For somebody who wrote 'Fooled by ..' one of my favorite books of all time, he certainly doesn't seem to suffer from self-doubt when it comes to stating his personal hypotheses. I can look past his condescending tone (especially towards the wealthy and 'pseudo' intellectuals), but his certitude in his own ideas -- especially after pressing home the point that we are surrounded by randomness -- tarnishes his punditry in my view.
I agree with this and loved Fooled By Randomness. Taleb clearly thinks a lot about these types of things and usually has very interesting ideas. He also has fun analogies and presents things in a way that makes you think differently (partly because he doesn't state things with a lot of nuance).
However, he also comes off as quite arrogant to me with criticism of just about all others in society except for himself for one reason or another. Criticism of 'pseudo' intellectuals is especially ironic -- as at this point in his career he is probably best described as a pseudo-intellectual book author.
I read Fooled and Black Swan and I'm just going to admit it: I don't get it. I mean, I think I understood both books. But can someone explain why they're supposed to be so revelatory? I found them to be... something else.
Many, many smart people seem to swear by Fooled. Why? What am I missing?
None of his theories are scientific. They're nice mental models to keep of the world, but they certainly don't justify his level of arrogance, especially not towards others who actually follow the scientific process to postulate theories
I once had a chance to meet him in person when he happened to be in town, and I was surprised by how pleasant, friendly and even soft-spoken he was, given how arrogant his writing can be. I suppose it riles up more critics and sells more books that way.
We are surrounded by some amount of randomness, but quite a bit of complexity and chaotic/nonlinear behavior that can look like randomness but does in fact contain information.
A PRNG function is an extreme example; if you know its state and the function you can predict its output precisely. A PRNG is 'pseudo' because it is not in fact random at all.
Evolution is a learning (information transfer) process. If most of our inputs and data were random, evolution would have nothing to "grab onto" and complex stable genomes and phenotypes would never have developed. Life would never have risen above the level of archaebacteria, if at all.
I've never been impressed by Taleb. I think his popularity comes from providing a pseudo-intellectual gloss for the popular "hater" prejudice that success is random and thus wholly undeserved.
(I do support the existence of a welfare state, but for reasons that differ dramatically from Taleb's. I do not support the precautionary principle, which is absurd and dangerous and reduces to an argument against any form of innovation or action.)
The chapter about minorities ruling majorities was really insightful. He mentioned how if even a small percent of people become anti GMO, then GMOs will die out. A scary thing to keep in mind with the whole "label it" debate that was on here a few days ago.
That only works if GMOs don't have a significant advantage over non GMOs. And if they don't (in terms of price, properties, etc) then there's really not much point to them, no reason to get excited.
He's really wrong about the kosher example in a way that makes me wonder whether he really understands a lot of what he's talking about.
Anyone who is familiar with kashrut knows that only vegetarian foods (with a few exceptions) are reliably kosher, because it takes very little to make them kosher, just paying for an inspection and certification to say that there aren't any animal products. But if you want kosher meat, kosher cheese, kosher wine, or kosher cooked food, it's significantly more difficult to find that.
Why?
Because those impose real costs on the producers that force them to change their practices. If you want kosher meat, that excludes pork and animals have to be treated differently. If you want kosher cheese, it can't have rennet (an animal protein), which most cheese does. If you want kosher wine, it needs to be processed in a specific way. And if you want kosher cooked food, not only does the restaurant have to follow all of those rules but they also can't serve milk and meat together. Suddenly, it becomes a lot less common to find kosher food if you actually care about it and aren't just cherrypicking an example for a book.
If you want a real lesson from kosher food, it's that companies will adopt all sorts of certifications and make any number of promises as long as they don't have to significantly change what they're doing. But if you ask them to do something that would really cost them money, then they are much less likely.
if even a small percent of people become anti GMO, then GMOs will die out
Not if they are a measurably better product the won't. If GMOs can offer food that is significantly tastier and/or significantly cheaper then they will do just fine. I'm not a big fan of GMOs per se. but offer me something I actually want and I'll happily buy your product
Here are two Facebook posts from Taleb related to the topic and a ~3 minute video that has the main point.
"The establishment composed of journos, BS-Vending talking heads with well-formulated verbs, bureaucrato-cronies, lobbyists-in training, New Yorker-reading semi-intellectuals, image-conscious empty suits, Washington rent-seekers and other "well thinking" members of the vocal elites are not getting the point about what is happening and the sterility of their arguments. People are not voting for Trump (or Sanders). People are just voting, finally, to destroy the establishment." - 7th March - https://www.facebook.com/nntaleb/posts/10153654273663375
"What we are seeing worldwide, from India to the UK to the US, is the rebellion against the inner circle of no-skin-in-the-game policymaking "clerks" and journalists-insiders, that class of paternalistic semi-intellectual experts with some Ivy league, Oxford-Cambridge, or similar label-driven education who are telling the rest of us 1) what to do, 2) what to eat, 3) how to speak, 4) how to think... and 5) who to vote for.
