Nassim Nicholas Taleb: evaluation

Transcript context

…Let me try a question a reader emailed to me, and I quote, “What advice could you give to the timid and unconfident? Does one seeking conventional employability and respect out of lack of imagination or lack of confidence deserve only contempt? How does one begin to learn meaningfully if you’re not awesome?” [laughter] It’s the exact opposite. The point is that we are imperfect. And the way you can function best is accepting we’re imperfect. It’s why we have theology. You want perfection, you can find it in theosis and find a lot of things. Incidentally, to go back to the idea of being orthodox, theosis is a way for us humans to rise above our condition as human, and it’s given to us openness, this equal opportunity for anyone. If you consider that we are imperfect, and the way you can arise, this sense of honor, by doing duties or self-sacrifice, then you have a lot of risk in the game. It’s taking risks for the sake of becoming more human. Like Christ. He took risks and he suffered. Of course, it was a bad outcome, but you don’t have to go that far. That was the idea. I didn’t talk about theosis. I just mentioned it in one footnote. It’s like we understand that we’re not in here to eat mozzarella and go to Tuscany. We’re not in here to accumulate money. We’re in here mostly to sacrifice, to do something. The way you do it is by taking risks. Some people take risks and some people labor in the fields. You have the option of doing either one or the other. But my point is you should never have someone rise in society if he or she is not taking risks for the sake of others, period. That’s one rule. The second one, you should never be a public intellectual if any statement you make doesn’t entail risk-taking. In other words, you should never have rewards without any risk. That’s the thing. Then you can accept inequality if the person who’s unequal is taking risks because that would make things rotate. For example, if someone becomes a billionaire, it’s fine. It’s unequal, but they’ve got to keep taking risks. You cannot be locked into a frozen upper-class condition, and then use your situation to use the government to prop you up there. And that’s the good thing about America is the rotation that you have. When it comes to childbearing decisions, do men have enough skin in the game? [laughter]…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.