64 Next

Chapter 4. A Third Lesson in Epistemology

from Fat Tony: The Error of Rationalism, or
How to Out-Argue Socrates

Birds rarely write more than ornithologists – Piety for the impious
–Fat Tony does not drink milk – Why not Harvardify? –Can
Socrates out-argue FT ? -- Mystagogue philosophaster

I said earlier that, because of complexity, life and the world are not
command-and-control style, but that we tended somehow to think so on
the occasion, the wrong occasion. Let us call it the error of rationalism.
In Fat Tony’s language, it would be what makes us the suckers of all
suckers. It is this rationalism that makes us move away from optionality
--which makes us denigrate options and trial-and-error because we think
we can figure it out by ourselves.
Consider two types of knowledge. The first type is not exactly
“knowledge”; its ambiguous character prevents us from associating it
with the strict definitions of knowledge. It a way of doing thing that we
cannot really express in clear language, but that we do nevertheless, and
do well. The second type is more like what we call “knowledge”; it is what
you acquire in school, can get grades for, can codify, what can be
explainable, academizable, rationalizable, formalizable, theoretizable,
codifiable, Sovietizable, bureaucratizable, Harvardifiable, provable, etc.
To make things simple, just look at the second type of knowledge as
something so stripped of ambiguity that an autistic person (a high
functioning autistic person, that is) can easily understand it. So could a
computer.
The error of rationalism is, simply, overestimating the role and
necessity of the second type, the academic knowledge, in human affairs --
and degrading the uncodifiable, more complex, intuitive or experience-
3/22/10 © Copyright 2010 by N. N. Taleb. This draft version cannot be
disseminated or quoted.
65 Next

based type. It is a severe error because not only a large share of our
knowledge is not explainable, academizable, rationalizable, formalizable,
theoretizable, codifiable, Sovietizable, bureaucratizable, Harvardifiable,
etc., but, further, that the role such explainable knowledge plays in life is
so minor that it is not even funny.
We are very likely to believe that skills and ideas that we actually
acquired by doing, or that came naturally to us (as we already knew by
our innate biological instinct) came from books, ideas, and reasoning. We
get blinded by it; there may even be something in our brains that makes
us suckers for the point. Let us see how.
Clearly we never think that it is thanks to ornithologists that birds
learn to fly –and if some people do hold such belief, it would be hard for
them to convince the birds. But, let’s anthropomorphize a bit: when
replace “birds” with “men”, then the idea that people learn to do things
thanks to what they learned during pompous lectures becomes plausible.
When it comes to human agency, matters suddenly become confusing to
us.
We tend to believe that it is largely thanks to the beautiful rules of
grammar that we can speak, that it is thanks to science that we have all
this technology, thanks to universities that societies can function, thanks
to political scientists and political philosophers that we have a well-
functioning political system, and thanks to economists that we have an
economy. Of course we need to add that the belief that it is thanks to
government planning and nation states that the world is functioning.
In other words, the denigration of practice. This is a dangerous
human disease, a severe sucker problem, to be inclined to think that
practice has a debt to theories; that practice is inferior to theories, and
that theories are necessarily good and better than no-theories5 --even
after the Soviet experiences, even after the literal bankruptcy of the
economic establishment, even after the severe failures of the brand of

5 I will show later how the "better than nothing argument" used in finance to
introduce risk models is perhaps the most vicious one to argue against.
3/22/10 © Copyright 2010 by N. N. Taleb. This draft version cannot be
disseminated or quoted.
66 Next

