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I didn't expect this article to be so long or to have such great examples. The idea that GMO providers should try to convince 100% of the population, not just t

I didn't expect this article to be so long or to have such great examples. The idea that GMO providers should try to convince 100% of the population, not just the majority, was particularly insightful and unexpected. It makes sense, though: if, say 10%, of folks will ONLY eat Organic and the remaining, say 90%, will eat Organic or GMO with equal preference, it makes your supply chain much easier to supply ONLY Organic food while still accessing 100% of the market. If you supply both types, you have a more complex supply chain, and if you supply ONLY GMO, you give up on 10% of the market.

rz2k 10y ago
Am I being pedantic to think that is a weird way to label? Organic refers to the methods and compounds used to control pests, while GMO refers to the genetic heritage of the organisms being cultivated. They're cultivated because they have more desirable traits, but they're still carbon-based organisms. Anyway, I'm probably making his point for him, but Taleb's anti-expert bias can drive me up the wall.
- linkregister 10y ago
  > Taleb's anti-expert bias can drive me up the wall. Indeed, that is why I couldn't make it past the second chapter of Antifragile. His insistence on citationless, just-so stories to explain everything (in his world everything has a snarky one-liner explanation) make his writing a huge turn-off to me. I'm surprised about his popularity in the HN crowd since I would expect engineers to insist on statements being backed up by evidence. However, this article contains some good insights. Although it was permeated with matter-of-fact insults to practically every group of people, the insults were less vicious than those of many of his other works.
  - dragonwriter 10y ago
    > I'm surprised about his popularity in the HN crowd Anti-(established)-expert bias and reducing complex problems and their solutions to clever (and often, though not always, snarky) one-liners are kind of bread-and-butter of the startup world.
  - zem 10y ago
    i wouldn't even mind the just-so stories if they were presented in good faith as real anecdata, but having him use a fictional just-so story in "the black swan" was a step too far. it's sad, because the man is a good writer; "black swan" also contained the best write-up of hempel's raven paradox i've seen, including martin gardner's/
    - linkregister 10y ago
      I haven't checked out Black Swan; is it worth a read?
      - zem 10y ago
        i went and dug up my review from when i read it (the blanked out name is a friend of mine whose review i was replying to, and who hated the book). amusingly, my feeling that he was a good writer seems to be me remembering his style as better than it actually was; i tend to remember the good bits of stuff longer than the bad: Reading part 1, I thought "Oh God, ____ is right, the man is an idiot." I realised, though, that he simply wasn't all that good a writer, which is not the same thing. I also got the impression that he was indulging in stylistic experiments, which detracted from the book. Anyway, one or two good ideas in there, and a nice discussion of Hempel's Raven Paradox (even better than Gardner's, so score one for him). But mostly part 1 was a matter of slogging through a lot of text for little reward. Part 2 got a bit more interesting, though here ____'s second claim of "the good parts aren't original and the original parts aren't good" was sadly borne out. Some decent material, but mostly stuff I'd read in lots of other places, pulled together into (to be fair) a pretty coherent narrative. Part 3, surprisingly enough, got a lot more interesting. I'm not sure what the difference was, but it did seem that he was genuinely offering insights of his own, rather than regurgitating other people's. He did also seem to have some genuinely valuable stuff to say. At any rate, I found myself reading the rest of the book with a lot more engagement and a lot less feeling of having to slog through it. On the whole, I think he does have a few genuine, and genuinely insightful points to make, shadowed by his rather clunky writing style and by the fact that he's rather full of himself. I think I will reread the book a chapter at a time, to make sure I get his point.
- CelestialTeapot 10y ago
  All crop plants are cultivated. The hard way to do genetic modification is through selective breeding (plant A's pollen rubbed on plant B's pistil) until you get the plant with the traits you want. There are some limitations, like you can't generally breed plants of different species. GMO typically refers to the more direct route of genetic engineering, where you insert the genes that give the plant the desired traits from some other donor which may be of a completely different species, maybe even an engineered gene that doesn't appear in nature.
  - rz2k 10y ago
    We're saying the same thing, and by using scientifically literate terminology we're probably furthering Taleb's point. They're cultivated in the sense that their seeds are propagated and they're cared for. Concerns about artificial selection used for tens of thousands of years might be dismissed as a naturalistic fallacy, and more surgical genetic engineering methods only introduced last century are difficult to distinguish in a meaningful way. However, example disasters from introducing species to ecosystems suggest that the conservative biases that partly make up the naturalistic fallacy would have sometimes lead to safer outcomes. In spite of these disasters though, it seems that the planet would not have a carrying capacity of 8 billion people without the inorganic advances of the green revolution. Nor, perhaps even conditions where probably half a billion of those people have a higher quality of life than the most fortunate 100 thousand people living two hundred years ago.

