jacob wrote:
I can't give you any examples/citations, but it's my understanding that religion in the medieval ages was to people's framework what consumerism and government (nation states) generally is to people today.
I think questions regarding purity and virtue which used to be filled with religious content have been replaced with nutritional content. It used to be important if you are part of the judean people's front or part of the people's front of judea and it's been replaced with the equally important issue of whether you are a low fat whole food low glycemic vegan or a high protein low carb gluten free locavore. Same moral circuitry in the brain, but now it's individualistic with a strong oral fixation rather than a normative/social issue in terms of content. Could be regression. (?)
I don't really see the value of discussing religion or "religious thinking" as limited to religious content. The potential irrationality is today equally strong or stronger in different contexts.
Taleb is an aggregator of old ideas and describing how they apply in a modern framework. Useful to those unfamiliar with these ideas or their application in that context. He does it in a verbose and narcissistic fashion that can be highly annoying to some people (myself included). I would guess that the problem is not that he is religious as such, but that he is a pompous ass about it. But he is just as much a pompous ass about losing some weight on his low-carb diet. Personally, it's the pompous ass part that annoys me about the guy. The content, while unoriginal as such, would be an interesting enough perspective if it weren't for the presentation style.
I guess one problem is that he tries to link everything into this one single framework of everything, an approach which can easily suffer from overgeneralisation. If you try to integrate
everything in your head, you may become, well, dense. What you gain in internal consistency, you can lose in open-mindedness and ability to integrate new and conflicting information as you set yourself up for an overload of cogitive dissonance when encountering something new.