massively destructive thinkers called the neo-conservatives, even after

the failure of risk theories in finance that caused the unfettered risk
taking, even after fifteen centuries of fiascos in medicine (I will show in
Chapter x how the history of medicine as we know it today has been
blatantly re-narrated in a way to overestimate the value of reasoning at
the detriment of tinkering leading to random discoveries. Academia --like
governments--will always tell you what it did for you, never what it did
not do).
It may be right on the occasion; there are numerous (valuable)
things that came to us thanks to reasoning in the relative or possibly total
absence of practical and empirical feedback. The most extreme case of a
discovery without any feedback is Einstein's discovery of relativity using
pure reasoning about the structure of time, supposedly thanks to a
dream. One spectacular case of a discovery with a small number of
existing external data is that of the astronomer Le Verrier discovery of
the existence of the planet Neptune on the basis of solitary computation,
using the behavior of the surrounding planets. When it was actually sited
he refused to look at it, so comfortable he was with his result. We are all
infatuated with stories of Sherlock Holmes in which, after collecting what
facts he needed, facts he shares with his sidekick and roommate Doctor
Watson, he sits in his chamber torturing the violin and formulates a
conclusion that surprises the reader, and highly impresses Watson, as it
is entirely derived from all the facts that he already knows but was
incapable of weaving into a theory. But Sherlock Holmes is not all
theories-with-no-feedback: he does some grind work in collected data,
smelling grounds like a dog, and noticing numerous details that would
escape another person, leading to feedback in searching for other details,
before building his reasoning. The greater hero is his patently smarter
brother Mycroft who was Sherlock's last resource when the latter hit the
wall. Mycroft never left his London gentleman's club; he could solve
matters in his head without needs for the trimmings of the messy reality
outside his club.

3/22/10 © Copyright 2010 by N. N. Taleb. This draft version cannot be

disseminated or quoted.
67 The Error of Rationalism

But we got so many dangerous hubris along with this ability to

discover by reasoning off other theories, very destructive hubris. So allow
my skepticism about the contribution of theories, which I will show
throughout this book by looking carefully at the record. Consider the bias
about the way information gets to us: there are many more books on
birds written by ornithologists than books by birds written on birds; and
certainly even fewer books on ornithologists written by birds. Fat Tonys
do not write books. University professors, particularly in the disciplines
with “science” attached to their designation, will over-represent their
share of contribution to knowledge –in their minds what is not
explainable, academizable, rationalizable, formalizable, theoretizable,
codifiable, Sovietizable, bureaucratizable, Harvardifiable, knowledge is
not knowledge. Books are typically written by those who write books, not
so much by those who do things. So, first, nonFattonys who write books
leave you with their side of the story (since they have the books), and,
second, as I showed with the metaphor of the birds, we are naturally
suckers for the role of ideas; we have this built-in tendency to
overestimate the role thinking and formal learning play in life.

THE ERROR OF RATIONALISM

This chapter is about this denigration of practice and the error of

rationalism of both the overestimation the importance of what we call
reason in human affairs, and the normative feeling that we need to be
able to articulate the motives and theories behind what we do and, worse,
things we understand (but have not done) are more important than
things we do but do not appear to understand how they work. If I
consider it the largest error ever made by man, it is not without some
backing: it is the mother problem behind such matters as:
overconfidence, expert problems, expert errors, Soviet experiences,
medical mistakes, dogmatism, and much, much more. And we have to do
things in life without being the suckers.
The error has the following manifestations.

3/22/10 © Copyright 2010 by N. N. Taleb. This draft version cannot be

disseminated or quoted.
68 Euthyphro

First, the philosophical: the difference between the two varieties of

knowledge is what philosophy is about. Do we need to understand
things? What do we mean by beliefs?
Second, the psychological: the mistake of reversing the arrow of the
formation of knowledge, the illusion of thinking, is part of the larger
mental biases that make us underestimate randomness, overestimate the
explainability of things, overvalue information, fall for the narrative
fallacy, be suckers for the Black Swan, and many more mental biases.
But there are other elements I will consider in this book: the very
definition of intelligence, intelligence testing, what school grades mean
and imply, etc.
Third, the scientific: Does science lead to technology or does
technology lead to science? If the first statement were true, if we really
need science for technology beyond the ornament, then universities
should be able to produce a larger share of the technological discoveries.
They haven’t, historically, as of the time of writing; the record is clear,
clear, clear! Furthermore, technology appears to emerge randomly,
making discoveries rely on randomness far more than design, meaning
that the ideal activity of stochastic tinkering can largely dispense with the
theoreticians as they can be more of a hindrance than anything --much
like regulators increase risks and a Wharton School class in introductory,
intermediate, or (especially) advanced economics will stand in your way
of understanding the economy.
Finally, the practical: we will discuss our Fat Tony lessons on where
the traps and suckers are and how to maneuver.
For now, let us for now see how we got into this mess by going to
Athens, 4th Century before our era.

