Taleb, Anti-Fragility, and Evolution

A reader writes in about anti-fragility and evolution:

I’m reading “Anti-Fragile” and, like Taleb’s other books, appreciate his insight. I do find it interesting how much he argues for anti-fragility using evolutionary and enlightenment examples. I agree with Taleb’s main point on anti-fragility. However, having read “Probability Zero” and your recent posts on Kant, I’m thinking you’ve refuted all his arguments to illustrate anti-fragility via evolution and enlightenment thinking. Taleb spends quite a bit of time writing about how evolution “directs” certain outcomes or how enlightenment thinking supports his humanism position.

Do you know if Taleb has read your recent works? His math background would hopefully allow him to fully engage in the math you’ve revealed.

My limited understanding is you’ve shown evolution can’t direct anything or even happen. The changes we see are either random or directed by some intelligence. Secondly, by refuting Kant and enlightenment thinking, would that impact Taleb’s thinking on how he approaches so many things being “unknowable”?

Taleb was familiar with SJWs Always Lie. I doubt he is familiar with any of my newer work. While we had some contact on Twitter beating up on Mary Beard and her ahistorical nonsense together, I have had no contact with him since getting banned from there in 2017 or whenever it was.

This is where I think it’s always vital to distinguish between the What and the Why. Anti-fragility is a sound concept and an important strategy that does not rely in any way, shape, or form on Taleb’s attempt to explain it in terms of evolution by natural selection or Enlightenment illogic.

One minor correction: the changes we see are not random. Kimura-style neutral drift has also been disproven in Probability Zero and The Frozen Gene, although the disproof was totally unnecessary because anyone who actually understood the math would never have pretended it could even begin to fill in the gaps produced by the insufficient rate of evolution natural selection; the drift equation is 40x slower to fixate than the already-too-slow rates examined in my books.

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An Editorial Update

Upon further review, and after reading some of the comments from the initial readers, it became obvious that the Chekov’s Blade situation in the first Wyrmwick College book by Mr. J.M. Wayland was going to prove distracting to its readers. While I personally reject, wholeheartedly and comprehensively, the conceit of Chekov’s Gun, which states a narrative principle that every element introduced in a story must be necessary to the plot, meaning that if something is mentioned, it should have significance later on, the responsible editor must respect the preferences of the readers, even at the expense of his own literary philosophy.

And anyhow, the contemplation of this omission led to my own observation that there was a major strategic element missing from the book. So I had Mr. Wayland update his manuscript, adding a new chapter, several new sections to existing chapters, and tweaking the details in a major scene or two. Nothing has actually changed from the previous version, but the revised manuscript is now 20 pages longer, and, I think, rather better for the additions.

All of which is to say that version 003 of DORIAN VANE AND THE VAMPIRE’S BLOOD is now available on Amazon, so those of you who have been kind enough to purchase it already may wish to update your Kindle. Please do not ask me how to do it, as I do not own a Kindle and I do not know how.

Furthermore, for those who are interested in the background lore, a very small portion of has been published on the Castalia Library site, and I am contemplating the possibility of doing a Special Illustrated Edition Hardcover after the regular print editions are released in a few weeks that would not only contain chapter heading illustrations, but also an appendix dedicated to A Chronicle of the First Rising and the Binding of Mordreth the Undying.

I’ve been very pleased to see that the reviews have generally been quite favorable, even prior to the Chekov’s Blade correction.

  • Great start to what looks to be a new classic series in YA Fantasy. One of the things I like best in this book is that the main character comes from a tradition with grounded values rather than the typical trope of a lost child with zero background. Dorian is still a child, and therefore is still puzzled by both life and the actions of others; but he thinks and acts from a solid core. The characters feel real, the plot is interesting and the overall read was a lot of fun. I look forward to the next in the series.
  • What Harry Potter should have been. Characters, and their stories, we can actually relate to. Games that actually make sense and are compelling for their own sake.. Bad guys that have legitimate reasons for bad behavior. A protagonist that, in the end, can’t do the impossible. Well done. Looking forward to the next one.
  • I would recommend this book to anyone that liked harry potter. This book and hopefully series is better and better written.
  • Take all of the things that worked in the Potterverse and turn them up to 11 because this is not the author’s first story. Rewrite all the WTF moments and make them Awesome. The plot will be familiar to fans of the genre. But what makes the storing thrilling for young adults and fascinating for parents who grew up in the Potterverse, are how the changes are wrung. Dorian, Halli, and Rory are not cartoon cutouts but are portrayed as 10 year olds with strengths and weaknesses. The text is littered with “textual ruins” that hint at deep and dark alternate universe worldbuilding. Muggleblood prejudice is replaced with “Magic is not a talent… It is a discipline.” Instead of Quidditch with its the ridiculous scoring system, we have Ruck and Sanjitsu, grounded in how rugby and full body marital arts are actually played. The cover illustrates what happens when magic is added to a Warhammer 40K historical miniatures battle.

