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The western door is called the "Door of the Post"; the passage outside it contains the shops of the candlemakers and a gallery for the sale of fruit.
The northern door is called the "Door of the Confectioners "; it too has a large passageway, and on the right as one leaves it is a khanqah, which has a large basin of water in the centre and lavatories supplied with running water. At each of the four doors of the mosque is a building for ritual ablutions, containing about a hundred rooms abundantly supplied with running water. One of the principal Hanbalite doctors at Damascus was Taqi ad-Din Ibn Taymiya, a man of great ability and wide learning, but with some kink in his brain.
The people of Damascus idolized him. He used to preach to them from the pulpit, and one day he made some statement that the other theologians disapproved; they carried the case to the sultan and in consequence Ibn Taymiya was imprisoned for some years.
While he was in prison he wrote a commentary on the Koran, which he called " The Ocean," in about forty volumes. Later on his mother presented herself before the sultan and interceded for him, so he was set at liberty, until he did the same thing again. I was in Damascus at the time and attended the service which he was conducting one Friday, as he was addressing and admonishing the people from the pulpit.
In the midst of his discourse he said "Verily God descends to the sky over our world [from Heaven] in the same bodily fashion that I make this descent," and stepped down one step of the pulpit. A Malikite doctor present contradicted him and objected to his statement, but the common people rose up against this doctor and beat him with their hands and their shoes so severely that his turban fell off and disclosed a silken skull-cap on his head.
Inveighing against him for wearing this, they haled him before the qadi of the Hanbalites, who ordered him to be imprisoned and afterwards had him beaten. The other doctors objected to this treatment and carried the matter before the principal amir, who wrote to the sultan about the matter and at the same time drew up a legal attestation against Ibn Taymiya for various heretical pronouncements.
This deed was sent on to the sultan, who gave orders that Ibn Taymiya should be imprisoned in the citadel, and there he remained until his death. One of the celebrated sanctuaries at Damascus is the Mosque of the Footprints al-Aqdam , which lies two miles south of the city, alongside the main highway which leads to the Hijaz, Jerusalem, and Egypt.
It is a large mosque, very blessed, richly endowed, and very highly venerated by the Damascenes. The footprints from which it derives its name are certain footprints impressed upon a rock there, which are said to be the mark of Moses' foot. In this mosque there is a small chamber containing a stone with the following inscription "A certain pious man saw in his sleep the Chosen One [Muhammad], who said to him 'Here is the grave of my brother Moses.
I saw a remarkable instance of the veneration in which the Damascenes hold this mosque during the great pestilence on my return journey through Damascus, in the latter part of July The viceroy Arghun Shah ordered a crier to proclaim through Damascus that all the people should fast for three days and that no one should cook anything eatable in the market during the daytime.
For most of the people there eat no food but what has been prepared in the market. So the people fasted for three successive days, the last of which was a Thursday, then they assembled in the Great Mosque, amirs, sharifs, qadis, theologians, and all the other classes of the people, until the place was filled to overflowing, and there they spent the Thursday night in prayers and litanies.
After the dawn prayer next morning they all went out together on foot, holding Korans in their hands, and the amirs barefooted. The procession was joined by the entire population of the town, men and women, small and large; the Jews came with their Book of the Law and the Christians with their Gospel, all of them with their women and children.
The whole concourse, weeping and supplicating and seeking the favour of God through His Books and His Prophets, made their way to the Mosque of the Footprints, and there they remained in supplication and invocation until near midday. They then returned to the city and held the Friday service, and God lightened their affliction; for the number of deaths in a single day at Damascus did not attain two thousand, while in Cairo and Old Cairo it reached the figure of twenty-four thousand a day.
The variety and expenditure of the religious endowments at Damascus are beyond computation. There are endowments in aid of persons who cannot undertake the pilgrimage to Mecca, out of which are paid the expenses of those who go in their stead. There are other endowments for supplying wedding outfits to girls whose families are unable to provide them, andothers for the freeing of prisoners. There are endowments for travellers, out of the revenues of which they are given food, clothing, and the expenses of conveyance to their countries.
Then there are endowments for the improvement and paving of the streets, because all the lanes in Damascus have pavements on either side, on which the foot passengers walk, while those who ride use the roadway in the centre. Besides these there are endowments for other charitable purposes.
One day as I went along a lane in Damascus I saw a small slave who had dropped a Chinese porcelain dish, which was broken to bits. A number of people collected round him and one of them said to him, "Gather up the pieces and take them to the custodian of the endowments for utensils.
This is an excellent institution, for the master of the slave would undoubtedlv have beaten him, or at least scolded him, for breaking the dish, and the slave would have been heartbroken and upset at the accident.
This benefaction is indeed a mender of hearts--may God richly reward him whose zeal for good works rose to such heights! The people of Damascus vie with one another in building mosques, religious houses, colleges and mausoleums.
They have a high opinion of the North Africans, and freely entrust them with the care of their moneys, wives, and children. All strangers amongst them [i. When I came to Damascus a firm friendship sprang up between the Malikite professor Nur ad-Din Sakhawi and me, and he besought me to breakfast at his house during the nights of Ramadan. After I had visited him for four nights I had a stroke of fever and absented myself.
He sent in search of me, and although I pleaded my illness in excuse he refused to accept it. I went back to his house and spent the night there, and when I desired to take my leave the next morning he would not hear of it, but said to me "Consider my house as your own or as your father's or brother's. I stayed thus with him until the Fast-breaking when I went to the festival prayers and God healed me of what had befallen me.
Meanwhile, all the money I had for my expenses was exhausted. Nur ad-Din, learning this, hired camels for me and gave me travelling and other provisions, and money in addition, saying "It will come in for any serious matter that may land you in difficulties"--may God reward him!
The Damascenes observe an admirable order in funeral processions. They walk in front of the bier while reciters intone the Koran in beautiful and affecting voices, and pray over it in the Cathedral mosque. When the reading is completed the muezzins rise and say "Reflect on your prayer for so-and-so, the pious and learned," describing him with good epithets, and having prayed over him they take him to his grave.
When the new moon of the month Shawwal appeared in the same year [1st September ], the Hijaz caravan left Damascus and I set off along with it. At Bosra the caravans usually halt for four days so that any who have been detained at Damascus by business affairs may make up on them. Thence they go to the Pool of Ziza, where they stop for a day, and then through al-Lajjun to the Castle of Karak. Karak, which is also called "The Castle of the Raven," is one of the most marvellous, impregnable, and celebrated of fortresses.
It is surrounded on all sides by the river-bed, and has but one gate, the entrance to which is hewn in the living rock, as also is the approach to its vestibule. This fortress is used by kings as a place of refuge in times of calamity, as the sultan an-Nasir did when his mamluke Salar seized the supreme authority. The caravan stopped for four days at a place called ath-Thaniya outside Karak, where preparations were made for entering the desert.
Thence we Journeyed to Ma'an, which is the last town in Syria, and from 'Aqabat as-Sawan entered the desert, of which the saying goes: " He who enters it is lost, and he who leaves it is born.
After a march of two days we halted at Dhat Hajj, where there are subterranean waterbeds but no habitations, and then went on to Wadi Baldah in which there is no water and to Tabuk, which is the place to which the Prophet led an expedition. The great caravan halts at Tabuk for four days to rest and to water the camels and lay in water for the terrible desert between Tabuk and al-Ula. The custom of the watercarriers is to camp beside the spring, and they have tanks made of buffalo hides, like great cisterns, from which they water the camels and fill the waterskins.
Each amir or person of rank has a special tank for the needs of his own camels and personnel; the other people make private agreements with the watercarriers to water their camels and fill their waterskins for a fixed sum of money. From Tabuk the caravan travels with great speed night and day, for fear of this desert. Halfway through is the valley of al-Ukhaydir, which might well be the valley of Hell may God preserve us from it.
One year the pilgrims suffered terribly here from the samoom-wind; the water-supplies dried up and the price of a single drink rose to a thousand dinars, but both seller and buyer perished. Their story is written on a rock in the valley. Five days after leaving Tabuk they reach the well of al-Hijr, which has an abundance of water, but not a soul draws water there, however violent his thirst, following the example of the Prophet, who passed it on his expedition to Tabuk and drove on his camel, giving orders that none should drink of its waters.
Here, in some hills of red rock, are the dwellings of Thamud. They are cut in the rock and have carved thresholds. Anyone seeing them would take them to be of recent construction. Al-Ula, a large and pleasant village with palm-gardens and water-springs, lies half a day's journey or less from al-Hijr.