EUTHYPHRO

The first systematic appearance of abstract knowledge, the very

notion of idea, started with Plato, particularly with his Forms
corresponding to the most ideational, abstract definitions, and with the

3/22/10 © Copyright 2010 by N. N. Taleb. This draft version cannot be

disseminated or quoted.
69 Euthyphro

observable as its mere manifestation. Before Plato, even notions that

later became abstract, like God, were extremely anthropomorphic and
embedded in some tangible character, embodied in legends and mythical
narratives. Plato expressed himself chiefly through his use of the person
who no doubt became the most influential philosopher in history,
Socrates the Athenian, the first philosopher in the modern sense.
Socrates left no writing of his own, so we get direct representation of him
through Plato and Xenophon, as well as some side ones in plays making
fun of him. Just as Fat Tony has, for biographer, this author trying to
satisfy his agenda, leading to distortions in his character, and self-serving
representation of some of my ideas in his personality, so I am certain that
the Socrates of Plato is a more Platonic character than the true Socrates.
In one of Plato’s dialogues, Euthyphro, Socrates was outside the
courthouse, awaiting the trial in which he was eventually put to death,
when the eponymous Euthyphro, a religious expert and prophet of sorts,
struck a conversation with him. Socrates explained that for the
“activities” that he was charged with by the court (corrupting the youth
and introducing new gods at the expense of the older ones), not only he
did not charge a fee, but he was in perfect readiness to pay one for people
to listen to him.
It turned out that Euthyphro was on his way to charge his father
with manslaughter, not bad a conversation starter. So Socrates started
out by wondering how charging one’s own father with manslaughter was
compatible with Euthyphro’s religious duties.
Socrates’ used two methods in his conversations. The first aimed at
seeking, or rather showing ignorance, not knowledge. The cross-
questioning the person, called elenchis, became famous as today’s cross-
examination (what we now call , mistakenly, the Socratic method and
teach in law school) by which Socrates made his interlocutor, who started
with a thesis, agree on series of statements then proceeded to show him
how the statements he agreed on are inconsistent with the original thesis,
thus establishing that he has no clue on what he was taking about.
Socrates used it mostly to show people how lacking in clarity they were in

3/22/10 © Copyright 2010 by N. N. Taleb. This draft version cannot be

disseminated or quoted.
70 Euthyphro

their thoughts, how little they knew about the concepts they used
routinely –and the need for philosophy to elucidate these concepts. He
applied it across a few dialogues, Euthyphro being the most
representative.
The second method, called maieutics, i.e. midwifery, travelled in the
opposite direction: One starts with ignorance, then progressively attain
knowledge. Like a midwife, Socrates gave birth to the truths that resided
in us by nudging the interlocutor into revealing these abstract truths that
sat there independent of empirical reality. These truths are typically what
we call Platonic representations. The dialogue that has given rise to the
most commentary is Meno, in which Socrates shows to a slave boy how
he already knew, deep-down, the laws of geometry and was helped by the
questioner, only helped, to give gestation to these a priori truths.
So in the beginning of the Euthypro dialogue, he catches his
interlocutor using the word piety while characterizing the prosecution of
his father as a pious act –and so gave the impression that he was
conducting the prosecution on grounds of piety. So Socrates posed the
issue : “tell me how you define piety and impiety”. Euthyphro answered:
“piety is what I am doing now, prosecuting a wrongdoer with
manslaughter.” He showed, in support of what he thought was his
definition, that gods did it. For example, Zeus, whom people agree is the
most pious of the gods, put his own father in chains for a crime. Socrates
pounced on him: “I urged you not to tell me about one or two of these
many pious actions, but to describe the actual feature that makes any
pious action pious (...) because you said that there is one characteristic
that makes a pious action pious”.
“What is pious is loved by the god” appeared to Euthyphro a good
such characteristic. Not satisfactory, as Socrates showed him that the
gods were not so always in agreement, since there were things liked by
some gods, and hated by others. Therefore the same things can be pious
and impious, which makes Euthypro’s definition fail Socrates’ scrutiny.
The conversation appeared to reach some happy resolution when
Socrates made Euthyphro agree that what is pious is what is loved by all

