research is racist?

As I said in the section on IQ, some eugenists,

say psychologists (Lynn) and intellectuals such as
Mountebank Charles Murray have been promoting
IQ differences between the races as means to
degrade some races and elevate the Northern
European brand as a superior one –with policy
implications on welfare, immigration, and sinister
matters.
But there is an entire brand of genetics that
does the contrary. Research that looks for popu-
lation movements is not. It is no different from
someone looking for biological parents. Many
African Americans have been engaged in it –
as a matter of fact denying that is effectively
racist. David Reich:
During the slave trade, Africans were
uprooted and forcibly deprived of their
culture, with the effect that within a
few generations much of their ancestors’
religion, language, and traditions were
gone. In 1976, Alex Haley’s novel Roots
used literature to begin to reclaim lost
roots by recounting the odyssey of the
slave Kunta Kinte and his descendants.
Following in this tradition, Harvard pro-
fessor of literature Henry Louis Gates
Jr. has capitalized on the potential of
genetic studies to recover lost roots for
African Americans. (Who We Are and
How We Got Here.)
Likewise, thanks to genetic research, I busted
theories of "Indo-European" and Greeks as part
of the Northern European "race" meant to give
some prestige ancestry to former Barbarians when
in fact Greeks were much closer, in origin, to
ancient –and current –Near Eastern populations.
 37

V ERBALISM AS A C ENTRAL axiomatic framework of rationality (hence

FALLACY OF P UBLIC D ISCOURSE called "pseudo-rationality").
6) Words that do not have a robust mapping as
We will present two aspects of failure in they can have an arbitrary, gerrymandered
reasoning that should encompass the usual fal- definition that, not being robust, changes
lacies. according to periods, such as "Western Civ-
ilization", "East-West divide", etc.
Definition 1 (Verbalism). The use of termsa 7) Substitution of one term for another, say
both central to one’s discourse and devoid of using "democracy" with implication of "gov-
rigidity of meaning; their meaning can change ernance", or "legal" for "ethical".
with context or circumstances. 8) Euphemisms and exaggeration in rigorous
a These definitions reflect formal definitions for this thought.
author, not necessarily the general acceptance of the term 9) Distinctions without a difference but pre-
among the general population or some scholarly circles. sented as a matter of substance.
10) Ambiguous labels that can fool people. Ex-
Note: words that escape definitions can be rig- ample: the "Holy Roman Empire" was not a
orous and nonverbalistic if they always and in continuation of the Roman Empire (Byzan-
all practical situations point to the same thing tium was) but the name was potent enough
(a well known application is the case where to confuse people into believing the original
obscenity could not be easily defined at the (mostly) Franco-German European union was
time, but, as Justice Potter Stewart in Jacobellis the continuation of ancient Rome. Likewise,
v. Ohio stated "I know it when I see it", to the designation "Arab" could have meant
describe his threshold test for it). Note: misnomers Westerner (i.e. Mediterranean) or "foreigner"
are not necessarily verbalistic and unrigorous if for Arabians and Peninsular people, while
they have a rigid meaning –say "martingale" in understood as "nomad" by some, confusing
mathematics (but for uses limited to mathematics, enough people into political theories and
not gambling strategies), or what is called abuse formulations such as the centralized lunacy
of language in hard science. . known as "Arab nationalism".
Verbalism includes the use of:
1) Ill-defined terms, say "progressive", "liberal",
Note: Distinctions can be with and without dif-
"modern", "populist", "sectarian", that require
ferences, depending on context and uses. The
a scale and a degree (rate of change meant
Eastern Church mapping the difference between
by "progressive"), etc.
(homoousios), "consubstantial", vs. (homoiousios)
2) Well-defined and rigid terms but used
"partakes of a similar substance", is not a dis-
in a way that does not correspond
tinction without a difference –in Greek, but both
to their meaning, say "correlation",
terms could be translated into the same term in
"volatility","regression", so their
Latin in early disputations with the terms co-
mathematical definition does not map to
essentialis and consubstantialis to represent both.
the connection [11] [12].
3) Terms stretched outside their original Note:The problem isn’t using labels as shortcuts
meaning "nazi", "fascist", "racist", Peer The problem with the verbalistic is that he or
Gynt Suite No. 2, Op. 55, etc. she thinks in label.
4) Such expressions as "evidence" without sta- The user should be free to use his or her
tistical significance. vocabulary, but, as with a mathematical statement,
5) Circular terms; ones that are explained by a legal document, or a computer article, every
other terms that loop to the same source, word needs to map to something precise, whether
s.a. "rationality" without mapping to proper defined or not.
Clearly, the scholar does not need to produce
Note that with such notions as "correlation" the proper meaning a complete codification of the expressions used;
is reduction of uncertainty concerning one of the variables condi-
tional on knowing the other, which is nonlinear: .6 correlation is but should be able to back-up every single term
far more than twice .3. used.
 38

Commentary
Verbalism tends to be absent from financial term
sheets, mathematical documents, legal contracts,
and courts of law –the latter benefits from, say
the articles of New York State Penal article
which has an exhaustive list of terms used in
court that can be explicitly defined.
Vagueness has traditionally been the enemy
of law: in the United States, laws that violate
the vagueness doctrine are unconstitutional.
For Frankfurt’s On Bu***t [13], both the liar
and someone saying the truth aim at the veridical-
ity in their statement. We are adding an additional
constraint to make it of rigid meaning. And
intentionality needs not be present: one can be
verbalistic without being bullshitter in the Frank-
furt sense. Many students of political science
are verbalistic without being bullshitters which
requires awareness –it is their discipline that
is bullshit, not them.