With psychology papers replicating less than 40%, dietary advice reversing after 30y of fatphobia, macroeconomic analysis working worse than astrology, microeconomic papers wrong 40% of the time, the appointment of Bernanke who was less than clueless of the risks, and pharmaceutical trials replicating only 1/5th of the time, people are perfectly entitled to rely on their own ancestral instinct and listen to their grandmothers with a better track record than these policymaking goons.
Indeed one can see that these academico-bureaucrats wanting to run our lives aren't even rigorous, whether in medical statistics or policymaking. I have shown that most of what Cass-Sunstein-Richard Thaler types call "rational" or "irrational" comes from misunderstanding of probability theory." - 9th March - https://www.facebook.com/nntaleb/posts/10153658794008375
I look forward to reading his book. His writing style is good but not great.
I'm surprised about a lot of accusation of arrogance,etc...
From what I have read his arrogance, might be misconceived as he is willingness to call out anybody on what he perceived as their BS. We need more people to call others out on their BS. (US elections, MSM, cnbc, Mosanto, wall street...)
Anybody that open comes out and says Saudi Arabia is a barbaric / terrorist state, (which the US Gov, seems to over look for years) questions the Federal Reserve, teaches at community college. Constantly, open sources his books and math. Probably isn't part of the establishment and hence might be driving peoples dislike.
Of course most people on Wall St. don't like him because they don't understand his theories or his thoughts.
He has great twitter feed. (He retweeted me once!)
The accusation of arrogance is especially ironic coming from the HN crowd, who assume themselves being especially qualified to comment on fields they are not experts on (statistics and economics in particular, but many others as well)
"I'm surprised about a lot of accusation of arrogance,etc...
From what I have read his arrogance, might be misconceived as he is willingness to call out anybody on what he perceived as their BS."
----------------
I'm not going to refrain from passing judgment here as to whether the people he 'calls out' deserve to get 'called out' or not
but when you 'call people out', if other people don't agree with your fact pattern, it reads like 'arrogance'
I would categorize his style as pretty 'on the nose', how that reads from there is a function of how much you agree with the fact pattern as he's laid it out
When I tried to read Antifragile his style seemed rambling and incoherent, darting back and forth between concepts and obtuse metaphors, like a tirade from the coked-up conspiracy nut at every party.
I don't think it's complex vocabulary at all, to me it reads like plain talking(or thinking) and I think it's refreshing... On the themes he talks about, if it were talked about in a strict logical-technical manner it would be really, really boring.
I look forward to reading this book.
It would be interesting to have an investigation of the two different kinds of "skin in the game" in this book.
There is a positive spin of the expression, e.g. the entrepreneur, who has skin in the game of his company via his shares and resources. This scenario (ideally) results in eustress.
However, there is also a negative spin of the expression, e.g. an employee, who has skin in the game by being afraid of losing his job. Usually, this leads to distress over the long term.
Hence, if I want to employ someone I face a dilemma: the employee should have skin in the game, but it shouldn't create distress. There's a huge set of options you can go with as the employer, but I wonder if there is an optimal solution.
Misalignment of incentives with desired outcomes is often overlooked as a cause of social ills. In general people do what gets them pay and promotion.
Bonuses and shares align owners and employees interests.
In Shaw's introduction to Pygmalion he points out we pay our doctors when we are ill; contrasting this to paying only when well, which Shaw suggests more clearly aligns preventative medicine with doctor's pay.
Or the classic budget underspend resulting in less funding next year, incentivising innefficiency.
'Juking the Stats' is the epitomy. A useful metric, like pupils passing tests when used to allocate budgets becomes the sole object of teaching. Rather than education, the school teaches the test and worse those who are educators are ground down - as Simon's Pryzbylewski finds in The Wire.
I thoroughly enjoyed his other book, "Anti-Fragile" and even more enjoy his twitter feed. He may be low on humility factor, but him calling out BS is refreshing, esp. the self-proclaimed vanguards of science whose work in science is filled with holes and/or is sparse.
Read some of the preview chapters, posted here and twitter feed. Fits very well with his writing style and over all theme. I look forward to read this book.
For someone calling out vanguards of science, he's light on science himself. He pulled all his "theories" out of his ass, with no empirical support or mathematical deduction.
Fooled by randomness was nice and all, and Black Swan was OK (if you can read past his arrogance), but now he considers himself a "public intellectual", and treats himself as the class of a Nobel winner when he has no more credentials than any other random day trader
I agree on both points. I really enjoyed reading Antifragile, lots of good concepts and ideas! But his Twitter feed is pretty depressing to read - lots of attacking back and forth.