The pilgrims halt there four days to provision themselves and wash their clothes. They leave behind them here any surplus of provisions they may have, taking with them nothing but what is strictly necessary.
The people of the village are very trustworthy. The Christian merchants of Syria may come as far as this and no further, and they trade in provisions and other goods with the pilgrims here. On the third day after leaving al-Ula the caravan halts in the outskirts of the holy city of Medina.
That same evening [the third day after leaving al-Ula, on the route from Syria and Damascus] we entered the holy sanctuary and reached the illustrious mosque, halting in salutation at the Gate of Peace; then we prayed in the illustrious "garden" between the tomb of the Prophet and the noble pulpit, and reverently touched the fragment that remains of the palm-trunk against which the Prophet stood when he preached.
Having paid our meed of salutation to the lord of men from first to last, the intercessor for sinners, the Prophet of Mecca, Muhammad, as well as to his two companions who share his grave, Abu Bakr and 'Omar, we returned to our camp, rejoicing at this great favour bestowed upon us, praising God for our having reached the former abodes and the magnificent sanctuaries of His holy Prophet, and praying Him to grant that this visit should not be our last and that we might be of those whose pilgrimage is accepted.
On this journey, our stay at Medina lasted four days. We used to spend every night in the illustrious mosque, where the people, after forming circles in the courtyard and, lighting large numbers of candles, would pass the time either in reciting the Koran from volumes set on rests in front of them, or in intoning litanies, or in visiting the sanctuaries of the holy tomb.
We then set out from Medina towards Mecca, and halted near the mosque of Dhu'l-Hulayfa, five miles away. It was at this point that the Prophet assumed the pilgrim garb and obligations, and here too I divested myself of my tailored clothes, bathed, and putting on the pilgrim's garment I prayed and dedicated myself to the pilgrimage. It is a village containing a series of palm-gardens and a bubbling spring with a stream flowing from it.
Our way lay thence through a frightful desert called the Vale of Bazwa for three days to the valley of Rabigh where the rainwater forms pools which lie stagnant for a long time. From this point which is just before Juhfa the pilgrims from Egypt and Northwest Africa put on the pilgrim garment. Three days after leaving Rabigh we reached the pool of Khulays which lies in a plain and has many palm-gardens.
The Bedouin of that neighbourhood hold a market there, to which they bring sheep, fruits, and condiments. Thence we travelled through 'Usfan to the Bottom of Marr, a fertile valley with numerous palms and a spring supplying a stream from which the district is irrigated. From this valley fruit and vegetables are transported to Mecca.
We set out at night from this blessed valley, with hearts full of joy at reaching the goal of our hopes, and in the morning arrived at the City of Surety, Mecca may God ennoble her! The inhabitants of Mecca are distinguished by many excellent and noble activities and qualities, by their beneficence to the humble and weak, and by their kindness to strangers. When any of them makes a feast, he begins by giving food to the religious devotees who are poor and without resources, inviting them first with kindness and delicacy.
The majority of these unfortunates are to be found by the public bakehouses, and when anyone has his bread baked and takes it away to his house, they follow him and he gives each one of them some share of it, sending away none disappointed. Even if he has but a single loaf, he gives away a third or a half of it, cheerfully and without any grudgingness.
Another good habit of theirs is this. The orphan children sit in the bazaar, each with two baskets, one large and one small. When one of the townspeople comes to the bazaar and buys cereals, meat and vegetables, he hands them to one of these boys, who puts the cereals in one basket and the meat and vegetables in the other and takes them to the man's house, so that his meal may be prepared.
Meanwhile the man goes about his devotions and his business. There is no instance of any of the boys having ever abused their trust in this matter, and they are given a fixed fee of a few coppers. The Meccans are very elegant and clean in their dress, and most of them wear white garments, which you always see fresh and snowy.
They use a great deal of perfume and kohl and make free use of toothpicks of green arak-wood. The Meccan women are extraordinarily beautiful and very pious and modest. They too make great use of perfumes to such a degree that they will spend the night hungry in order to buy perfumes with the price of their food.
They visit the mosque every Thursday night, wearing their finest apparel; and the whole sanctuary is saturated with the smell of their perfume.
When one of these women goes away the odour of the perfume clings to the place after she has gone. Three days' march through this district brought us to the town of Wisit. Its inhabitants are among the best people in Iraq--indeed, the very vest of them without qualification.
All the Iraqis who wish to learn how to recite the Koran come here, and our caravan contained a number of students who had come for that purpose. As the caravan stayed here [Wisit] three days, I had an opportunity of visiting the grave of ar-Rifai which is at a village called Umm 'Ubayda, one day's journey from there.
I reached the establishment at noon the next day and found it to be an enormous monastery containing thousands of darwishes [dervishes]. After the mid-afternoon prayer drums and kettledrums were beaten and the darwishes began to dance. After this they prayed the sunset prayer and brought in the meal, consisting of rice-bread, fish, milk and dates. After the night prayer they began to recite their litany. A number of loads of wood had been brought in and kindled into a flame, and they went into the fire dancing; some of them rolled in it and others ate it in their mouths until they had extinguished it entirely.
This is the peculiar custom of the Ahmadi darwishes. Some of them take large snakes and bite their heads with their teeth until they bite them clean through. After visiting ar-Rifai's tomb I returned to Wasit and found that the caravan had already started, but overtook them on the way, and accompanied them to Basra.
As we approached the city I had remarked at a distance of some two miles from it a lofty building resembling a fortress. I asked about it and was told that it was the mosque of 'Ali.
Basra was in former times a city so vast that this mosque stood in the centre of the town, whereas now it is two miles outside it. Two miles beyond it again is the old wall that encircled the town, so that it stands midway between the old wall and the present city. Basra is one of the metropolitan cities of Iraq and no place on earth excels it in quantity of palm-groves.
The current price of dates in its market is fourteen pounds to an Iraqi dirham, which is one-third of a nuqra. The qadi sent me a hamper of dates that a man could scarcely carry; I sold them and received nine dirhams, and three of those were taken by the porter for carrying the basket from the house to the market.
The inhabitants of Basra possess many excellent qualities; they are affable to strangers and give them their due, so that no stranger ever feels lonely amongst them. They hold the Friday service in the mosque of 'Ali mentioned above, but for the rest of the week it is closed. I was present once at the Friday service in this mosque and when the preacher rose to deliver his discourse he committed many gross errors of grammar.
In astonishment at this I spoke of it to the qadi and this is what he said to me: "In this town there is not a man left who knows anything of the science of grammar. This Basra, in whose people the mastery of grammar reached its height, from whose soil sprang its trunk and its branches, amongst whose inhabitants is numbered the leader whose primacy is undisputed--the preacher in this town cannot deliver a discourse without breaking its rules!
At Basra I embarked in a sumbuq, that is a small boat, for Ubulla, which lies ten miles distant. One travels between a constant succession of orchards and palm-groves both to right and left, with merchants sitting in the shade of the trees selling bread, fish, dates, milk and fruit. Ubulla was formerly a large town, frequented by merchants from India and Firs, but it fell into decay and is now a village.
Here there are two bridges like that at Hilla on which the people promenade night and day, both men and women. The town has eleven cathedral mosques, eight on the right bank and three on the left, together with very many other mosques and madrasas, only the latter are all in ruins.
The baths at Baghdad are numerous and excellently constructed, most of them being painted with pitch, which has the appearance of black marble. This pitch is brought from a spring between Kufa and Basra, from which it flows continually.
It gathers at the sides of the spring like clay and is shovelled up and brought to Baghdad. Each establishment has a large number of private bathrooms, every one of which has also a wash-basin in the corner, with two taps supplying hot and cold water. Every bather is given three towels, one to wear round his waist when he goes in, another to wear round his waist when he comes out, and the third to dry himself with.
In no town other than Baghdad have I seen all this elaborate arrangement, though some other towns approach it in this respect. The western part of Baghdad was the earliest to be built, but it is now for the most part in ruins.
In spite of that there remain in it still thirteen quarters, each like a city in itself and possessing two or three baths. The hospital maristan is a vast ruined edifice, of which only vestiges remain.
The eastern part has an abundance of bazaars, the largest of which is called the Tuesday bazaar. On this side there are no fruit trees, but all the fruit is brought from the western side, where there are orchards and gardens. I left Baghdad with the mahalla of Sultan Abu Sa'id, on purpose to see the way in which the king's marches are conducted and travelled with it for ten days, thereafter accompanying one of the amirs to the town of Tabriz.