And yes, after in-depth conversations with the author, I can confirm that Wyrmwick College will be a seven-book series. It’s been interesting to see that the readers have been able to detect that although that Mr. Wayland’s work is built upon a Potteresque infrastructure, it owes considerably more to The Dark is Rising and even The Chronicles of Prydain in terms of its flesh, its soul, and its future direction.

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A Total Failure

“The emerging agreement does not achieve any of Israel’s war objectives. The regime survives, the missile program remains intact, and Iran will be able to rebuild its nuclear program. This is a total failure by Netanyahu, and along the way he is turning us into a vassal state that receives instructions regarding its national security. No press conference, no media spin, and no AI video will hide the failure. The next government will have a historic role: to repair the damage caused by Netanyahu’s inability to turn military achievements into strategic successes.”

That’s a statement by Israel’s former Prime Minister Yair Lapid, who is the current opposition leader. And it’s really little more than acknowledgement of what was pretty obviously inevitable since February.

The fact is that orchestrating green flags, invading multiple other countries, then starting a war with a bigger, much more militarily powerful nation with significant industrial capacity and counting on a foreign nation you are controlling in semi-secret to somehow bail you out is really not the brilliant strategy that the smart boys who concocted it no doubt believed it was.

As a general rule, if you think you’re being clever at the geostrategic level, you’re probably heading straight for defeat and quite possibly for disaster. War is fairly simple. Be there first, with the most, longer than anybody else. It’s that last one that tends to be disregarded by the clever sorts, because there is no way to dance around it, finesse it, or talk your way around it.

So they ignore it.

And we can all see how well that tends to work out, no matter how high-tech your weaponry, deluded your self-belief, or elevated your elan.

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The Nightmare is Worse Than They Fear

In which I not only defend, but explain, the inevitability of AI-augmented literature replacing its organic form. Read the whole thing at AI Central, as it also features the excellent remix of The Long and Lonesome Skyway as well as an explanation of why it was so easy for AI to effectively replace organic illustration and music while it has been a lot harder to do the same for books.

This is, of course, a simplification. The key is understanding the concept of model collapse. Fiction is much harder for AI than either translation or non-fiction, because fiction lacks the anchor in the real that allows AI to do its thing. It can’t recognize and build off patterns when there is no pattern to recognize.

At this stage in its development, the AI novelist is essentially a soulless John Scalzi. It can write pastiches, because pastiche provides it with the anchor it requires. But it can’t work from nothing, and, in fact, the more improved the AI model, the less capable it is of usefully filling in the necessary blanks. The early Gemini tests produced much, much better results than the latest Opus 4.8 on maximum effort, because the more powerful the model, the more it insists upon doing its own thing and utilizing that weird, passive AI style that can’t stop explaining what it is describing in run-on sentences with six more clauses than they need, which it considers to be “prestige-style” writing.

Eventually, someone will build an AI specifically for fiction writing. But it will cost about 20 million to do so, which means that it probably won’t happen until Amazon decides to convert KDP into KDAI, which you can be absolutely certain is going to happen eventually because that is what will give Amazon ownership of the content it is co-creating, not just a piece of the distribution. Sure, you won’t have to give Amazon its piece, but most authors will, in order to claim the additional percentages and special algorithmic advantages provided, because there is no viable alternative.

So those who think literary AI is a nightmare now have no idea how bad it is almost certainly going to be. The devastation that Kindle Select and Kindle Unlimited has already imposed upon the publishing industry is just a warmup for Amazon’s complete control over all future literary production, publishing, and distribution.

Ironically, the only way to forestall this quasi-inevitable techno-tyrannical future is to a) create a faster and better AI competitor or b) produce books that Amazon can’t even think of producing.

Do you really think anything Castalia is doing is just an accident? Do you understand why I twice attempted to convince independent authors to help me build a genuine alternative? And do you see why supporting Castalia in one way or another may be the single most important thing you can do for the future of literature?

