PublicFace's comments

I agree and I replied above saying I didnt really address the hidden nature of fakes. I went to ebay looking for fakes because they are cheaper and I didn't want to actually own real ones.

I mean I agree but what about something like clothing where the style is ephemeral and safety isn't really an issue (outside of blatant materials poisoning or whatever).

Yeah exactly. I guess I didn't address the inherent way you GET knockoff shirts/clothing off of ebay which is look for the people who are obviously selling fakes pretending to be reals but for far too cheaply and order accordingly. It's not hard if you aren't totally blind to the standard Engrish language cues. That being said I am probably hurting RL's brand. But do I care? What if selling "official knockoffs" was a thing? What if you paid the smallest of licensing fees to sell an "official knockoff". A certified look alike with no quality standard. That would be a new market segment right?

I like the Chinese counterfeits. I got a bundle of knock off Ralph Lauren polos that let me experiment with the frat boy look in college with out spending thousands on real ones.

I personally like shanzai culture. Brands are cool but ultimately quality should be an internal thing that customers should seek out and test, not rely on status symbols and brands to define their tastes. Caveat emptor is a thing you know.

Beats workin'.

Kill the "work week" concept too while we're at it. Are we seriously going to continue the fallacy that humans only work on specific religiously appointed days?

Just start moving to results only work environments.

Why do downvote brigades even EXIST on this website? I feel like this upvote downvote garbage is an echo chamber in the making. Just sort comments by replies or randomly, or not at all. Or just have a "garbage post" flag and call it a day. Anything is better than this pseudo-democracy thing that Reddit has shown to be useless for real discussion time and again.

Where did you see the messages that caused you to write this comment? I totally agree I'm just curious who is complaining.

PDFs are free and all students already know this. The only people who care are the people with a vested interest in selling pointless and useless garbage(textbooks). I didn't pay for my textbooks in school. Nobody should. If it's useful you should copy it and share it with your friends. Software, textbooks, tools, designs, ideas, whatever. Information is free whether you believe it or not. The medium is what you should pay for....but it is not the message.

Basically: the internet was never a level playingh field. It was always controlled by telecom and Big Gov. It wasn't designed to be equitable and has never been a laissez faire system of any sort. To participate you need capital, clout, and insider status.

My point is that the principle of an open Internet is a fallacy of narration, trying to fit a story to the situation for the purposes of journalism.

It's still pretty clear you don't get his ideas, let me help:

"Even experts can't predict everything, so we should build failure tolerance into our systems..."

That's not really NNT's point at all. We shouldn't even design systems that require fragile predicting systems of any kind. We shouldn't waste our time. We shouldn't be designing fragile top down inductive systems in the first place. Ever. Like centralized banks for instance. They are inherently flawed because they don't account for unknown unknowns. And any benefits are epiphenomenal (i.e. fitting the story to the facts narratively after the fact).

"Experts sometimes get things wrong, so your guess is as good as theirs..."

Also not really an NNT idea. He states that some kinds of knowledge (like experience, i.e. empirical phenomenology) are more resilient and less subject to exposure to reality then say top down theoretical knowledge like economics (which is his dead horse to beat but he has a point: there is no such thing as non-theoretical economics for the most part since they rely on homo economicus etc etc etc)

"Experts are actively hazardous and should be rejected because they are experts"

Man, you have a gift I'l give you that. NNT says you should ignore so called charlatans like economists and academics because their knowledge is not tested in the real world and never exposed to the cold light of empirical reality, having been coddled by the university tenure system and the incestuous system of paper writing and publishing. A plumbers knowledge is tested every day when he fixes pipes, an engineer's is tested in his products. An economists are not really tested since we have no way of actually replicating the universe and testing out their little toy ideas. There will always be exigent data we don't have. Hey, theres the problem of induction again!

"...induction...freshman...sun....useless..."

You conflate the word deduction in the same breath as induction so I'll help you out. Induction = using specific events to determine the general theory. Deduction = using general theory to explain specific events. Understanding why induction is a PROBLEM is the whole point. No you can't apply the problem of induction deductively because that is the literally the definition of the problem of induction: recursive. It isn't a deductive theory to be applied to knowledge to reject it, it is the core problem of human knowledge, which is constantly seeking a heuristic or a pattern where there might not necessarily be one. Induction is a trap. You keep falling into it.

"All knowledge is limited and provisional; use it anyway...the lack of firm surety still seems to disturb some people..pseudo expert"

Reflect on above ideas about big fragile systems, charlatans, and induction. Also consider that there is nothing inherently wrong with promoting any ideas (in a Popperian manner) and accusing someone of "preying" for simply sharing ideas is again ad hominem and fundamentally fallacious. Understand and attack the ideas not the person.

Go read and understand Karl Popper and empirical negativism and this whole thing might make more sense and NNT might annoy you a little bit less.

If you see fraud and don't shout fraud you are a fraud.

Because books cost money to print? And take time to write? Stop burying the lead.

I am still not hearing any good arguments about NNT's actual ideas, just loose ad hominem that doesn't really represent anything other than sentiment on the commenter's part. You call him pseudo-expert, I call him well-read polymath with good ideas. Potato, potahto.

The problem of induction, that's basically NNT's core point.

The process of induction is pointless and impossible for creating models of unbounded processes with past data, and applying it is a recipe for creating huge catastrophes. Unknown unknowns make theoretical knowledge useless for forecasting. Phenomenology is more useful in most situations.

In essence, economists, top down intellectuals, central planners, etc, are wasting time and energy and resources and creating even worse problems and NNT loudly proclaims that they are doing so, this makes them uncomfortable and they like to say nasty things about him instead of his actual ideas.

Pretty familiar story, you know you've won when they attack you and not the idea's your talking about.

Hey wow, what a terrible top comment. I think I count a bit of ad-hominem, some appeal to authority, a no true scotsman, but I don't see single concrete response to an of his ideas. Have you even read Taleb? Are you even aware of his philosophy or what his points are?

You make no argument that makes me think you have read a single one of his books.

First: Taleb was independently wealthy from prop trading before he started his writing career. You would know that if you read like anything about him. He didn't need the fame or money and is primarily sharing his ideas for the good of humanity (as all good philosophers of science should).

Second: You completely ignored his core point which is that we need less top down induction based normative globalized structures and more anti-fragile, small nation states similar to the bottom up style of Switzerland. This is basically the core argument of Incerto, that our systems are based on intellectuals who misapply their models because they lack real world experience. THESE are the pseudo-experts, not NNT as you so flippantly label him.

Go read a book.

There never was a level playing field? Narrative fallacy.

Occasionally technology produces moments where dynamic conditions allow for people to leverage large amounts of energy if they get lucky. But all those people participating on a "level playing field?" they are "cheating" as hard as they can at every step.

The perception that things were ever even is just that. A perception. Our ecosystem is not "even". Nature doesn't "know" what "fair" is.

Heuristics. Lots of them.