I left Baghdad with the mahalla of Sultan Abu Sa'id, on purpose to see the way in which the king's marches are conducted, and travelled with it for ten days, thereafter accompanying one of the amirs to the town of Tabriz. We reached the town after ten days' travelling, and encamped outside it in a place called ash-Sham.
Here there is a fine hospice, where travellers are supplied with food, consisting of bread, meat, rice cooked in butter, and sweetmeats. The next morning I entered the town and we came to a great bazaar, called the Ghazan bazaar, one of the finest bazaars I have seen the world over.
Every trade is grouped separately in it. I passed through the jewellers' bazaar, and my eyes were dazzled by the varieties of precious stones that I beheld. They were displayed by beautiful slaves wearing rich garments with a waist-sash of silk, who stood in front of the merchants, exhibiting the jewels to the wives of the Turks, while the women were buying them in large quantities and trying to outdo one another.
As a result of all this I witnessed a riot--may God preserve us from such! We went on into the ambergris and musk market, and witnessed another riot like it or worse. We spent only one night at Tabriz. Next day the amir received an order from the sultan to rejoin him, so I returned along with him, without having seen any of the learned men there [in Tabriz]. On reaching the camp the amir told the sultan about me and introduced me into his presence.
The sultan asked me about my country, and gave me a robe and a horse. The amir told him that I was intending to go to the Hijaz, whereupon he gave orders for me to be supplied with provisions and to travel with the cortege of the commander of the pilgrim caravan, and wrote instructions to that effect to the governor of Baghdad.
I returned therefore to Baghdad and received in full what the sultan had ordered. As more than two months remained before the period when the pilgrim caravan was to set out, I thought it a good plan to make a journey to Mosul and Diyar Bakr to see those districts and then return to Baghdad when the Hijaz caravan was due to start. When we arrived at Baghdad [after touring Tabriz and other cities in Iran and Iraq] I found the pilgrims preparing for the journey, so I went to visit the governor and asked him for the things which the sultan had ordered for me.
He assigned me the half of a camel-litter and provisions and water for four persons, writing out an order to that effect, then sent for the leader of the caravan and commended me to him. I had already made the acquaintance of the latter, but our friendship was strengthened and I remained under his protection and favoured by his bounty, for he gave me even more than had been ordered for me. As we left Kufa I fell ill of a diarrhoea and had to be dismounted from the camel many times a day.
The commander of the caravan used to make enquiries for my condition and give instructions that I should be looked after. My illness continued until I reached Mecca, the Sanctuary of God may He exalt her honour and greatness! I made the circuit of the Sacred Edifice [the Ka'aba] on arrival, but I was so weak that I had to carry out the prescribed ceremonies seated, and I made the circuit and the ritual visitation of Safa and Marwa riding on the amir's horse.
When we camped at Mina I began to feel relief and to recover from my malady. At the end of the Pilgrimage I remained at Mecca all that year, giving myself up entirely to pious exercises and leading a most agreeable existence After the next Pilgrimage [of AD ] I spent another year there, and yet another after that.
I arrived at Judda [Jedda], an ancient town on the sea-coast, which is said to have been built by the Persians. We embarked here on a boat which they called a jalba.
The Sharif Mansur embarked on another and desired me to accompany him, but I refused. He had a number of camels in his jalba and that frightened me, as I had never travelled on sea before. For two days we sailed with a favouring wind, then it changed and drove us out of our course. The waves came overboard into our midst and the passengers fell grievously sick.
These terrors continued until we emerged at a roadstead called Ra's Dawa'ir between Aydhab and Sawakin. We landed here and found on the shore a reed hut shaped like a mosque, inside which were ostrich egg-shells filled with water. We drank from these and cooked food. A party of Bejas came to us, so we hired camels from them and travelled with them through a country in which there are many gazelles.
The Bejas do not eat them so they are tame and do not run away from men. After two days' travelling we reached the island of Sawakin [Suakin]. It is a large island lying about six miles off the coast and has neither water nor cereal crops nor trees.
Water is brought to it in boats, and it has large reservoirs for collecting rainwater. The flesh of ostriches, gazelles and wild asses is to be had in it, and it has many goats together with milk and butter, which is exported to Mecca. Their cereal is jurjur, a kind of coarse grained millet, which is also exported to Mecca.
We took ship at Sawakin for Yemen. No sailing is done on this sea at night because of the number of rocks in it. At nightfall they land and embark again at sunrise. The captain of the ship stands constantly at the prow to warn the steersman of rocks.
Six days after leaving Sawakin we reached the town of Hali, a large and populous town inhabited by two Arab tribes. The sultan is a man of excellent character, a man of letters and a poet. I had accompanied him from Mecca to Judda, and when I reached his city he treated me generously and made me his guest for several days.
I embarked in a ship of his and reached the township of Sarja, which is inhabited by Yemenite merchants. Ibn Battuta arrives in Yemen, first visiting the town of Zabid pp. Zabid is a hundred and twenty miles from San'a, and is after San'a the largest and wealthiest town in Yemen. It lies amidst luxuriant gardens with many streams and fruits, such as bananas and the like. It is in the interior, not on the coast, and is one of the capital cities of the country.
The town is large and populous, with palm-groves, orchards, and running streams--in fact, the pleasantest and most beautiful town in Yemen. Its inhabitants are charming in their manners, upright, and handsome, and the women especially are exceedingly beautiful. The people of this town hold the famous [picnics called] subut an-nakhl in this wise. They go out to the palmgroves every Saturday during the season of the colouring and ripening of the dates.
Not a soul remains in the town, whether of the townsfolk or of the visitors. The musicians go out [to entertain them], and the shopkeepers go out selling fruits and sweetmeats. The women go in litters on camels. For all we have said of their exceeding beauty they are virtuous and possessed of excellent qualities.
They show a predilection for foreigners, and do not refuse to marry them, as the women in our country [Tangiers, Morocco] do. When a woman's husband wishes to travel she goes out with him and bids him farewell, and if they have a child, it is she who takes care of it and supplies its wants until the father returns. While he is absent she demands nothing from him for maintenance or clothes or anything else, and while he stays with her she is content with very little for upkeep and clothing.
But the women never leave their own towns, and none of them would consent to do so, however much she were offered. We went on from there to the town of Ta'izz, the capital of the king of Yemen, and one of the finest and largest towns in that country.
Its people are overbearing, insolent, and rude, as is generally the case in towns where kings reside. Ta'izz is made up of three quarters; the first is the residence of the king and his court, the second, called 'Udayna, is the military station, and the third, called al-Mahalib, is inhabited by the commonalty, and contains the principal market.
He uses an elaborate ceremonial in his audiences and progresses. The fourth day after our arrival was a Thursday, on which day the king holds a public audience. The qadi presented me to him and I saluted him. The way in which one salutes is to touch the ground with the index-finger, then lift it to the head and say "May God prolong thy Majesty. The wazir was present, and the king ordered him to treat me honourably and arrange for my lodging.
After staying some days as his guest I set out for the town of San'a', which was the former capital, a populous town built of brick and plaster, with a temperate climate and good water. A strange thing about the rain in India, Yemen, and Abyssinia is that it falls only in the hot weather, and mostly every afternoon during that season, so travellers always make haste about noon to avoid being caught by the rain, and the townsfolk retire indoors, for their rains are heavy downpours.
The whole town of San'a is paved, so that when the rain falls it washes and cleans all the streets. I travelled thence to 'Aden, the port of Yemen, on the coast of the ocean. It is surrounded by mountains and can be approached from one side only; it has no crops, trees, or water, but has reservoirs in which rainwater is collected. The Arabs often cut off the inhabitants from their supply of drinking-water until the they buy them off with money and pieces of cloth.
It is an exceedingly hot place. It is the port of the Indians, and to it come large vessels from Kinbayat [Cambay], Kawlam [Quilon], Calicut and many other Malabar ports [on the south-west coast of India]. There are Indian merchants living there, as well as Egyptian merchants.
Its inhabitants are all either merchants, porters, or fishermen. Some of the merchants are immensely rich, so rich that sometimes a single merchant is sole owner of a large ship with all it contains, and this is a subject of ostentation and rivalry amongst them. In spite of that they are pious, humble, upright, and generous in character, treat strangers well, give liberally to devotees, and pay in full the tithes due to God.
I took ship at Aden, and after four days at sea reached Zayla [Zeila, on the African coast], the town of the Berberah, who are a negro people. Their land is a desert extending for two months' journey from Zayla to Maqdashaw [Mogadishu]. Zayla is a large city with a great bazaar, but it is the dirtiest, most abominable, and most stinking town in the world.