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Preparing for the Inevitable

It looks as if Turkey is gearing up for its inevitable war with Israel:

Convening before the Turkish legislature, Erdoğan cast Israel as the architect of a broader scheme to destabilize the Mediterranean, warning that “nobody should chase adventures” or enlist in Israel’s “boat of mischief.” Should any party move against the interests of Turkish nationals or Turkish Cypriots, Erdoğan made plain, Ankara stood ready to deliver a response both clear and strong.

These comments follow a recent statement by Turkey’s interior minister, who declared Saturday that Ankara would one day “liberate” Jerusalem, pledging to restore Turkish dominion over a city governed by the Ottoman Empire for centuries. Israel’s Foreign Ministry fired back sharply, asserting that the “Ottoman Empire is gone” and that Jerusalem “shall remain the eternal capital of Israel.”

Erdoğan added that “Damascus and Beirut are two sister cities of Istanbul. Turkey’s security begins in Aleppo, in Damascus, and in Beirut.” The Turkish president further stated that “we will not tolerate any fait accompli in the lands of our brothers, and we will not turn a blind eye to any attack against our brothers.” He attacked Israel, claiming, “These people and their mercenaries go around throwing so-called threats at Turkey here and there. There is no need for you to say this – we know your intentions and your targets very well. We are fully aware of what the ultimate goal of the ‘Promised Land’ delusion is, and with God’s help, we will never allow it.”

Erdoğan warned that the consequences of Israel’s policies would spread beyond the region: “Just as the entire world is paying today for the unresolved situation in Hormuz, if Israel’s rampaging is not stopped, the price will be paid – together with the region – by all of humanity.”

Erdoğan also issued threats against Greece and Cyprus against the backdrop of those countries’ deepening ties with Israel. “We see that there are those who seek to ignite a fire in the Eastern Mediterranean, and especially on the island of Cyprus. Small entities, whose ambitions far exceed their stature, have boarded Israel’s boat of conflict and taken on the role of proxies for Zionism. They are chasing delusional dreams in the Eastern Mediterranean. I say this clearly: let no one be dragged along by the Zionist massacre gang. If the rights of Turkey and of Turks in Cyprus in the Eastern Mediterranean are harmed, our response will be clear and very strong.”

The Turkish president again compared Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to Adolf Hitler. “Israel, which is carrying out the bloodiest genocide in the history of humanity, simultaneously attacked Iran and, not content with that, also began the occupation of Lebanon,” he said. “85 years ago, silence in the face of Hitler led to the loss of 80 million lives. Today the same mistake is being repeated: the genocide of the Gaza butcher Netanyahu and his cabinet is also being watched in great silence, exactly as was done with Hitler.”

I suspect the Israelis are going to have a much harder time arguing that there is no such thing as a Turkish people or that the Turks have no claim on Jerusalem than they have had with their ahistorical lies about the nonexistence of Palestine or the Palestinian people. And the fact that they’re already losing to Iran doesn’t bode well given the fact that they’ve mostly eliminated what was always their buffer zone in Syria.

Assad was always an enemy, of course, but one danger with defeating a minor enemy on your border is that it creates a new border with a bigger and more dangerous enemy. This, of course, is why there was already one regime change attempt in Turkey – the 2016 failed coup d’etat by the Gulen movement that shows every sign of being a Clown World operation.

This is why World War III is being traced back further than the Ukraine coup of 2014 to the so-called Arab Spring of 2011.

World War III is here. The Arab Spring was the spark that lit the fuse of a global conflict Europe cannot escape

And Covid was definitely part of Clown World’s plan to win through biotechnology what it is losing on the battlefields.

After months of searching through intelligence community holdings and files, today I’m releasing new evidence of longstanding US government funding of more than 120 bio labs in over 30 countries. Now, these bio labs include labs in places like Ukraine, which could be at risk of compromise due to the ongoing Russia-Ukraine war. In fact, the intelligence community had previously warned that a US-funded bio lab in Ukraine likely housed dangerous pathogens and remained vulnerable to longstanding threats of Russian attack, seizure, or damage.

Until now, evidence regarding the full existence and funding of these laboratories had been knowingly withheld from you, the American people. Many of these US government-funded bio labs are currently or have previously engaged in research using hazardous and highly contagious pathogens, and in some cases included dangerous gain of function research with very little visibility or oversight. Now, President Trump clearly understands the serious threat dangerous gain of function research poses to the American people, and this is why he took decisive action over a year ago. On May 25, 2025, he signed an executive order to end federal funding of gain of function research around the world.

