How is everyone's mental health at the moment?

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Re: How is everyone's mental health at the moment?

#31

Post by yhavr » Sat, Jul 11, 2020, 8:59 AM UTC

dondawest wrote: post #15

yhavr wrote: post #9

Well, surprisingly good. Assuming I have no job, stuck alone in an asocial country, miss my home, and had a much worse mental state before entering pandemics. TL;DR: stoicism rocks. the best thing I've adopted ever. Secret? First of all, stoicism. When COVID started, I got into and quickly merged into my philosophy. I still have a lot to learn, read and internalize (finish the big 3 stoics, yudkovsky, taleb, kahneman…

I almost spit out my coffee when you mentioned TALEB as a stoic, much less a member of the “big three” He’s as far from stoic as I can possibly imagine. His hairtrigger easily offended argumentative twitter presence is maybe even more sensitive and reactive and thin skinned than trump.

Taleb is not a stoic, but his works provide a great framework for dealing with uncertainty: for example, the whole concept of antifragility... benefiting from misfortunes... seems like core stoic concept, isn't it?

Regarding his behavior. I think he just enjoys being human. After all, if he was ruled by emotions he'd not survive the trader job.

Re: How is everyone's mental health at the moment?

#32

Post by yhavr » Sat, Jul 11, 2020, 9:10 AM UTC

dondawest wrote: post #30

user_agent wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The most basic definition of stoicism is "indifference to fate". In that scope Taleb definitely is a stoic. His approach toward stoicism, though, is less philosophy focused and more (that's kind of unique) targeted toward statistics. Ancient stoics don't write about their philosophy in such a way, but the logic remains similar. The whole concept of antifragility Taleb has promoted is pure "opportunistic" stoicism. Ta…

He reminds me of Ayn Rand hating on government handouts while taking them. He promotes stoicism while practicing the opposite. You can say he’s promoting “logical stoicism” just like Ayn Rand fans can say that “it’s okay to be ideologically against handouts while taking them,” but we both know deep down that these people aren’t practicing what they preach. I like Taleb a lot but it took me a little while to understan…

He promotes stoic-ish things, not stoicism.

> "but we both know deep down that these people aren’t practicing what they preach"

Actually, it's one of core tenets of his philosophy. "don't tell what to do, show me what you did in the same situation".

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