The reason for the stench is the quantity of its fish and the blood of the camels that they slaughter in the streets. When we got there, we chose to spend the night at sea, in spite of its extreme roughness, rather than in the town, because of its filth. On leaving Zayla we sailed for fifteen days and came to Maqdasha [Mogadishu], which is an enormous town.
Its inhabitants are merchants and have many camels, of which they slaughter hundreds every day [for food]. When a vessel reaches the port, it is met by sumbuqs, which are small boats, in each of which are a number of young men, each carrying a covered dish containing food. He presents this to one of the merchants on the ship saying "This is my guest," and all the others do the same. Each merchant on disembarking goes only to the house of the young man who is his host, except those who have made frequent journeys to the town and know its people well; these live where they please.
The host then sells his goods for him and buys for him, and if anyone buys anything from him at too low a price, or sells to him in the absence of his host, the sale is regarded by them as invalid. This practice is of great advantage to them.
We stayed there [in Mogadishu] three days, food being brought to us three times a day, and on the fourth, a Friday, the qadi and one of the wazirs brought me a set of garments. We then went to the mosque and prayed behind the [sultan's] screen. When the Shaykh came out I greeted him and he bade me welcome.
He put on his sandals, ordering the qadi and myself to do the same, and set out for his palace on foot. All the other people walked barefooted. Over his head were carried four canopies of coloured silk, each surmounted by a golden bird. After the palace ceremonies were over, all those present saluted and retired.
I embarked at Maqdashaw [Mogadishu] for the Sawahil [Swahili] country, with the object of visiting the town of Kulwa [Kilwa, Quiloa] in the land of the Zanj. We came to Mambasa [Mombasa], a large island two days' journey by sea from the Sawihil country. It possesses no territory on the mainland. They have fruit trees on the island, but no cereals, which have to be brought to them from the Sawahil. Their food consists chiefly of bananas and fish.
The inhabitants are pious, honourable, and upright, and they have well-built wooden mosques. We stayed one night in this island [Mombasa], and then pursued our journey to Kulwa, which is a large town on the coast.
The majority of its inhabitants are Zanj, jet-black in colour, and with tattoo marks on their faces. I was told by a merchant that the town of Sufala lies a fortnight's journey [south] from Kulwa and that gold dust is brought to Sufala from Yufi in the country of the Limis, which is a month's journey distant from it. Kulwa is a very fine and substantially built town, and all its buildings are of wood.
Its inhabitants are constantly engaged in military expeditions, for their country is contiguous to the heathen Zanj. The sultan at the time of my visit was Abu'l-Muzaffar Hasan, who was noted for his gifts and generosity. He used to devote the fifth part of the booty made on his expeditions to pious and charitable purposes, as is prescribed in the Koran, and I have seen him give the clothes off his back to a mendicant who asked him for them.
When this liberal and virtuous sultan died, he was succeeded by his brother Dawud, who was at the opposite pole from him in this respect. Whenever a petitioner came to him, he would say, "He who gave is dead, and left nothing behind him to be given.
Thoroughbred horses are exported from here to India, the passage taking a month with a favouring wind. Dhafari is a month's journey from 'Aden across the desert, and is situated in a desolate locality without villages or dependencies. Its market is one of the dirtiest in the world and the most pestered by flies because of the quantity of fruit and fish sold there.
Most of the fish are of the kind called sardines, which are extremely fat in that country. A curious fact is that these sardines are the sole food of their beasts and flocks, a thing which I have seen nowhere else. Most of the sellers [in the market] are female slaves, who wear black garments.
The inhabitants cultivate millet and irrigate it from very deep wells, the water from which is raised in a large bucket drawn up by a number of ropes attached to the waists of slaves.
Their principal food is rice imported from India. Its population consists of merchants who live entirely on trade. When a vessel arrives they take the master, captain and writer in procession to the sultan's palace and entertain the entire ship's company for three days in order to gain the goodwill of the shipmasters.
Another curious thing is that its people closely resemble the people of Northwest Africa in their customs. In the neighbourhood of the town there are orchards with many banana trees.
The bananas are of immense size; one which was weighed in my presence scaled twelve ounces and was pleasant to the taste and very sweet. They grow also betel-trees and coco-palms, which are found only in India and the town of Dhafari.
Since we have mentioned these trees, we shall describe them and their properties here. Betel-trees are grown like vines on cane trellises or else trained up coco-palms.
They have no fruit and are grown only for their leaves. The Indians have a high opinion of betel, and if a man visits a friend and the latter gives him five leaves of it, you would think he had given him the world, especially if he is a prince or notable. A gift of betel is a far greater honour than a gift of gold and silver. It is used in this way. First one takes areca-nuts, which are like nutmegs, crushes them into small bits and chews them.
Then the betel leaves are taken, a little chalk is put on them, and they are chewed with the areca-nuts. They sweeten the breath and aid digestion, prevent the disagreeable effects of drinking water on an empty stomach, and stimulates the faculties.
The coco-palm is one of the strangest of trees, and looks exactly like a date-palm. The nut resembles a man's head, for it has marks like eyes and a mouth, and the contents, when it is green, are like the brain.
It has fibre like hair, out of which they make ropes, which they use instead of nails to bind their ships together and also as cables. Amongst its properties are that it strengthens the body, fattens, and adds redness to the face. If it is cut open when it is green it gives a liquid deliciously sweet and fresh.
After drinking this one takes a piece of the rind as a spoon and scoops out the pulp inside the nut. This tastes like an egg that has been broiled but not quite cooked, and is nourishing.
I lived on it for a year and a half when I was in the Maldive islands. One of its peculiarities is that oil, milk and honey are extracted from it. The honey is made in this fashion. They cut a stalk on which the fruit grows, leaving two fingers' length, and on this they tie a small bowl, into which the sap drips.
If this has been done in the morning, a servant climbs up again in the evening with two bowls, one filled with water. He pours into the other the sap that has collected, then washes the stalk, cuts off a small piece, and ties on another bowl. The same thing is repeated next morning until a good deal of the sap has been collected, when it is cooked until it thickens.
It then makes an excellent honey, and the merchants of India, Yemen, and China buy it and take it to their own countries, where they manufacture sweetmeats from it. The milk is made by steeping the contents of the nut in water, which takes on the colour and taste of milk and is used along with food. To make the oil, the ripe nuts are peeled and the contents dried in the sun, then cooked in cauldrons and the oil extracted.
They use it for lighting and dip bread in it, and the women put it on their hair. It is a fertile land, with streams trees, orchards, palm gardens, and fruit trees of various kinds. Its capital, the town of Nazwa, lies at the foot of a mountain and has fine bazaars and splendid clean mosques.
Its inhabitants make a habit of eating meals in the courts of the mosques, every person bringing what he has, and all sitting down to he meal together, and travellers join in with them. They are very warlike and brave, always fighting between themselves. The sultan of Oman is an Arab of the tribe of Azd, and is called Abu Muhammad, which is the title given to every sultan who governs Oman.
The towns on the coast are for the most part under the government of Hormuz. I travelled next to the country of Hormuz. Hormuz is a town on the coast, called also Mughistan, and in the sea facing it and nine miles from shore is New Hormuz, which is an island.
The town on it is called Jarawn. It is a large and fine city, with busy markets, as it is the port from which the wares from India and Sind are despatched to the Iraqs, Firs and Khurasan. The island is saline, and the inhabitants live on fish and dates exported to them from Basra. They say in their tongue. Water is a valuable commodity in this island. They have wells and artificial reservoirs to collect rainwater at some distance from the town.
The inhabitants go there with waterskins, which they fill and carry on their backs to the shore, load them on boats and bring them to the town.
We set out from Hormuz to visit a saintly man in the. No travelling can be done there except in their company, because of their bravery and knowledge of the roads.
In these parts there is a desert four days' journey in extent, which is the haunt of Arab brigands, and in which the deadly samum [simoom] blows in June and July.
All who are overtaken by it perish, and I was told that when a man has fallen a victim to this wind and his friends attempt to wash his body [for burial], all his limbs fall apart.
All along the road there are graves of persons who have succumbed there to this wind. We used to travel by night, and halt from sunrise until late afternoon in the shade of the trees. This desert was the scene of the exploits of the famous brigand Jamal al-Luk, who had under him a band of Arab and Persian horsemen.
