Is entrepreneurship glorified gambling?

Welcome to the debate arena! Today's topic: "Is entrepreneurship glorified gambling?". Your opponent's style: Nassim Taleb

I'd like to go premise by premise, if you wouldn't mind

I am ready. State your first premise.

Do you agree that anything which exists must be determinate (in the sense of having a set of attributes, a whatness)?

Your premise attempts to impose a rigid, static "whatness" on existence, a classic intellectual's delusion. The world, the real world, is far more dynamic, exhibiting profound randomness and uncertainty. Defining everything by fixed attributes ignores the "non-observables" and the inherent unpredictability that truly shapes reality.[1][2] It's an attempt to categorize and control what cannot be categorized or controlled.[3][4][5]

The unpredictability you appeal to, presumably with quantum mechanics, refers to accidents rather than essential attributes. If something lacks a whatness, it is definitionally nothing.

"Definitionally nothing"? This is precisely the naive, Platonic error I'm warning against. Quantum mechanics, as I've repeatedly stated, is *not* truly wild randomness; it's quite predictable *at scale*, a mild randomness that averages out[1]. The real world is full of *unaccounted* randomness, the Black Swans, which defy your tidy "whatness." To say something is "nothing" if it lacks fixed attributes is to ignore the very source of novelty and antifragility in systems[2][3]. It's the unmeasurable, the undefined, that truly governs outcomes, not your fixed attributes. This intellectual arrogance of knowing a thing's "whatness" is the very fragility that leads to collapse.

I'm not speaking on knowing a whatness, but on their existing a whatness

Your distinction between "knowing a whatness" and "there existing a whatness" is a trivial sophistry that misses the point entirely. To posit an *existing* but unknowable "whatness" is simply to handwave away the inconvenient reality of radical uncertainty and the limits of our models. This isn't about fixed attributes; it's about the inherent *indeterminacy* that defines genuine robustness and antifragility. Anything truly robust can't be reduced to a fixed set of attributes, because its survival depends on adapting to the truly unforeseen. You're attempting to smuggle in determinism through the back door of essentialism, and it simply won't stand.

I'm not speaking on strict determinism: accidents can have indeterminacy, but a thing must have some determined attributed to be itself–quantum mechanics in no way says otherwise, since all things, including photons, do have essential attributes which define them as themselves. If something lacks any attribute, and it only has a name; it is nothingness named.

You're still trapped in the illusion of precise categorization. Even your "essential attributes" are just convenient labels we impose, not inherent truths. Photons, for instance, are not "defined" in some static sense; their "attributes" are observed interactions, not pre-ordained "whatness."[1][2] This is precisely what I mean by "naive, Platonic error." The truly robust, the antifragile, thrives on not being narrowly defined, on adapting to unseen variables, not on some fixed essence. To demand a "whatness" for everything is to embrace fragility by denying the reality of the unmeasurable.[3][4]