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What's wrong with Taleb? Not arguing, just curious.
by dgudkov 9y ago
What's wrong with Taleb? Not arguing, just curious.
- mi100hael 9y agoNot OP, but survivorship bias, mostly. He's maybe not wrong, but he's also not very rigorous in his arguments.
- nl 9y agoThis. Also, the unacknowledged inconsistency of his arguments is ridiculous: ~"Unpredictable events happen more frequently than people expect. I'm 100% right about this prediction of the future and you are an idiot if you disagree".
- dmichulke 9y agoI think he meant rather: - it's hard (impossible) to predict population statistics from a sample with size 1, ceteris paribus. Over the short term, you have sample size 1 for rare events, over the long term ceteris paribus doesn't hold. - people "coerce" everything into a normal distribution in order to get a handle on things which is of course wrong if the thing you look at is not normally distributed. Finance comes to mind.
- nl 9y agoSorry the two sentences in the quasi-quote are separate things. The first sentence is his book 'Black Swans' and the second is his Twitter feed. I should have made that more clear.
- newlyretired 9y agoI just finished all 3 of Taleb's major books, and I took a slightly different interpretation of his Black Swan concept. I am very interested in reading criticisms of his that focus on the material -- most that I've read thus far discuss his writing style, or lack of rigor. (The second is certainly a valid criticism, but I'm looking to engage with his ideas, not the man himself or the broad scientific validity.) Taleb's Black Swan concept is that unpredictable events happen more frequently than people expect, and have an outsized impact on the outcomes of a model. Events that are not predictable are not included in the predictive model. Take the frequency of event and exclusion from the model, add in asymmetric results (small changes to input parameters can lead to huge changes in outcome), and that's his theory. Is that accurate? What are the issues with that?
- audiometry 9y agoAnd additionally, Taleb is enormously pompous. His books have some interesting ideas in them, but they’re enveloped in a cloud of his farts. Makes him very tedious to read.
- rtx 9y agoI like my authors to be pompous. Because anybody whose not will not write a 2000 page book. You have to have an internal belief that people want read your ramblings.