Where Is the Charlatan?
Taleb distrusts advice that offers only actions to take and ignores mistakes to avoid. His heuristic directs attention to preventing ruin and removing harmful practices, especially where success may reflect luck.
THE IDEA
Where Is the Charlatan?
Recall that the interventionista focuses on positive action—doing. Just like positive definitions, we saw that acts of commission are respected and glorified by our primitive minds and lead to, say, naive government interventions that end in disaster, followed by generalized complaints about naive government interventions, as these, it is now accepted, end in disaster, followed by more naive government interventions. Acts of omission, not doing something, are not considered acts and do not appear to be part of one’s mission. Table 3 showed how generalized this effect can be across domains, from medicine to business.
I have used all my life a wonderfully simple heuristic: charlatans are recognizable in that they will give you positive advice, and only positive advice, exploiting our gullibility and sucker-proneness for recipes that hit you in a flash as just obvious, then evaporate later as you forget them. Just look at the “how to” books with, in their title, “Ten Steps for—” (fill in: enrichment, weight loss, making friends, innovation, getting elected, building muscles, finding a husband, running an orphanage, etc.). Yet in practice it is the negative that’s used by the pros, those selected by evolution: chess grandmasters usually win by not losing; people become rich by not going bust (particularly when others do); religions are mostly about interdicts; the learning of life is about what to avoid. You reduce most of your personal risks of accident thanks to a small number of measures.
Further, being fooled by randomness is that in most circumstances fraught with a high degree of randomness, one cannot really tell if a successful person has skills, or if a person with skills will succeed—but we can pretty much predict the negative, that a person totally devoid of skills will eventually fail.
When to use it
Evaluating financial advisors: Be skeptical of those who only suggest investments without discussing risks of loss or avoidance strategies.
Policy making: Consider the benefits of removing bad regulations (negative action) rather than adding new ones (positive action).
Personal health: Focus on eliminating harmful habits (e.g., smoking, poor diet) rather than solely adopting new healthy habits.
FROM THEORY TO EVERYDAY LIFE
In practice
How-to Books
Taleb criticizes formulaic promises such as 'Ten Steps for Enrichment' or 'Five Steps to Weight Loss'. His concern is whether the advice ignores failure and avoidance, rather than whether the title alone proves the book unreliable.
Chess Grandmasters
Taleb uses chess grandmasters to illustrate the importance of avoiding decisive mistakes. This need not mean passive play: an aggressive move can be sound, while a cautious-looking move can still be a blunder.
A MOMENT TO REFLECT
Put it to work.
Recall a piece of popular advice you recently followed. Did it consist only of positive steps? Could it be charlatan advice?
For a current decision, list possible actions and mistakes to avoid. Which mistakes would cause the greatest harm?
Think of a domain where 'not doing' something is often better than 'doing'. How does that apply to your life?
CONTINUE THE CONVERSATION
Source texts
- Antifragile (Nassim Nicholas Taleb)