rz2k 10y ago

Am I being pedantic to think that is a weird way to label? Organic refers to the methods and compounds used to control pests, while GMO refers to the genetic heritage of the organisms being cultivated. They're cultivated because they have more desirable traits, but they're still carbon-based organisms. Anyway, I'm probably making his point for him, but Taleb's anti-expert bias can drive me up the wall.

linkregister 10y ago
> Taleb's anti-expert bias can drive me up the wall. Indeed, that is why I couldn't make it past the second chapter of Antifragile. His insistence on citationless, just-so stories to explain everything (in his world everything has a snarky one-liner explanation) make his writing a huge turn-off to me. I'm surprised about his popularity in the HN crowd since I would expect engineers to insist on statements being backed up by evidence. However, this article contains some good insights. Although it was permeated with matter-of-fact insults to practically every group of people, the insults were less vicious than those of many of his other works.
- dragonwriter 10y ago
  > I'm surprised about his popularity in the HN crowd Anti-(established)-expert bias and reducing complex problems and their solutions to clever (and often, though not always, snarky) one-liners are kind of bread-and-butter of the startup world.
- zem 10y ago
  i wouldn't even mind the just-so stories if they were presented in good faith as real anecdata, but having him use a fictional just-so story in "the black swan" was a step too far. it's sad, because the man is a good writer; "black swan" also contained the best write-up of hempel's raven paradox i've seen, including martin gardner's/
  - linkregister 10y ago
    I haven't checked out Black Swan; is it worth a read?
    - zem 10y ago
      i went and dug up my review from when i read it (the blanked out name is a friend of mine whose review i was replying to, and who hated the book). amusingly, my feeling that he was a good writer seems to be me remembering his style as better than it actually was; i tend to remember the good bits of stuff longer than the bad: Reading part 1, I thought "Oh God, ____ is right, the man is an idiot." I realised, though, that he simply wasn't all that good a writer, which is not the same thing. I also got the impression that he was indulging in stylistic experiments, which detracted from the book. Anyway, one or two good ideas in there, and a nice discussion of Hempel's Raven Paradox (even better than Gardner's, so score one for him). But mostly part 1 was a matter of slogging through a lot of text for little reward. Part 2 got a bit more interesting, though here ____'s second claim of "the good parts aren't original and the original parts aren't good" was sadly borne out. Some decent material, but mostly stuff I'd read in lots of other places, pulled together into (to be fair) a pretty coherent narrative. Part 3, surprisingly enough, got a lot more interesting. I'm not sure what the difference was, but it did seem that he was genuinely offering insights of his own, rather than regurgitating other people's. He did also seem to have some genuinely valuable stuff to say. At any rate, I found myself reading the rest of the book with a lot more engagement and a lot less feeling of having to slog through it. On the whole, I think he does have a few genuine, and genuinely insightful points to make, shadowed by his rather clunky writing style and by the fact that he's rather full of himself. I think I will reread the book a chapter at a time, to make sure I get his point.
CelestialTeapot 10y ago
All crop plants are cultivated. The hard way to do genetic modification is through selective breeding (plant A's pollen rubbed on plant B's pistil) until you get the plant with the traits you want. There are some limitations, like you can't generally breed plants of different species. GMO typically refers to the more direct route of genetic engineering, where you insert the genes that give the plant the desired traits from some other donor which may be of a completely different species, maybe even an engineered gene that doesn't appear in nature.
- rz2k 10y ago
  We're saying the same thing, and by using scientifically literate terminology we're probably furthering Taleb's point. They're cultivated in the sense that their seeds are propagated and they're cared for. Concerns about artificial selection used for tens of thousands of years might be dismissed as a naturalistic fallacy, and more surgical genetic engineering methods only introduced last century are difficult to distinguish in a meaningful way. However, example disasters from introducing species to ecosystems suggest that the conservative biases that partly make up the naturalistic fallacy would have sometimes lead to safer outcomes. In spite of these disasters though, it seems that the planet would not have a carrying capacity of 8 billion people without the inorganic advances of the green revolution. Nor, perhaps even conditions where probably half a billion of those people have a higher quality of life than the most fortunate 100 thousand people living two hundred years ago.