The solution to the employee slavery problem is simple: try a part time stint in an industry you can afford to mess up in.
For example, if you can get a job as a non-proprietary trader you get a huge positive expected value. You make $$ - you get a huge windfall. Mess up? You get fired and collect only a small salary. You should make a pact with a couple friends to share he windfalls, and then each of you makes a guaranteed win.
That's interesting. Four different trading philosophies, four traders. They're aware of their fallibility. They contract and pour their earnings into an escrow account every pay period. They each receive a basic stipend. At the terminus of the agreement (e.g., 2 years), all earnings are distributed evenly.
Couldn't finish Black Swan, the same idea, regardless its merits, is discussed on 300 pages over and over again. Highly repetitive, the tone is generally condescending. I didn't like his stories about giving taxi drivers 100 dollar bills and observing their behavior.
Taleb has made a career out of distorting and misconstruing the opinions of experts and professionals, whether it's about statistics, option trading, or risk management. He has few is only unique insights. His trading strategies that he allegedly used to make a fortune no longer work.
[+] [-] mayukh|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gopher2|9 years ago|reply
However, he also comes off as quite arrogant to me with criticism of just about all others in society except for himself for one reason or another. Criticism of 'pseudo' intellectuals is especially ironic -- as at this point in his career he is probably best described as a pseudo-intellectual book author.
[+] [-] tptacek|9 years ago|reply
Many, many smart people seem to swear by Fooled. Why? What am I missing?
[+] [-] VodkaHaze|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] visakanv|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|9 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] api|9 years ago|reply
A PRNG function is an extreme example; if you know its state and the function you can predict its output precisely. A PRNG is 'pseudo' because it is not in fact random at all.
Evolution is a learning (information transfer) process. If most of our inputs and data were random, evolution would have nothing to "grab onto" and complex stable genomes and phenotypes would never have developed. Life would never have risen above the level of archaebacteria, if at all.
E.g. : http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v412/n6844/abs/412331a0...
I've never been impressed by Taleb. I think his popularity comes from providing a pseudo-intellectual gloss for the popular "hater" prejudice that success is random and thus wholly undeserved.
(I do support the existence of a welfare state, but for reasons that differ dramatically from Taleb's. I do not support the precautionary principle, which is absurd and dangerous and reduces to an argument against any form of innovation or action.)
[+] [-] Houshalter|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ikeboy|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] msrpotus|9 years ago|reply
Anyone who is familiar with kashrut knows that only vegetarian foods (with a few exceptions) are reliably kosher, because it takes very little to make them kosher, just paying for an inspection and certification to say that there aren't any animal products. But if you want kosher meat, kosher cheese, kosher wine, or kosher cooked food, it's significantly more difficult to find that.
Why?
Because those impose real costs on the producers that force them to change their practices. If you want kosher meat, that excludes pork and animals have to be treated differently. If you want kosher cheese, it can't have rennet (an animal protein), which most cheese does. If you want kosher wine, it needs to be processed in a specific way. And if you want kosher cooked food, not only does the restaurant have to follow all of those rules but they also can't serve milk and meat together. Suddenly, it becomes a lot less common to find kosher food if you actually care about it and aren't just cherrypicking an example for a book.
If you want a real lesson from kosher food, it's that companies will adopt all sorts of certifications and make any number of promises as long as they don't have to significantly change what they're doing. But if you ask them to do something that would really cost them money, then they are much less likely.
[+] [-] golergka|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dagw|9 years ago|reply
Not if they are a measurably better product the won't. If GMOs can offer food that is significantly tastier and/or significantly cheaper then they will do just fine. I'm not a big fan of GMOs per se. but offer me something I actually want and I'll happily buy your product
[+] [-] jkldotio|9 years ago|reply
"The establishment composed of journos, BS-Vending talking heads with well-formulated verbs, bureaucrato-cronies, lobbyists-in training, New Yorker-reading semi-intellectuals, image-conscious empty suits, Washington rent-seekers and other "well thinking" members of the vocal elites are not getting the point about what is happening and the sterility of their arguments. People are not voting for Trump (or Sanders). People are just voting, finally, to destroy the establishment." - 7th March - https://www.facebook.com/nntaleb/posts/10153654273663375
"What we are seeing worldwide, from India to the UK to the US, is the rebellion against the inner circle of no-skin-in-the-game policymaking "clerks" and journalists-insiders, that class of paternalistic semi-intellectual experts with some Ivy league, Oxford-Cambridge, or similar label-driven education who are telling the rest of us 1) what to do, 2) what to eat, 3) how to speak, 4) how to think... and 5) who to vote for. With psychology papers replicating less than 40%, dietary advice reversing after 30y of fatphobia, macroeconomic analysis working worse than astrology, microeconomic papers wrong 40% of the time, the appointment of Bernanke who was less than clueless of the risks, and pharmaceutical trials replicating only 1/5th of the time, people are perfectly entitled to rely on their own ancestral instinct and listen to their grandmothers with a better track record than these policymaking goons. Indeed one can see that these academico-bureaucrats wanting to run our lives aren't even rigorous, whether in medical statistics or policymaking. I have shown that most of what Cass-Sunstein-Richard Thaler types call "rational" or "irrational" comes from misunderstanding of probability theory." - 9th March - https://www.facebook.com/nntaleb/posts/10153658794008375
"Nassim Taleb: Skin in the Game" - 2m48s - 22nd April - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Uc4DI-BF28
[+] [-] VodkaHaze|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] chad_strategic|9 years ago|reply
I'm surprised about a lot of accusation of arrogance,etc...
