Machiavelli

Taleb’s book, Skin in the Game, got me thinking about some of the clear choices I have made between this or that thinker, writer or fictional character. From what I’ve heard and read so far, Taleb, rather like Machiavelli, seems to delight in seeking clarity in strong either-or positions…

The last point I made in yesterday’s review of Skin in the Game was about Taleb’s take on Plato, or rather on what he calls “Platonicity.” It is the political realism of Taleb that I find attractive and I am not hostile to his referring to the tendency of relying overmuch on impostures of “Platonic models” to navigate – or impose oneself upon – the political world as “Platonicity.”