"Black Swan" (and more recently, "Antifragile") author Nassim Taleb is known for, among other things, his impassioned arguments against his detractors (especially on Twitter and Facebook).
Yesterday, Taleb sent out a tweet that caused a few other tweeters to poke fun, including Joe Cotterill, a reporter for the Financial Times; Lorcan Roche Kelly, Chief Europe Strategist at Trend Macrolytics; and Karl Whelan, an economist who worked for several years at the Federal Reserve and the Central Bank of Ireland.
To make a long story short, Taleb didn't find the jokes funny.
The whole thing quickly devolved into a pretty heated exchange that ended up running all the way until this afternoon.
We have chronicled the conversation here.
It all started with a simple generalization, as Twitter conversations often do
Never buy a product that the owner of the company that makes it doesn't use (Generalized Skin in the Game) facebook.com/permalink.php?…
— Nassim N. Taleb (@nntaleb) April 22, 2013
Of course, as is also common on Twitter, the jokes began immediately as fellow tweeters thought of clever counterexamples
Undertakers MT @nntaleb: Never buy a product that the owner of the company doesn't use
— Joseph Cotterill (@jsphctrl) April 22, 2013
This was followed by some additional analysis of said counterexamples
@dsquareddigest @jsphctrl @nntaleb hard to make a purchase from the owner after he has used the product though
— Lorcan Roche Kelly (@LorcanRK) April 22, 2013
See the rest of the story at Business Insider
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