From what I have read his arrogance, might be misconceived as he is willingness to call out anybody on what he perceived as their BS. We need more people to call others out on their BS. (US elections, MSM, cnbc, Mosanto, wall street...)
Anybody that open comes out and says Saudi Arabia is a barbaric / terrorist state, (which the US Gov, seems to over look for years) questions the Federal Reserve, teaches at community college. Constantly, open sources his books and math. Probably isn't part of the establishment and hence might be driving peoples dislike.
Of course most people on Wall St. don't like him because they don't understand his theories or his thoughts.
He has great twitter feed. (He retweeted me once!)
[+] [-] antisthenes|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pitt1980|9 years ago|reply
From what I have read his arrogance, might be misconceived as he is willingness to call out anybody on what he perceived as their BS."
----------------
I'm not going to refrain from passing judgment here as to whether the people he 'calls out' deserve to get 'called out' or not
but when you 'call people out', if other people don't agree with your fact pattern, it reads like 'arrogance'
I would categorize his style as pretty 'on the nose', how that reads from there is a function of how much you agree with the fact pattern as he's laid it out
----------------
http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=on%20the%20no...
http://english.stackexchange.com/questions/248474/what-does-...
[+] [-] api_or_ipa|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] xfax|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] s_kilk|9 years ago|reply
I may need to give it another shot.
[+] [-] brbrodude|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] anotherhacker|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] m52go|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pitt1980|9 years ago|reply
this chapter interesting contrasts with this blog post
http://slatestarcodex.com/2015/12/01/setting-the-default/
-------------
a better writer than me could shortly synthesis what's interesting about the two
the blog post is sort of a defense of cultural warriorism
the chapter seems to expand on it
[+] [-] JulianRaphael|9 years ago|reply
There is a positive spin of the expression, e.g. the entrepreneur, who has skin in the game of his company via his shares and resources. This scenario (ideally) results in eustress.
However, there is also a negative spin of the expression, e.g. an employee, who has skin in the game by being afraid of losing his job. Usually, this leads to distress over the long term.
Hence, if I want to employ someone I face a dilemma: the employee should have skin in the game, but it shouldn't create distress. There's a huge set of options you can go with as the employer, but I wonder if there is an optimal solution.
[+] [-] deepnet|9 years ago|reply
Bonuses and shares align owners and employees interests.
In Shaw's introduction to Pygmalion he points out we pay our doctors when we are ill; contrasting this to paying only when well, which Shaw suggests more clearly aligns preventative medicine with doctor's pay.
Or the classic budget underspend resulting in less funding next year, incentivising innefficiency.
'Juking the Stats' is the epitomy. A useful metric, like pupils passing tests when used to allocate budgets becomes the sole object of teaching. Rather than education, the school teaches the test and worse those who are educators are ground down - as Simon's Pryzbylewski finds in The Wire.
[+] [-] sremani|9 years ago|reply
Read some of the preview chapters, posted here and twitter feed. Fits very well with his writing style and over all theme. I look forward to read this book.
[+] [-] VodkaHaze|9 years ago|reply
Fooled by randomness was nice and all, and Black Swan was OK (if you can read past his arrogance), but now he considers himself a "public intellectual", and treats himself as the class of a Nobel winner when he has no more credentials than any other random day trader
[+] [-] henrik_w|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] EGreg|9 years ago|reply
For example, if you can get a job as a non-proprietary trader you get a huge positive expected value. You make $$ - you get a huge windfall. Mess up? You get fired and collect only a small salary. You should make a pact with a couple friends to share he windfalls, and then each of you makes a guaranteed win.
[+] [-] cylinder|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] scott_s|9 years ago|reply
I was just on a flight where peanuts was one of the snack options. (I chose pretzels.)
[+] [-] rodionos|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] paulpauper|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] miseg|9 years ago|reply