3/22/10 © Copyright 2010 by N. N. Taleb. This draft version cannot be

disseminated or quoted.
71 Fat Tony v/s Socrates

the gods. Until, surprise, Socrates required him to show the causal arrow,
whether something is pious because it is loved by the gods, or is if it is
loved by the gods because it is pious. From that, he derived that what is
pious and what is loved by the gods could not the same property. So we
are back at the very beginning.
When prodded for another definition of what was pious, Euthyphro
was honest in his frustration. The poor man felt that he knew what piety
was but could not express it; worst, he was now insecure: “I don’t know
how to convey to you what I have in mind. Whatever we put forward
somehow keeps on shifting its position and refuses to stay where we laid
it down”.
The dialogue continued with more definitions (what is “moral
rectitude?"), until Euthyphro claimed an urgent engagement and ran
away. The dialogue ended abruptly, but the reader is left with the
impression that it could have gone on until today, twenty-five centuries
later, without it bringing us any closer to anything.
Let us reopen it.

FAT TONY V/S SOCRATES

How would Fat Tony have handled the cross-examination by the

relentless Athenian? Now that the reader is acquainted with our hefty
character, let us examine, as a thought experiment, an equivalent
dialogue between Fat Tony and Socrates, properly translated of course.
Clearly, there are similarities between the two characters. Both had
time on their hands and enjoyed unlimited leisure, though, in the case of
Tony, free-time was the result of productive insights ( and, in a way, the
cause of his enrichment as used free time to retain the mental clarity that
office idiots usually lack). Both like to argue, and look at rigorous active
conversation (instead of TV screen or concert hall passivity) as main
source of entertainment, perhaps even as a main reason to live. Both
dislike writing: Socrates because he did not like the definitive and
immutable character that is associated with the written word when for

3/22/10 © Copyright 2010 by N. N. Taleb. This draft version cannot be

disseminated or quoted.
72 Fat Tony v/s Socrates

him answers are never final and should not be fixated. Nothing should be
written in stone, even literally: Socrates in the Euthyphro boasts for
ancestry the sculptor Daedalus. Daedalus’ statues became alive as soon as
the work was completed; and unlike other statues frozen for eternity in a
single posture, nobody could observe them in the rigidity of a single
position. When you talk to one of Daedalus' statues, it talks back to you,
unlike the ones you see in the Metropolitan Museum of Arts in New York
City. Tony, for his part did not like writing for other, no less respectable
reasons: he almost flunked out of high school in East Brooklyn.
But the similarities stop somewhere, which would be good enough
for a dialogue. Of course we can expect a bit of a surprise on the part of
Fat Tony standing in front of the man described to him by Nero as the
greater philosopher of all times: Socrates, we are told, have looks beyond
the unprepossessing. For someone with some expectation of what a
philosopher would look like, it would be much like an encounter with one
of those hippies of the 1960s that we run into forty years too late, when
biology, norepinephrine (stress-hormones), mortgage worries,
carbohydrates, and the lack of intensity in the bedroom take their toll.
Socrates was repeatedly described as having a protruding belly, thin
limbs, bulging eyes, a snub nose (to the point that Nietzsche questioned
the purity of his race, casting him as a non-Hellene). He looked haggard.
He might even have had body odor as he bathed much less than his
peers. You can imagine Fat Tony sneering while pointing his finger at the
fellow: “Look, Neeero, you want me to talk to ...this”? Or perhaps not:
Socrates was said to have a presence, a certain personal confidence and a
serenity of mind that made some young men find him “beautiful”, and
even fall madly in love with him.
Now assume Fat Tony was asked by Socrates how he defined piety.
Fat Tony’s answer would have been most certainly to get lost –Fat Tony,
aware of Socrates’ statement in the beginning of the Euthyphro dialogue
that not only he would debate for free, but that he would be ready to pay
for conversation, would have claimed one doesn’t argue with someone
who is ready to pay you to just argue with him.

