Nassim Taleb...continued from ai5000 Magazine

“There is a quote by Paul Valery. He met Einstein at a party in the 1920s, and he asked him ‘Do you carry a notebook‘ around? Einstein asked, ‘Why?’, and Valeria said ‘To write down your ideas, to put them down,‘ and Einstein said, ‘I only have one idea.‘ To succeed, you only have to have one idea—two ideas, you’re dead.  Journalism: It supplies too much information-slash-noise. I enjoy some journalists, but journalism is the problem. They have all the data/noise, but never talk about the elephant in the room. They miss it. I don’t need papers. The U.K. ones are the only ones I look at. The quality of the U.K .press is much higher than the American press. When I write, I don’t like to be edited. I speak in an idiosyncratic way. The publishers of my books, they told me people didn’t understand how I wrote, so I just kept waiting until I found a publisher that didn’t want to edit it. All editors seem to edit the same way for papers in America—it’s boring to read. Editors for my books just cancelled each other out. They go in and they kill your text. They over-edit me in America. If I write in the U.K., they don’t edit me at all. In America, they reduce dimensiality; they are all programmed to write the same. They want the illusion of control, just as they do on Wall Street. They need to look like they’re doing something. I don’t want to spend too much time on Buffett. George Soros has 2 million times more statistical evidence that his results are not chance than Buffett does. Soros is vastly more robust. I am not saying Buffett doesn’t have skill—I’m just saying we don’t have enough evidence to say Buffett isn’t doing it by chance.“

To be sure to catch the start of Nassim Taleb’s Interrogation, available in ai5000 Magazine after February 3, click here.