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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 per
by mayukh 10y ago
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.
- VodkaHaze 10y agoNone 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
- anton1989 10y agoYou don't seem to know what scientific means, do you?
- VodkaHaze 10y agoAre his theories formulated in a rigidly defined and testable manner, and empirically tested? No, they're "rules of thumb". Rules of thumbs can be great to make complex decisions (like in trading, as he does), but coming up with a few rules of thumb and doing well at your job does not warrant his level of confidence in his intellect.
- ricksplat 10y agoAren't rules of thumb in his case the outcome of inductive reasoning based on many observations? Sounds pretty empirical to me. It is a fundamental strength of science that such formulations accept falsifiability - so the fact that his hypotheses/theories/laws don't hold in all cases just means they need to be refined for those cases. It also common scientific practice to accept hypotheses within bounds of probability.
- VodkaHaze 10y agoThe wildest conspiracy theories you've heard are also "the outcome of inductive reasoning based on many observations". Empirical testing is supposed to be statistical, not subject to human bias.
- ricksplat 10y agoWell no, because they are neither falsifiable nor independently verifiable. Taleb proposes hypotheses based on openly available information and he provides enough information to replicate his findings.
- anton1989 10y agoLooks like VodkaHaze is an account opened to harass scientists who are against GMOs.
- VodkaHaze 10y agoI don't particularly care about his position on GMOs. In fact I sort of agree with it; his point can be reduced to "we're not exactly sure what we're doing here, perhaps we should try to avoid scalable disasters" which is sound. I was ambivalent towards Taleb a few years ago, but ever since he's upped his online presence he's become actively annoying
- flazzarino 10y agowhat's stopping you from ignoring him?
- zzzmarcus 10y agoHe has a 450 page mathematical explanation of his theories in his book Silent Risk. http://www.fooledbyrandomness.com/FatTails.html http://www.fooledbyrandomness.com/FatTails.html
- VodkaHaze 10y agoI'll read this thanks.
- darawk 10y agoHis theories are largely a rejection of placing too much faith in the scientific method (without rejecting it entirely, of course). The essence of his entire philosophy is that naive empiricism causes you to ignore things that happen rarely, and the more you build the assumption that rare events do not happen into your models, the more it hurts when they do happen. This is, by definition, a hypothesis that is both obviously true and also almost impossible to test. The very problem in question is that there is a fundamental lack of data on these rare events because they happen rarely.
- gopher2 10y agoI 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.
- sremani 10y agohttps://arxiv.org/a/taleb_n_1.html https://arxiv.org/a/taleb_n_1.html If that is pseudo intellectual for you, you are too rich. Lets not forget his success as bond trader and his fund making massive sums of money in market volatility.
- MagnumOpus 10y agoHis fund lost massive amount of other people's money over the long term. (Guess he didn't have enough skin in the game.)
- ricksplat 10y agoHave you got more info on that? I'd be interested in following it up.
- dagw 10y agoWhere are you getting those numbers from? The most reliable numbers I could find where in this WSJ article: http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB118429436433665637 http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB118429436433665637 which claims that while his fund may have under-performed other funds over its lifetime and suffered a couple of years of modest losses during a period of stable growth, it did make massive returns during the dot.com crash which was kind of the funds raison d'etre.
- deleted 10y ago
- visakanv 10y agoI 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.
- brbrodude 10y ago"people 'nice' in print are assholes in person and vice versa" Nassim Taleb :P
- whatok 10y agoI wouldn't imagine he would be hostile to you unless he suspected you were a charlatan.
- cylinder 10y agoWhat? He is a Christian himself.
- robotresearcher 10y agoYou may have misread the previous comment.
- aws_ls 10y agoI think a lot of the text written on this page can be explained by his tweets. Your experience reminded me of his this tweet: "Proud of being gentle with the waiter & tough with powerful ass*les rather than reverse..." https://twitter.com/nntaleb/status/709083677993598976 https://twitter.com/nntaleb/status/709083677993598976 (Also, please take it in good faith. Don't at all mean to imply equivalence or difference of social positions of any parties. )
- visakanv 10y agoYes, this is consistent with my experience. He was patient and kind with a bunch of students, very present and listening closely.
- tptacek 10y agoI 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?
- VodkaHaze 10y agoFooled by randomness is his best book, but it's probably getting replaced by Robert Frank's book "Success and Luck" on my recommendation list for that topic. It's just a good reminder that you might be luckier than you think and that skill doesn't fully explain the successful achievements. Black Swan is seriously hard to read through; his arrogance is insufferable. The point he's making is fairly self evident; the book just got published at a very appropriate time. You can get by without reading, or thinking about, his writings. He doesn't deserve the level of fame he has achieved by all standards.
- scott_s 10y agoI also found his arrogance in Black Swan insufferable - enough that I lost all taste for his writing. I saw him talk in person in my building when he was promoting Anti-Fragile, and I was also not impressed. Do you still recommend I read Fooled By Randomness?
- VodkaHaze 10y agoRead Success and Luck by Robert Frank instead
- wglb 10y agoI would. Do you think highly of Mandebrot? Clearly a deep thinker. Most of his writings are filled with his self references.
- scott_s 10y agoMy own academic papers have a decent number of self references, too. But there is an enormous difference between referencing your own work, and telling the reader that the author is brilliant and those other people over there are stupid.
- api 10y agoWe 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. E.g. : http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v412/n6844/abs/412331a0.html 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.)
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]