He used to build hospices and entertain travellers with the money that he gained by robbery, and it is said that he used to claim that he never employed violence except against those who did not pay the tithes on their property. No king could do anything against him, but afterwards he repented and gave himself up to ascetic practices and his grave is now a place of pilgrimage. We went on to the town of Khunjubal, the residence of the Shaykh Abu Dulaf, whom we had come to visit.
We lodged in his hermitage and he treated me kindly and sent me food and fruit by one of his sons. From there we journeyed to the town of Qays, which is also called Siraf. The people of Siraf are Persians of noble stock, and amongst them there is a tribe of Arabs, who dive for pearls. The pearl fisheries are situated between Siraf and Bahrayn in a calm bay like a wide river.
During the months of April and May a large number of boats come to this place with divers and merchants from Firs, Bahrayn and Qathif. Before diving the diver puts on his face a sort of tortoiseshell mask and a tortoiseshell clip on his nose, then he ties a rope round his waist and dives. They differ in their endurance under water, some of them being able to stay under for an hour or two hours [sic] or less.
When he reaches the bottom of the sea he finds the shells there stuck in the sand between small stones, and pulls them out by hand or cuts them loose with a knife which he has for the purpose, and puts them in a leather bag slung round his neck.
When his breath becomes restricted he pulls the rope, and the man holding the rope on the shore feels the movement and pulls him up into the boat.
The bag is taken from him and the shells are opened. Inside them are found pieces of flesh which are cut out with a knife, and when they come into contact with the air solidify and turn into pearls [sic]. These are then collected large and small together; the sultan takes his fifth and the remainder are bought by the merchants who are there in the boats.
Most of them are the creditors of the divers, and they take the pearls in quittance of their debt [i. After the [AD ] pilgrimage I went to Judda [Jedda], intending to take ship to Yemen and India, but that plan fell through and I could get no one to join me.
I stayed at Judda about forty days. There was a ship there going to Qusayr [Kosair], and I went on board to see what state it was in, but I was not satisfied. This was an act of providence, for the ship sailed and foundered in the open sea, and very few escaped. Afterwards I took ship for Aydhab, but we were driven to a roadsted called Ra's Dawa'ir [on the Egyptian coast of the Red Sea], from which we made our way [overland] with some Bejas through the desert to Aydhab.
In Syria Ibn Battuta boards a Genoese merchant galley for the sea crossing to the southern coast of Anatolia; he then travels overland to the city of Konia. It is a large town with fine buildings, and has many streams and fruit-gardens. The streets are exceedingly broad, and the bazaars admirably planned, with each craft in a bazaar of its is own. It is said that this city was built by Alexander.
It is now in the territories of Sultan Badr ad-Din ibn Quraman, whom we shall mention presently, but it has sometimes been captured by the king of Iraq, as it lies close to his territories in this country. We stayed there at the hospice of the qadi, who is called Ibn Qa1am Shah, and is a member of the Futuwa.
His hospice is very large indeed, and he has a great many disciples. They trace their affiliation to the Futuwa back to the Caliph 'Ali, and the distinctive garment of the order in their case is the trousers, just as the Sufis wear the patched robe.
This qadi showed us even greater consideration and hospitality than our former benefactors and sent his son with us in his place to the bath. We went on to the town of Birgi where we had been told there was a distinguished professor called Muhyi ad-Din. On reaching the madrasa we found him just arriving, mounted on a lively mule and wearing ample garments with gold embroidery, with his slaves and servants on either side of him and preceded by the students.
He gave us a kindly welcome and invited me to visit him after the sunset prayer. I found him in a reception hall in his garden, which had a stream of water flowing through a white marble basin with a rim of enamelled tiles. He was occupying a raised seat covered with embroidered cloths, having a number of his students and slaves standing on either side of him, and when I saw him I took him for a king.
He rose to greet me and made me sit next him on the dais, after which we were served with food and returned to the madrasa. The sultan of Birgi was then at his summer quarters on a mountain close by and on receiving news of me from the professor sent for me. When I arrived with the professor he sent his two sons to ask how we were, and sent me a tent of the kind they call Khargah [kurgan]. It consists of wooden laths put together like a dome and covered with pieces of felt; the upper part is opened to admit the light and air and can be closed when required.
Next day the sultan sent for us and asked me about the countries I had visited, then after food had been served we retired. This went on for several days, the sultan inviting us daily to join him at his meal, and one afternoon visiting us himself, on account of the respect which the Turks show for theologians.
At length we both became weary of staying on this mountain, so the professor sent a message to the sultan that I wished to continue my journey, and received a reply that we should accompany the sultan to his palace in the city on the following day. Next day he sent an excellent horse and descended with us to the city.
On reaching the palace we climbed a long flight of stairs with him and came to a fine audience hall with a basin of water in the centre and a bronze lion at each corner of it spouting water from its mouth. Round the hall were daises covered with carpets, on one of which was the sultan's cushion. When we reached this place, the sultan removed his cushion and sat down beside us on the carpets.
The Koran readers, who always attend the sultan's audiences, sat below the dais. After syrup and biscuits had been served I spoke thanking the sultan warmly and praising the professor, which pleased the sultan a great deal. As we were sitting there, he said to me "Have you ever seen a stone that has fallen from the sky? The sultan sent for stone breakers, and four of them came and struck it all together four times over with iron hammers, but made no impression on it.
I was amazed, and he ordered it to be taken back to its place. The discussion on dynamic inequality through the concept of ergodicity, was exceptionally good if one removed the vitriol towards others and too perfunctory a dismissal of inequality conclusions without sufficient proof. The author shines when talking about Lindy effect, although this topic was better covered in the previous book on anti-fragility. Those who survive have a stronger chance of surviving longer is a good concept.
Given the simple and singular nature of the main theme , the book has many unrelated diversions through contradictions, contortions, critiquing where the author makes more interesting points: apart from the one on politics above, there is a good section on how a minority stringent choice impact could have on overall impact on the broad population choice. Another unrelated topic is the differential spread of different religions due to differences in laws a non-Muslim marrying a Muslim has to convert while in cases under Judaism or Zoroastrianism, the follower might be ostracised.
Overall, the author could have used his fame and popularity better to make more constructive points, even if obvious, rather than waste so much energy bashing some other highly relevant and important analysis.
View all 15 comments. Sep 18, David rated it it was amazing Shelves: economics , ethics , politics , philosophy , mathematics , nonfiction , psychology. From the back cover of the book jacket: The problem with Taleb is not that he's an asshole. He is an asshole. The problem with Taleb is that he is right.
And this book, Skin in the Game is more quirky than either of his previous books--if that is at all possible. This book is poorly written. It jumps around from From the back cover of the book jacket: The problem with Taleb is not that he's an asshole.
It jumps around from one topic to another, almost stream of consciousness. I am sure that Taleb makes new enemies with each book he writes. If, by the end of the book, you have not been offended by something he has written, then you haven't been paying attention. Taleb is blunt, sometimes obtuse, and often right. But it really irks me that his very strong opinions are not always backed up by reasoning.
Like a mathematics professor, he will often "let the reader fill in the lines of his proof. It is so easy for people to spout utter nonsense, so unless they could potentially suffer consequences of being wrong, you should ignore them. This goes especially for intellectuals in academia. However, "hard" science seem to be immune to this problem, because of the redeeming nature of falsification, while "scientism" -- the excessive belief in science is worthless.
The broad sweep of his aphorisms are overwhelming. Here are some examples that actually are given some logical reasoning: Genes follow majority rule. Languages follow minority rule.
Islam is widespread because of its rules of conversion and parentage. We need entrepreneurs. Taleb goes into some detail about how psychologists totally misunderstand "loss aversion", due to the concept of ergodicity.
Taleb introduces so many quirky words and expressions, that he devotes a glossary in the back of the book to explain the terms. And, the end of the book is filled with a technical appendix with some very technical mathematical proofs about probability theory. With so many issues that I have with this book, why do I recommend it with five stars? Because the book is so thought-provoking.
It jabs me everywhere, and gets me to think about a lot of things, basic assumptions about life. Take a risk--read this book.
View all 5 comments. Anyway, this book lost a bit of its charm due to aggressive and seemingly random things aggregated together. I'm sure it's another case of 'it's not you, it's me', still, I felt the previous volumes were better grounded and more founded in reality. Anyway, the eruditic approach to even the most disjointed things: Assassins, politics, Knights Templar There is a lesson here: what we learn from professionals in the real world is that data is not necessarily rigor.
One reason I—as a probability professional—left data out of The Black Swan except for illustrative purposes is that it seems to me that people flood their stories with numbers and graphs in the absence of solid or logical arguments.
