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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   Edited 1yr ago   34473 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 14, 2022

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She still married him, of course.

Reminds me of this fun story of the ages, in case you haven't read it: https://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/08/magazine/albrecht-muth-and-viola-drath-georgetowns-worst-marriage.html

I believe people can be far more naturally vigilant than you describe. I don't recall meeting too many pretenders recently, but can say that I find poorly written and/or acted dialogue (for specialized vocation that I'm familiar with) immediately and obviously unbelievable. Succession is extraordinarily reviewed and is a great show, but parts of its intense board room scenes are just silly, because no independent (as in, someone without Roy for a last name) director of a F100 company, or C-level execs, would come across as so stupid and ineffectual. In real life, these types of people have a certain look, yet in the show, many of them (who have little to no screen time) are clearly background actors chosen for some superficial demographic reason who are simply missing the vitality and intelligence that should be obvious from their eyes, body language, and even speed of reaction to the latest dialogue around them etc. All very NPC like, and immediately obvious that they didn't go to Princeton followed by Goldman and then HBS and then Blackstone.

I don't recall meeting too many pretenders recently,

Maybe you have, and you haven't detected them! Maybe you're expecting the pretenders to have obvious tells, but they don't, so you miss them entirely. They're out there, more than you think, so many people have secrets you don't suspect.

FWIW, I work in a field full of pretenders and fakes, and my experience is that proper fraud avoidance is to understand that the optimal fraud avoidance strategy does not result in never getting tricked, just in never committing enough money/resources before being certain you aren't getting tricked. I probably waste a lot of time on false leads and fakers every month; but because I know my radar isn't perfect I'd rather be unfailingly polite and follow up on a false opportunity than risk missing out on a good one. At the same time, I don't trust anyone past the contract terms, because I know I might be wrong about them.

((Which is Taleb's real message in that other thread. Not that education makes you dumb son, but that you should have humility about your ability to anticipate everything.))

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