Monsieur Taleb, all summer you’re sliding one degree per day. You don’t like models unless…. they’re your own & for 6-year-olds?

Romans were the COPIERS & CENTRALISERS of history. To be Roman is to copy what Greeks invent, centralise it & dehumanise it e.g. theatres to arenas.

Did Cato expelled greek doctors also? Medicine was (and still remains) the ultimate test of BS models, developed by Greeks throughout the Roman & Byzantine period. The inability of Romans to form & test new models is evident in their low-innovation copy-paste legalistic culture.

Medicine was (and remains) the ultimate test of BS models. It needs COURAGE equal to Achilles to propose a radical new model against old wisdom. For every 100 models (hypotheses) only 1 may be useful. It’s safer to play the Roman Rationalist & reject all models as BS.

To sumarize:

– Romans: centralisation + deductive reasoning (legal science)
– Greeks: decentralisation (demos) + testing models with high-level semiotics & inductions (medicine)
– Byzantines: deductive (legalistic) + inductive (modern hospitals)

Some more comments
So this story can be traced back to Descartes & Francis Bacon (Scientific Method) criticising the dogmatic approach of the Aristotelian establishment of their time. Today it’s different. Scientists don’t read Plato or Aristotle from the original, thus spreading misinformation.

I remember the time when a doer was judged by the roughness of his hands, not by his best-selling books against tawkers. I also remember the time when hard-working Protestants were recognised as the pillars of modernity. Things have changed.

Source 1, Source 2