Further, people mistake empiricism for a flood of data. Just a little bit of significant data is needed when one is right, particularly when it is disconfirmatory empiricism, or counterexamples: only one data point a single extreme deviation is sufficient to show that Black Swans exist. Traders, when they make profits, have short communications; when they lose they drown you in details, theories, and charts.
Probability, statistics, and data science are principally logic fed by observations—and absence of observations. For many environments, the relevant data points are those in the extremes; these are rare by definition, and it suffices to focus on those few but big to get an idea of the story.
But for the general public and those untrained in statistics, such tables appear convincing—another way to substitute the true with the complicated. This allows us to answer the questions: Who is the real expert? Who decides who is and who is not an expert? Where is the meta-expert? Time is the expert. Morgan and recoup a multiple of the difference between his or her current salary and the market rate.
Regulators, you may recall, have an incentive to make rules as complex as possible so their expertise can later be hired at a higher price. So there is an implicit bribe in civil service: you act as a servant to an industry, say, Monsanto, and they take care of you later on.
They do not do it out of a sense of honor: simply, it is necessary to keep the system going and encourage the next guy to play by these rules. He helped bankers get bailouts, let them pay themselves from the largest bonus pool in history after the crisis, in that is, using taxpayer money , and then got a multimillion-dollar job at a financial institution as his reward for good behavior.
A quarter is enough to have somewhere to go, particularly when it rains in New York, without being emotionally socialized and losing intellectual independence for fear of missing a party or having to eat alone. So let us take a look at social science. If you say something crazy you will be deemed crazy.
Sacrifice is necessary. It may seem absurd to brainwashed contemporaries, but Antifragile documents the outsized historical contributions of the nonprofessional, or, rather, the non-meretricious. For their research to be genuine, they should first have a real-world day job, or at least spend ten years as: lens maker, patent clerk, Mafia operator, professional gambler, postman, prison guard, medical doctor, limo driver, militia member, social security agent, trial lawyer, farmer, restaurant chef, high-volume waiter, firefighter my favorite , lighthouse keeper, etc.
It is a filtering, nonsense-expurgating mechanism. I have no sympathy for moaning professional researchers. I for my part spent twenty-three years in a full-time, highly demanding, extremely stressful profession while studying, researching, and writing my first three books at night; it lowered in fact, eliminated my tolerance for career-building research. View all 8 comments. Apr 23, Satyajeet rated it it was ok Shelves: on-a-break. Cherry-picking meets ignorance of human nature meets naive interpretation of history meets erroneous assumptions.
If you cherry-pick the data, you can make ANY ridiculous hypothesis sound convincing. My problem is with the ideas in this book, not its author, although I do question the intelligence of its author when his prose lapses into Cherry-picking meets ignorance of human nature meets naive interpretation of history meets erroneous assumptions. My problem is with the ideas in this book, not its author, although I do question the intelligence of its author when his prose lapses into pseudoscientific drivel.
Taleb all but begs the reader to take note of his SITG chivalry. Yes, good Sir Knight, your chivalry is noted. Now, there are not two but four combinations of idea-consequence scenarios that can be neatly represented as below. The premise: You present an idea to the world, which is then implemented. In all four scenarios listed below, other people are respectively affected as a result of the implementation, but the ramifications for you are different in each.
An investment advisor who is investing your money with his ideas should have a significant personal stake in the same fund. If the idea fails, he almost drowns in bankruptcy and nobody will ever take his investment advice seriously again. Over time, many similar events will eliminate other bad ideas and the people who parented those ideas. As a result, the system overall is better off, and it is precisely SITG that allowed these self-corrections to happen.
In a non-SITG environment, such people can persist. Sounds great, and symmetries are indeed well suited to some situations. But the problem is that this solution is not at all generalizable and is very restricted in its applicability.
He will lie, cheat, deceive, exaggerate, lobby, wield power, or do a million other wicked things just to save his skin. Here are some ways in which SITG, by incapacitating the ability of the skin-owners to tell the difference between good and evil, can harm the system: 1. He was allowed to have SITG because of bureaucratic loopholes; normally, this is rightly prohibited. However, someone who has the official power but who has nothing to gain or lose as in the case of pure neutrals , either in the present or in the future, is more likely to do good to others rather than serve himself like Icahn did.
Financial SITG is the reason why tobacco companies, despite their own research showing that smoking tobacco is strongly correlated with lung cancer, suppressed those findings, lied to the public for decades that there is no evidence, let millions die of preventable cancer, got caught lying, and were sued for billions—all in a misguided attempt to save their invested skin.
And unsurprisingly, owing to SITG, something very similar is happening with oil companies now. All these companies lose a lot of money should things not go in their favor, and make a lot of money otherwise, so they are never honest about their data or their true intentions—a typical trait of those with SITG. Taleb himself stood to make a lot more money in had all the Big Banks been allowed to fail; he had placed bets that they would fail.
Only the truly gullible can fail to see why he fruitlessly demanded that the Fed let those banks fail. NOT having any SITG game lets you think objectively about a situation in a way that having your skin at stake hardly can. The slave-holding states of the American antebellum South wanted to secede from the Union primarily, though not solely I am not nuance-averse , because of the issue of slavery.
Slavery was crucial to the cotton business, and the slave-holding states of the South would have taken a huge economic hit if slavery were abolished. Small wonder, then, that the South wanted to keep slavery alive by seceding from the Union, thus initiating the Civil War. There was nothing inherently evil or stupid about the Southerners; they were driven by an inability to tell the difference between good and evil because their own interests were involved.
Slavery did not resolve itself at the hands of those with skin in the cotton game. It was Lincoln and his cohorts, not slaveholders or Southerners, who ratified the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution, the one abolishing slavery.
This idea is mathematically beautiful but ultimately stands on the quick soil. In essence, it states that the projected lifespan of non-perishable cultural entities is in direct correlation with its current age.
If a book has survived for years in print, it will likely survive another At its foundation, both ideas require people—lots of common, hardworking people—who make collective decisions about accepting or rejecting an idea through small decisions that accrue.
In the Wisdom, the decisions accrue across space; in Lindy, across time. But in both, it is the hoi polloi—and not the academics, the bureaucrats, or some other group of chosen experts—who truly put the ideas to the test.
The difference between these propositions is night and day. The difference matters. A lot. In that book, he is careful to distinguish between survival through chance and survival through competence.
A stockbroker can have a long career making successful bets, despite being clueless about stocks. The laws of stochastic probability make room for such anomalies. However, a dentist or a doctor can have a long career if and only if they are competent, and no law of probability will rescue them otherwise.
Or so I thought I learned this many unfortunate years later: The case he makes for non-stochastic professions turns out not to be true at all and illuminates a rot in the assumptions that Lindy stands on. The noise caused by the placebo effect can sometimes deafen people to the fraudulence of most alternative medicines which generally treat non-life-threatening conditions.
If any alternative medicine fraud claims to have a cure for cancer, the claim can be put to the test as easily by the public as by scientists. People should, given a decade or more of hearsay, arrive at a verdict about the efficacy of the treatment—if Taleb is to be believed.
Every week, an exodus of benighted, gullible, illiterate, and even semi-literate people from all across the country arrive at his doorstep and stand in miles-long queue for hours to get a second appointment with him.
Even his online ratings are consistently high. Vox populi? Vox humbug! Many more such examples abound. Aphorisms survive because of their rhetorical effect, not necessarily because they are agents of truth. Only by woefully cherry-picking them can you present them in a positive light. Superstitions survive for thousands of years, and horrible myths that are demonstrably untrue are inherited through generations of descendants, completely unfiltered by Lindy.
Conversely, many great books of science and math from the antiquity, including five books by Euclid, have been irretrievably lost, unprotected by Lindy. Lindy tolerated it for years; bureaucrats and reformers ended it in just Page after page of this book is filled with vignettes from classical literature, to give it the feel of Lindyness.
It never ceases to amuse me how Taleb combs through historical mythologies to find stories that vaguely metaphorically resemble an agenda he has already made up his mind about. Even the typeface of this book is given a historical context for, geez! Taleb likes to chastise psychologists, but psychologists have also committed the same error that Taleb is committing in abundance here: Drawing a little too much inspiration from ancient vignettes.
Freud was inspired by the vignette of Oedipus when he came up with his ridiculous hypothesis of Oedipus complex. Jung produced an equally ridiculous variant called the Electra complex after the Greek mythological character.