Definition 2 (Hand-waving). Hand-waving

reasoning is one that skips critical steps, but
not necessarily in exposition. It gives the im-
pression of analytical thoughts and derivations
but is in fact a facade of unrigorously produced
arguments.

Hand-waving is most often complained about

in mathematics, but is is vastly more rampant
in fields that attempt scientific approach, such
as psychology and political science.
Commentary
Fields like psychometrics produce all manner of
equations and mathematical language, but repose
on flaws in elementary interpretation of concepts
such as correlation, leading to spurious derivations,
particularly when it comes to the "g", general
intelligence.
 39

U NCERTAINTY AND Commentary

C OMPLEXITY: D EFINITIONS This is a standard local convexity effect (from
Jensen’s inequality) drilled in [3] and [15]. Mean-
field approaches are based on studying the be-
havior of large and complex stochastic models
Definition 3 (Complex Systems). For our purposes, ( those with a large number of small indi-
a complex system is one where, dynamically 1) in- vidual components interacting with one other)
teractions between parts can produce a different col- by reducing them to a simpler "average" one.
lective and individual outcome than when examined Typically they reduce a many-body problem to a
in isolation, 2) interactions are at least intermittently one-body problem. They fail in physical systems.
present. Likewise, the field of evolutionary biology (The
gene centered view of evolution, "selfish gene")
It is typically associated with the following improperly generalizes the behavior of aggregate
properties. populations from the assumption that one can
assign fitness to each allele (symmetry breaking
1) Interactions and spacial distribution, see Sayama and Bar Yam,
Specific deterministic and random inter- [16] [17]: "the predictions of the gene centered
actions between components –owing to de- view are invalid when symmetry breaking and
pendence –produce different behaviors from pattern formation occur within a population, and
those of the properties seen in isolation, in particular for spatially distributed populations
particularly when asymmetric. with local mating neighborhoods in the pres-
ence of disruptive selection.") Likewise "fitness"
is never determined unless future interactions are
known, which violated numerous forecastability
2) Scale transformation and emergence
rules. Under unpredictability fitness is harder to
properties
pin down. The idea of a representative agent has
These cross-dependencies produce differ- been dominant in economics and social science;
ent outputs depending on the scale (as there is no representative agent under nonlin-
per Anderson’s "more is different" [14]]). earities –the market price is determined by the
marginal squeezed buyer, not the average.
Commentary
Consider the behavior of a bee colony compared 4) Nonprobabilistic modeling
to that of the individual bees. One can no The random or deterministic process for
longer assume "everything else being equal" and a vector, even when predictable, cannot be
perform naïve comparative statics in the presence expressed by a higher dimensional stochastic
of crossdependencies, or by making a separa- process, with its snapshots expressed as a
tion between endogenous and exogenous variables, multivariate probability distribution. Hence:
hence automata below. We note one of the failure automata, agent based models.
of behavioral economics in attempting to infer
properties of aggregates from those of components Commentary
–as we note, a collection of biases in individuals
Consider running a company’s income as a
does not lead to the biases in markets. A central
stochastic process (i.e., over time). The fate of
failure in centralized top down systems is the
the company depends on its own income, but also
eliminations of the interactions outside exclusively
on that of its competitors, suppliers, the economy,
hierarchical ones.
etc. The "terrain" is also random. Consider an n-
3) Nonlinearity dimensional vector with components Xi,t indexed
in space and time t, {X1,t , X2,t , . . . , Xn,t }. X1,2
There is at least one scale at which
depends on X2,1 which itself depends on X1,1 ,
functions of averages, at some scale, diverge
etc. In standard time series there is a problem
from averages of sums.
of covariance stationarity, that is, the covariance
 40

matrix is not independent from time t.

5) Computational opacity
Computational irreducibility (Wolfram
[18]) cannot be ruled out in navigating
successive states, meaning that to evaluate
the state of the system between discrete
periods t and t + m requires knowing
the future state at every step, hence a
minimum of m computations.

Commentary
When you try to model the trajectory of a
ball, a bullet, a planet, or a falling piano from
the 53rd floor, you do not need to examine
every step. You summarize with a function. Under
interactions such a summary is just not possible.
You have to redo every step. Figures 13 and
14 show the problem of irreducibility.

6) Fat tailedness in distribution space

The presence of feedback loops between
Figure 13. Cellular automata. Rule 110 is computationally irre-
ducible. Above we see the rule: if black on both sides, next is components and the abrupt switching of
white, if black on right and white on left, black, etc. We start with states means that random variables in the
a black unit, and flow down on the page for 110 steps. The next system can produce multiplicative effects,
graph shows what happens after 410.
hence fail to converge to the Gaussian
basin.

Commentary
CLT requires independence. Even if at some
scale there is a different output, the thing works.

7) Self-organization, absence of central-

ized control
The interactions flow –thanks to simple
rules – upward from the bottom layer,
never from the top of the hierarchy.

Commentary
Fractal hierarchy means that relationships between
entities...
Definition 4 (Fractal Localism). No unit is examined
vertically except
Definition 5 (Filtering). Filtering and skin in the
game
Figure 14. Rule 110 after 500 steps starts showing shapes that
are totally random –but predictable one step ahead.
 41

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