How do you view the statement "Don't completely believe what teachers say; they are the group with the least social practice"?


Taleb repeatedly emphasizes in "Antifragile": Those who haven't experienced pain firsthand don't deserve to give advice. The truth is even more brutal and sharp—teachers are not only the group with the least social practice but also order guardians deliberately isolated in closed environments by the entire social system.
This is not a disparagement of the teaching profession but an analysis based on social division of labor. Teachers lack experience not because of personal fault but because the system intentionally designs it to maintain stability.
The teacher's duty is to teach you what the world should be like, but you need to discover what the world actually is. Their life trajectory is a perfect closed loop: from elementary school to university, then directly returning to school after graduation to teach. Many have never truly left the campus walls in their entire lives.
They live in a linear world where effort yields returns, rules are clear, and there is a safety net. Expecting such a group to teach you how to fight in a risky, ambiguous, and survival-of-the-fittest real society is a huge cognitive dissonance. It's like expecting an indoor swimming coach to teach you how to dive in the deep sea.
Three reasons why you can't fully trust teachers:
First, teachers maintain appearances; society operates on interests. Schools teach that honesty, fairness, and effort lead to success to facilitate management and transmit positive energy. The real society is chaotic, driven by luck, resource exchanges, and hidden rules. Teachers enjoy stable salaries and summer vacations, having not experienced business battles, survival anxiety, or the darker sides of human nature. Their job is to teach you correct but useless principles.
Second, education is fundamentally industrialized and standardized production, while societal winners are often non-standard. Schools cultivate obedient, useful cogs; teachers instinctively dislike those who break rules. Ironically, these traits—disregard for rules, risk preference, sensitive human nature—are the top weapons for survival in society. Obedient children get candy in school, but in society, it might be poison.
Third, we cannot do without teachers. If from birth we are taught the law of the jungle, society will inevitably collapse into hell. Teachers must be naive idealists, safeguarding the original settings of human civilization. Thank teachers for teaching beautiful things—that is the fundamental character of being human.
But the moment you step out of school, you must complete a "parricide" of the mind, letting the rough winds of reality blow in. Keep kindness but grow teeth, keep honesty but learn to lie to bad people, keep rule awareness but understand how to exploit loopholes. With morality and rule of law in the left hand, and cunning and pragmatism in the right, carve your own path through the muddy reality. Listening to teachers can make you a harmless good person; only by not fully trusting can you have the chance to become a strong person.
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