3/22/10 © Copyright 2010 by N. N. Taleb. This draft version cannot be

disseminated or quoted.
73 Fat Tony v/s Socrates

But Fat Tony’s power in life is that he does not let the other person
frame the question. He taught Nero that an answer is planted in every
question; never respond to a question that makes no sense to you with a
straight answer.
FAT TONY: “You are asking me to define what characteristic makes
a difference between pious and nonpious. Do I really need to be able to
tell you what it is to be able to conduct a pious action?”
SOCRATES: “How can you use words like piety without knowing
what it means, while pretending to know what it means?”
FAT TONY: “Do I actually have to be able to tell you in plain
barbarian nonGreek English, or in pure Greek what it means to know and
understand what it means?”
No doubt Fat Tony would have taken Socrates of Athens further
down his own road and be the one to doing the framing of the question:
FAT TONY: “tell me, old man. Does a child need to know what
mother’s milk is to understand the needs to drink it?”.
SOCRATES: “No, he does not need to”.
FAT TONY, using the same repetitive pattern of Socrates in the
Plato dialogues: “And my dear Socrates, does a dog need to define what
an owner is to be loyal to him?”
SOCRATES, puzzled to have someone ask him questions: “A dog has
... instinct. It does not reflect on its life. We are not dogs.”
Fat Tony: “I agree, my dear Socrates, that a dog has instinct. We are
not dogs. But are we humans fundamentally different to be completely
stripped of instinct leading us to do things?”
Without waiting for Socrates’s answer (only suckers wait for
answers; questions are not made for answers).
FAT TONY: ”Then, my good man Socrates, why do you think that we
need to define things?”
SOCRATES: “My dear Mega-tony, we need to know what we are
talking about when we talk. The entire idea of philosophy is to be able to

3/22/10 © Copyright 2010 by N. N. Taleb. This draft version cannot be

disseminated or quoted.
74 Primacy of Definitional Knowledge

reflect and understand what we are doing, examine our lives. An

unexamined life is not worth living”.
FAT TONY: “If I asked someone on a bicycle riding it just fine to
give me the theory behind his bicycle riding, he would fall from it. By
bullying and questioning people you confuse them and hurt them.”
Then, looking at him patronizingly, with a smirk, very calmly.
FAT TONY: “My dear Socrates... You know why they are putting you
to death? It is because you make people feel stupid blindly following
habits, instincts and traditions. You may be occasionally right. But you
may confuse them with things they’ve been doing just fine without
getting in trouble. You are destroying people’s illusions about
themselves. And you have no answer; you have no answer to offer them.”

PRIMACY OF DEFINITIONAL KNOWLEDGE

You can see here that what Fat Tony is hitting here is the very core
of philosophy: it is indeed with Socrates that the main questions that
became today philosophy were first raised; and questions such as “what
is existence?”, “what are morals?”, “what is a proof”, “what is science”,
“what is this?” and “what is that?”.
The question we saw in Euthypro occurs in the various dialogues
written by Plato. While the question, as we just saw, in the Euthyphro
was ‘what is piety [hosiotês]? Other dialogues address: temperance
[sôphrosunê] (in the Charmides ); courage [andreia] (in the Laches’),
virtue [aretê] in the Meno I mentioned earlier. What Socrates is seeking
relentlessly are definitions that specify the essential nature of the thing
concerned rather than the properties by means of which we can recognize
it or the meaning of the term used to designate it.
To place this in a modern context –the great question of the
separation between art and science; why they don't mix, and why
practitioners on both sides look down at the other one. Socrates went
even as far as questioning the poets and reported that had no more clue
than the public about their own works. In Plato’s account of his trial in