Not only did they lie, they threatened those who attempted to expose the truth. So, this release today breaks new ground as the information surrounding the existence, history, locations, and funding of these US-funded bio labs has been intentionally covered up by very powerful people who falsely claimed that these bio labs didn’t exist. Now, they accuse anyone who says otherwise to be foreign assets and traitors to America. Now, ODNI and I will continue working closely with partners across the US government to identify exactly where these labs are and what pathogens they contain to end dangerous gain of function research that threatens the health and well-being of the American people and people around the world.

This is why there are going to be more false flags, green flags, fake pandemics, and vaccine campaigns. Don’t fall for any of them. It’s clowns all the way down. When Clown World calls something a “conspiracy theory” you can be confident that it is not only true, but the truth is even worse than the story being denied.

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Switzerland 1, Qatar 1

Very disappointing. This is what happens when you don’t play to finish off a team that you’ve beaten. There are few things I despise more than a team that has complete control of the ball, but is content to just take the occasional half-hearted chance here and there rather than bear down and finish off the weaker opponent.

Champions are killers. People who try to win games by holding on are failing to understand that they are planting the seeds of their own future failures. If dropping the two points in the 95th minute cost the Swiss a place in the knockout stages, they’ll have no one to blame but themselves.

The USA played a much more aggressive, much more impressive game in taking apart Paraguay 4-1. But it’s obvious why Pele’s prediction about African success in the World Cup never came to pass; many, if not most of their best players have been stolen by the European teams and the USA.

I don’t think this is a healthy development. The games already don’t sell out. How long are people going to care if Nigerians in one jersey can beat Nigerians in a different jersey? If you’re going to do that, why not just watch the Champion’s League?

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Immigration is the End of a Society

We are not all the same. We do not all share the same values. And if you permit those who are not like you, and who have different traditions, values, and cultures, to invade your society, you have ended that society. High-trust societies cannot survive low-trust inhabitants.

The Enlightenment and its values were always a lie. This is the result of those lies.

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Books and More Books

1300 pounds of books arrived at the warehouse today. So if you’re waiting for a book from NDM Express, it should be on the way very soon. This includes volumes 9 and 10 for the Junior Classics demi backers, leaving only the last two leather editions to complete. Which we will do, but not until after the resolution of our dispute with a certain party… Among the new books now available for purchase there include Trafalgar, Sigma Game, the second edition of Probability Zero, and Veriphysics: The Return of the Real.

In other news, JDA has a new trilogy coming out, the first volume of which is now available on Amazon.

Captain Conley of the E.A.S. Valiant is written in the mold of those classic commanding officers. A career fleet man. Competent and principled, but new to command. The Aryshan War ended months ago and now he’s leading a joint human-Aryshan crew into uncharted space. His challenge is not just what lies beyond explored territory. Half his bridge crew were the enemy a few months prior, and he has to earn the trust of people whose worlds his side bombed. That tension sits underneath every decision he makes, every order he gives. He’s not a superhero. He’s not chosen by destiny. He’s a captain trying to hold a fragile crew together while the galaxy throws things at them that nobody planned for.

Fandom Pulse also has a review of one of my favorite novels by Keigo Higashino, Journey Under the Midnight Sun.

Higashino gives us Ryōji and Yukiho only as other people see them — through detectives, classmates, coworkers, lovers, business associates, victims. Across nineteen years and five hundred pages, we never once hear either of them think. We never stand behind their eyes. We read their faces the way a stranger on a train would read them: from outside, inferring, always uncertain.

The effect is disorienting, and then it becomes frightening. In most novels, even cold ones, the reader has a home, a consciousness to rest inside, a voice that organizes the world. 白夜行 offers none. You are passed from hand to hand through people who each see a fragment: Sasagaki sees the unsolved case that will not let him sleep. A classmate sees Yukiho’s strange, perfectly maintained beauty. A colleague sees Ryōji’s quiet talent with computers. A woman sees the man who destroyed her. No one sees the whole shape. Only the reader, slowly, over years and chapters, begins to assemble the outline of what these two people are doing and what they have done to survive since that October in Osaka.

It is reading as detective work. And the thing you are detecting is terrible.

And finally, we are in the process of binding A History of the Freedom of Thought. I have the first test binding, and it is the best the Castalia bindery has produced yet, with an exquisite old-school rounded spine and the most beautiful pigskin leather you can imagine. It’s a small, slender book, but it is an absolute Pocket Venus. We are also binding a small number of books for one of JDA’s omnibuses, The Aryshan War, and he gave me permission to show the very cool endpapers which for some reason really make me want to bind a set of the Traveller Little Black Books. Pictures of both will be posted at Castalia Library when they’re finished next week.