Another perverse complex, also inspired by classical Greek stories, goes by Jocasta complex. Cancer genes can survive in a species for millions of years. However, none of this is to say that Lindy is totally useless. In the philosophy of science, consilience is a method of converging on the truth through multiple, independent sources of evidence that are themselves imperfect and prone to errors.
We know that the theory of evolution is true not just because fossils hint at it, but because seven independent sources of evidence converge at the same conclusion. A theory which is supported only by one form of evidence is a lot weaker than a theory that is vindicated by multiple sources that do not depend on each other.
In the event of a disagreement between sources—which is bound to happen given that each source is imperfect—all it means is that further investigation is needed, not that one source is necessarily better than the other, or that the other source must be discarded altogether.
In consilience, Lindy can act as ONE of these independent sources, rather than replacing other sources. Alx fr totally lynched it. If intellectuals can be idiots, Taleb is its most shining example. He is better suited for trolling on Twitter and peddling conspiracy theories about GMOs than for sermonizing on how societies should function.
View all 10 comments. Aug 16, Daniel Clausen rated it it was amazing Shelves: books-of , books-of Update September 4, I changed my mind. I decided to rate this book after all. Any book that has passages that are better on the third reading deserves five stars.
On my third reading, there were parts of the book I skipped, but most of the book was still remarkable, and I would argue even better on the third reading. Ergo, 5 stars are necessary. And anything less would be dishonest. I will leave the original review as it was written around this time last year, but keep in mind that all my Update September 4, I will leave the original review as it was written around this time last year, but keep in mind that all my remarks about the book being unrateable have now been overturned.
I can't rate this book. This seems an absurd thing to say, but it's hard to rate a book that often comes off as a pre-pubescent twitter rant. I think the problem is that Taleb's classical and anti-modern sense of honor screeches against my modern ears. Also, his classical sense of honor often devolves into the aesthetics of blue-collar water cooler bullshit sessions I've been around too many of these , twitter rants, and toxic masculinity.
Forghetabout it? It's really hard to once the words are out there. I still believe twitter was a technology that was supposed to be for teens and that in brings out the worst in people. The actual philosophy of this book is wonderful and deserves at least two readings. I own the paperback in question, so I can just cross out flagrant vulgarity with a black pen.
There isn't that much of it just enough to make the book unrateable. If you've read Antifragile and Black Swan, much of what is written in this book but not all will seem redundant. I think once you've figured out the core of Taleb's philosophy you can start applying it to your own problems with ease.
It does help, however, to go back and see how he applies it. I consider Fooled by Randomness to be less essential than Antifragile and Black Swan, but an interesting case study to understand how philosophies evolve.
Since apparently, I'm not a real man unless I deadlift, and deadlifting is more important than book lifting at a library, and since I haven't deadlifted since high school football, I guess I should get back to deadlifting. Sadly, pounds was my max in high school and all I've been doing since then is trying to improve myself with book learning. That, or I can embrace a very hidden asymmetrical truth about modernity.
Modernity has unlocked the once hidden power of women -- women thinkers, women writers some who deadlift, many who don't -- thus, roughly doubling the amount of ingenuity and talent at least in places that are modern. An interesting question, one I think deserves some thought: How do intelligent, working women -- and to be fair entrepreneurs -- read Taleb? I think I'll explore the Goodreads comment sections and find out. View all 12 comments.
Feb 21, Magnus Ahmad rated it did not like it. Pop-science in it's lowest form. Book reads like a poorly researched, hastily written college essay. Strings together a few nuggets of common sense wisdom with sizeable amounts of unreferenced BS. Taleb is a shark, living off a reputation and using his own fanbase like an ATM. Mar 04, Ivank rated it it was ok. In this book 4, Taleb is more arrogant and pretentious than ever. You can never let go of the feeling that this book is about him, rather than any other topic.
He's become profoundly obnoxious and negative. Despite some good points in the book, reading it feels like carrying a burden. In this new book Taleb goes to extra lengths to attack David Runciman, head of the politics department at Cambridge, and a Guardian book reviewer who had torn apart his previous "Antifragile" book.
Runciman's crit In this book 4, Taleb is more arrogant and pretentious than ever. Runciman's criticisms for book 3 are totally valid here in book 4 as well: that Taleb is profoundly antisocial, self-contradicting, and disorganized; that "Black Swan" and "Fooled by randomness" will remain classics, while "Antifragile" - and I'm sure "Skin in the game" as well - will be forgotten quickly because of their mediocrity.
I wanted to like this and I certainly did at the beginning. All of his insults are complex, original and amusing but he insults so many people so frequently that the process itself becomes tedious. I do enjoy his historical anecdotes, but again there are a large volume of them, and not always obviously with a point, other than a demonstration of his research or recall abilities.
It is the fact that he criticises many individuals in passing with a specific but cryptic reference to something they I wanted to like this and I certainly did at the beginning. It is the fact that he criticises many individuals in passing with a specific but cryptic reference to something they have said or written, but then offers no detail or explanation as to what they said or wrote or why they were wrong that annoys me the most.
In the end, whilst interesting and amusing there was little of use to take from this book - and that is ignoring how pompous and arrogant he sounds all the time as well.
Mar 01, Jeffrey rated it it was amazing Shelves: non-fiction. Five stars only because six weren't available. View 1 comment. Nov 12, Gordon rated it liked it. That personality reminds the reader of a much, much smarter version of a certain orange-faced head of state given to frequent outbursts on Twitter. I don't think Taleb is the tweeting sort but if he were his tweets would be Trumpian, but coherently so, with many more polysyllabic words, and probably without the Random Capitalization so characteristic of our Dear Leader.
But I digress. The main idea of this book is that you shouldn't trust the opinions of people without skin in the game, who won't suffer painful consequences, financial or otherwise, if their opinions are wrong. An extension of this idea is that you shouldn't trust people who don't have first-hand, in-the-trenches experience in whatever their chosen profession may be, from cutting hair to running companies to leading armies.
However, Taleb leaves little doubt that the best profession of all is being a Wall St. The author's curiously narrow working experience, of little value to society or to the economy, consists of skimming some profit off the river of money coursing through the financial exchanges, while avoiding taking major losses from the markets' periodic wild gyrations.
At this, Taleb excelled, by his own account, which I have no reason to doubt. But he wasn't even an investor, let alone an entrepreneur, much as he glorifies the entrepreneur. He was a risk-taker, but of the short-term speculator variety. It's by no means a dishonorable profession, and certainly a challenging if lucrative one.
But it does tend to shape a certain worldview, especially towards risk. And what Taleb is all about is managing risk, and understanding it quantitatively. A key concept in his idea of risk is his notion of "ergodicity", a branch of probability theory I have not studied. As Taleb uses the term, a system is ergodic if the probability of some outcome as a result of independent iterations is the same as the probability of that outcome from one individual running iterations.
In the financial world, if you make enough speculative bets where one of the very low probability outcomes is financial disaster, you will eventually encounter financial disaster.
Lone rogue traders have been known to take down entire banks. So why is this idea interesting? As an individual, it tells you not to take repeated life-threatening and solvency-threatening risks if you can instead take smaller risks with expected positive outcomes -- and zero risk of ruin.
Applying the idea to problems at the social level, such as GMOs and climate change, Taleb argues that these are the kind of risk scenarios where ruin is a real possibility, where the number of iterations of this risky bet is very high, and where we therefore should not take these risks in the first place.
I didn't need any convincing of this with respect to climate change, but Taleb has definitely given me reason to re-assess what I think of GMOs. I am still not sure what to make of the high risk of our planet outrunning its food supply as population grows inexorably towards its peak somewhere between billion VS. Taleb says the latter risk is too high because it could be terminal; he says nothing about the risk of the former. A curious feature of the book is that Taleb, who worshipped behavioral economics in his previous book Fooled by Randomness, turns against it in this volume.
He does not explicitly attack the fathers of the field, Tversky and Kahneman who won the Nobel Prize in Economics for his work , but does go on the rampage against some of the other thinkers in the field, such as Cass Sunstein and Richard Thaler.
The gist of Taleb's argument is that individuals' irrational behaviors due to cognitive biases don't amount to sub-optimal system behavior because systems are not simply the sum of the individual components. He illustrates this with the example of the invisible hand of the market, where purely self-interested individual behaviors nonetheless result in a market that efficiently self-regulates through price signals.
I think this is major confusion on his part. Take retirement savings, a problem he mentions. American workers notoriously save too little and put too much of their savings in low interest money market accounts, due in part to certain cognitive biases such as weighting the pleasures of the present spending the money NOW disproportionately heavily relative to the the future having much more money to spend in retirement.
