"I will always remember my encounter with the writer and cultural icon Susan Sontag, largely because I met the great [mathematician] Benoit Mandelbrot on the same day. It took place in 2001, two months after the terrorist event of September, in a radio station in New York. Sontag, who was being interviewed, was piqued by the idea of a fellow who "studies randomness" and came to engage me. When she discovered that I was a [stock market] trader, she blurted out that she was "against the market system" and turned her back to me as I was in mid-sentence, just to humiliate me (note here that courtesy is an application of the Silver Rule), while her assistant gave me a look as if I had been convicted of child killing. I sort of justified her behavior in order to forget the incident, imagining that she lived in some rural commune, grew her own vegetables, wrote with pencil and paper, engaged in barter transactions, that type of stuff.No, she did not grow her own vegetables, it turned out. Two years later, I accidentally found her obituary (I waited a decade and a half before writing about the incident to avoid speaking ill of the departed). People in publishing were complaining about her rapacity; she had squeezed her publisher, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, for what would be several million dollars today for a novel. She shared, with a girlfriend, a mansion in New York City, later sold for $28 million. Sontag probably felt that insulting people with money inducted her into some unimpeachable sainthood, exempting her from having skin in the game."