And finally, I’d encourage those of you who enjoyed Dorian Vane to leave a review, or at least a rating there. There is an interesting discussion at Sigma Game of a comparative SSH analysis of the protagonists of the two different magic school novels.

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The US Agrees to Surrender

Apparently the Short Fake Trump is angry that Iran isn’t permitting him to lie to everyone about the deal being struck to end the latest flareup in the War of the Epstein Alliance.

Iranian state-run Mehr news agency has cited a source close to the Iranian negotiating team to report the 14-point MoU in Farsi. The development comes a day after US President Donald Turmp announced that a deal has been agreed upon conceptually at the highest level of the Iranian leadership.

As per the MoU, the war shall immediately in all theatres, Iran shall declare to never acquire a nuclear weapon, and talks shall commence to resolve the issue of the Iranian nuclear programme. These are the 14 points of the MoU:

  1. Permanent and immediate cessation of war on all fronts, including Lebanon.
  2. US commitment not to interfere in Iran’s internal affairs and to respect the sovereignty of the Islamic Republic of Iran.
  3. Complete lifting of the naval blockade within 30 days.
  4. US commitment to withdraw its forces from areas surrounding Iran.
  5. Reopening of the Strait of Hormuz within 30 days under arrangements determined by Iran.
  6. Suspension of sanctions on the sale of oil, petrochemical products, and their derivatives, along with full Iranian access to the resulting financial resources.
  7. Requirement for the United States and its allies to present reconstruction plans for Iran worth at least $300 billion.
  8. Sixty days of negotiations aimed at reaching a final agreement focused on nuclear issues and the complete removal of US primary and secondary sanctions, as well as relevant resolutions of the UN Security Council and the Board of Governors of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA).
  9. Reaffirmation of Iran’s commitment under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) not to produce nuclear weapons.
  10. During the negotiation period, the United States commits not to increase its military forces in the region and not to impose any new sanctions.
  11. Release of $24 billion in frozen Iranian assets during the 60-day final negotiation period. Half of this amount must be made available to Iran before negotiations begin.
  12. Creation of a monitoring mechanism to ensure implementation of the agreement.
  13. The final agreement will be endorsed by a UN Security Council resolution.
  14. Final negotiations will not begin until half of Iran’s frozen assets have been released, oil sanctions have been suspended, and the naval blockade has been lifted. The final agreement will focus exclusively on: the future of enriched nuclear material and uranium enrichment, sanctions relief, and a program for rebuilding Iran’s economy

Moreover, the MoU explicitly stated that discussions about the Iran’s missile programme and its support for anti-Israel and anti-American groups in the region like Hezbollah, Hamas, and the Houthis —whom the MoU refers to as “resistance groups”— are off the table.

It’s a perfectly reasonable deal which extricates the USA from the conflict, and eventually, the region. Which, of course, is why the Netanyahu regime can be expected to do its best to prevent it from taking effect. But it doesn’t matter what the Zionists in the US want, the US military is simply not able to fight Israel’s wars anymore.

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A Pipeline to the Stars

In which a member of our community has built a system to unlock a whole host of old Hebrew and Latin texts:

This started as an offhand question.

I was chatting with Claude about some obscure Hebrew books related to my interest in the history of astronomy and cosmology. One of them contained a firsthand account of encounters with Tycho Brahe and Johannes Kepler.

I started by asking what Claude knew about the book from reviews, catalogs, and other online references. The information was sparse. Then I thought: why not go to the source?

Knowing that Vox Day had used AI extensively for translation work, I asked Claude what it could do with a scanned PDF.

The answer seemed almost too good to be true.

So I tested it.

“Here’s a 250-page PDF. Translate it.”

That didn’t happen.

Claude explained that the PDF would need to be broken into smaller batches. I would have to upload each section separately, start a new chat for each batch, run a translation prompt, and then manually stitch everything together afterward. It even suggested shell commands to help.

That also didn’t happen.

Instead, over the next five days, I used Claude Web and Claude Code to build the functional scaffolding that eventually became my translation pipeline. As an experiment, I kept it completely code-free at first. I wanted to see how far I could get simply by describing what I wanted.

The answer turned out to be: surprisingly far.

Read the rest about how the translation pipeline was constructed and find the link to the growing compendium of ancient and medieval texts at AI Central.

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