Meanwhile, the market does a very efficient job of pricing in myriad factors to determine the constantly-adjusted price of a typical ETF such as Vanguard's VT fund. Does this mean that the retirement savings behavior of individual American workers is going to add up to a rational, optimal retirement savings system somehow, just because the price of the fund these workers might invest in is efficiently determined?
Meanwhile, the behavioral economists of whom Taleb is so contemptuous have some very pragmatic ideas about how to nudge the behavior of workers today -- such as making voluntary enrollment in company K retirement plans the default rather than something the employee has to proactively select -- so that they will in fact make more rational retirement savings decisions that will serve them well in the future.
While there is much that I think Taleb is wrong about -- behavioral economics, the importance of economic inequality, the level of social mobility across classes, the role of government beyond the small scale, the role of a free press, the appropriate number of Latin quotations to put in books about risk and uncertainty And he's right about one central thing: beware of advice from people with no skin in the game, who will suffer no great discomfort if the advice they give you proves disastrous.
Mar 01, Gints Dreimanis rated it it was amazing. Hey, another one who doesn't give a fuck. NNT is a bit of a diva, and it is obvious that he has some beef with a lot of people. He certainly sounds right. But is he? I don't know. The book revolves around the notion that people not having skin in the game will fuck us up, somehow. Turns out that the idea of skin in the game can be applied to a wide variety of fields and professions.
Especially the ones Taleb doesn't like, like academics, policy makers, journalists. Oh, and rationality as you kno Hey, another one who doesn't give a fuck. Oh, and rationality as you know it sucks because it is made by academics, and other interesting insights. NNT is like your funky weekend drug dealer, comes with something interesting that he stole from the big guns, then goes away mumbling hateful speech about the government.
I love the guy, now sue me. May 23, Leif Denti rated it it was ok. Taleb has lost it. This book is a good example of someone doing a "Lord Kelvin", that is, making strong claims about things that are not within your field of expertise.
Taleb is a statistician, but of course that doesn't hinder him from having very strong opinions on other matters such as other researchers' fields, politics, banking, journalism, to mention just a few. That's a shame because I loved his first two books. However since Antifragility, quality has been on a downward slop Taleb has lost it. However since Antifragility, quality has been on a downward slope. In this book, Taleb doesn't even bother to back up his claims.
Take this claim: old people is right 90 percent of the time but a psychologist is right only 10 percent of the time. Thats interesting for sure but where is the data? Why should I believe this? He also claims that - because of the Lindy effect - the only theory that is worthwhile is theory that has "survived" the test of time.
Like what the ancients wrote about: honor, love, cognitive dissonance. Of course he conveniently leaves out all the counter examples. Oppression, tyranny and dictatorship has survived the test of time.
Are those things better ways of organizing a society than democracy? Machiavelli is a classic, and Aristotle maintained that society should be ruled by a thinking class of philosophers of course, who did you think?
Is that good theory? It's sloppy thinking and I'm disappointed. In fact, Taleb writes off whole professions with the stroke of his pen. The all-knowing, omnipotent thinker that he seem to think he is. Instead of actual corroboration of the many many, many claims, we get to read some ancient story about the Assyrians, or a very technical statistical term that seem to obscure Talebs claims instead of illuminating them.
It's funny actually with the terminology in this book. I read a lot of science books and I rarely come across a book that uses so many obscure terms and concepts.
For a guy who dislikes scientists and scientism , he sure likes to sound like one. In summary, the book is severely incoherent - ancient stories are mixed with Talebs observations about modern life, his dismissal of his thought up enemies, and disjointed anectodes from his life. Somehow I get the feeling that the book is actually about Taleb himself. Be warned: this book is a ranty, largely unstructured, flow-of-consciousness type stuff.
It has an equal probability or either delighting the reader or driving them mad. I personally enjoy the erudite style of Taleb's argumentation and find his references and vignettes of the 'times gone by' intellectually stimulating.
Also, the black-and-white bluntness of his position makes the book feel refreshing. You may not agree with Taleb's side, but you are never left in doubt wh 3. You may not agree with Taleb's side, but you are never left in doubt which side that is. If you have never read Taleb before I urge you to start with the Black Swan.
This new book is an awful place to get to know the author. You need to warm up to him first And if you hated Antifragile. Well, grab something else to read : Skin in the Game is unlikely to be your thing either.
View 2 comments. Mar 25, Ajay rated it it was amazing. Some really good insights in a very small book - 1. Cost benefit analysis is not possible when there is a probability of Ruin.
The west is in the process of committing ideological suicide on minority rule. Its easier to Macrobullshit than it is to Microbullshit. What matters is not what a person has, but w Some really good insights in a very small book - 1.
What matters is not what a person has, but what he or she is afraid of losing. Don't tell me what you think, tell me whats in your portfolio. Feb 27, Gaurav Mathur rated it liked it. Aah, Taleb. I have read all his non-technical books at least twice, so of course it was with great enthusiasm that I bought this Bit of a bummer.
SITG has some great insights, but most of them were shared on his Twitter account, and his posts on Medium. But of course applaud the man for pursuing his ideas for more than 2 decades.
Have learned quite a lo Aah, Taleb. Have learned quite a lot, and there is a door to new knowledge through his references to other great thinkers. Mar 20, Ill D rated it it was amazing. Taleb's the hero. Feb 09, Yevgeniy Brikman rated it really liked it. As with most of Taleb's books, this one is poorly organized, full of childish insults and bravado, and makes some totally absurd claims.
But this book also contains some startling, deep insights and ideas. It's frustrating to have to wade through a lot of bullshit to get to these interesting ideas, but when you finally get there, the pay off is pretty damn good. Here are some of the biggest insights I got from this book: 1. The central thesis is that "skin in the game" is essential for systems t As with most of Taleb's books, this one is poorly organized, full of childish insults and bravado, and makes some totally absurd claims.
The central thesis is that "skin in the game" is essential for systems to work efficiently and fairly. Any actor who makes a decision must bear the risk of that decision. Otherwise, you end up with an asymmetry where one actor may get all the upside, and everyone else is stuck with all the potential downside.
Examples: - No skin in the game: politician who argues for war, but has no risk of actually dying in that war. Creating a world where everyone has skin in whatever game they are playing may be more effective than adding more laws. Systems work completely differently at different scales and you can't generalize from one scale to another You can't always understand larger systems from smaller parts.
Examples: - You can't understand the emergent behavior of an ant colony from the behavior of one ant. Due to the curse of dimensionality, small increases in size can lead to massive increases in complexity. For example, we still don't fully understand how the neurons of the tape worm's central nervous system work—it's just too complicated.
But going up to neurons may double that complexity; going to neurons may double it again; and so on. The human brain, for comparison, has billion neurons. While our TV-brand of politics pretends like it's all about "left" vs "right", Taleb has this amazing quote from the brothers Geoff and Vince Graham: "I am, at the Fed level, libertarian; at the state level, Republican; at the local level, Democrat; and at the family and friends level, a socialist.
The Lindy effect: for some things, mortality rate decreases with time. Broadway actors used to gather at Lindy's delicatessen after each performance, and they noticed a pattern where plays that had been running for 20 days were likely to survive another 20 days; plays that had ran for days were likely to survive another days; those that ran for days would run another ; and so on.
The same effect can be seen in many other places: e. In other words, the life expectancy of some things is proportional to their current age.
The longer that thing has survived, the longer it's likely to keep surviving, so the mortality rate decreases with time. As a general rule, this is why you should prefer things that have survived longer to those that are newer: e.
That old book has survived so long for a reason! The same goes for ideas, art, and traditions that have been passed down from generation to generation. Rule of the minority In many situations, a tiny minority e. Examples: - A large percentage of food in the US is kosher, even though only a tiny percentage of the population follows kosher practices - Schools and planes ban peanuts even though only a tiny percentage of the population is allergic to them This arises due to an asymmetry where the minority group can only tolerate one option but the majority group can tolerate either, and so we often accede to the demands of the minority group: e.
This is why "Merry Christmas" became "Happy Holidays", even in a country where the vast majority of people celebrate Christmas. This is also why all it takes is a single angry old lady complaining regularly to change the laws in a small town. More generally, many great changes in society happen not via consensus or voting, but because some small passionate minority typically with skin in the game pushes for it.
This is also why, even in a society that preaches tolerance, you cannot be tolerant of intolerance. That is, even if you firmly believe in tolerance of all viewpoints and free speech, you cannot be tolerant of, for example, Nazi movements. Even a small minority of intolerant people can overrun a tolerant society.
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