3/22/10 © Copyright 2010 by N. N. Taleb. This draft version cannot be

disseminated or quoted.
75 Primacy of Definitional Knowledge

the Apology, Socrates said how he cross-examined the poets in vain: “I

took them some of the most elaborate passages in their own writings, and
asked what was the meaning of them. I am almost ashamed to speak of
this, but still I must say that there is hardly a person present who
wouldn't have talked better about their poetry than they did themselves”.
Some classical scholars call this problem “the Socratic fallacy” this
insistence that you do not know examples falling under a concept unless
you can express it in logical and propositional form. And here we can use
philosophy and logic to hoist Socrates by his own petard, as some
philosophers such as Peter Geach have shown in the 1960s: this
reasoning on the part of Socrates, the grand reasoner, is circular. I can
simplify it as follows: If you know what thing is, you do not need
examples; and if you don’t know what it is, providing examples will
never get you to the truth.
And this priority of definitional knowledge lead to Plato’s thesis that
you cannot know anything unless you know the Forms which are what
definitions specify. If we cannot define piety, from working with
particulars, then let us start with universals from which these particulars
should flow. In other words if you cannot get a map from a territory,
build a territory out of the map.
In defense of Socrates, his questions lead to a major result: if they
could not allow him to define what something was, at least allowed him
to be certain about what a thing was not.

Nietzsche

Fat Tony, of course, had many precursors. Many we will not hear
about, because of the primacy of philosophy and the way it got integrated
into daily practices by Christianity and Islam. I remind the reader that
when I say “philosophy”, I mean theoretical and conceptual knowledge,
all knowledge. For, until recently, the term largely meant science –this
attempt to rationalize nature.

3/22/10 © Copyright 2010 by N. N. Taleb. This draft version cannot be

disseminated or quoted.
76 Primacy of Definitional Knowledge

A vivid modern attack on the point came from the young Friedrich
Nietzsche, through dressed up in literary flight on optimism, pessimism,
mixed with a hallucination on what “West”, a “typical Hellene”, and the
German soul mean. The young Nietzsche wrote his first book, The Birth
of the Tragedy while in his early twenties. He went after Socrates whom
he called the “mystagogue of science” for “making existence appear
comprehensible”. This brilliant passage exposes what I call the
rationalistic fallacy:

Perhaps —thus he [Socrates] should have asked himself –what is not

intelligible to me is not necessarily unintelligent? Perhaps there is a
realm of wisdom from which the logician is exiled?

There is another extension to Socrates’ notion of truth: it is largely

motivated by the agenda that one does not knowingly do evil. This is
precisely the argument that Nietzsche vituperated against. Knowledge is
the panacea; error is evil; hence science is an optimistic enterprise. This
scientific optimism irritated Nietzsche: this use of reasoning and
knowledge at the service of utopia. Forget the optimism/pessimism
business that is addressed when people discuss Nietzsche, as the so-
called Nietzschean pessimism distracts from the point: it is the very
goodness of knowledge that he questioned.

Renan’ Truth in the Nuances

As I said, earlier attacks on “philosophy” in the sense of rationalistic

knowledge from the Plato and Aristotle traditions came from a variety of
people, not necessarily visible in the corpus, and mostly in forgotten or
rarely mentioned texts. Why forgotten? because structured learning likes
the impoverishment and simplification of rationalism, easy to teach, not
the rich texture of empiricism and, as I said, those who attacked
academic thinking had little representation (something that we will see,
is starkly apparent in the history of medicine). An even more

3/22/10 © Copyright 2010 by N. N. Taleb. This draft version cannot be

disseminated or quoted.