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Taleb in person at a talk is very different than Taleb with a bottle of wine on Twitter. To both of their credit, they’ve expanded my knowledge of probability
by mathattack 7y ago
Taleb in person at a talk is very different than Taleb with a bottle of wine on Twitter.
To both of their credit, they’ve expanded my knowledge of probability and statistics.
- iron0013 7y agoHave they though, or have they only made you feel as though your knowledge of probability and statistics has expanded? Taleb is the poster boy for "sound and fury, signifying nothing"
- dmix 7y agoI don't know about Taleb, but Nate Silver's book on Bayesian statistics and prediction in general got me really interested in statistics from a general-reader standpoint. Where I ended up digging harder into the more math/sciencey books afterwards. The part about predicting Earthquakes and his work on sports is really good. https://www.amazon.com/Signal-Noise-Many-Predictions-Fail/dp/B009HL6444/ https://www.amazon.com/Signal-Noise-Many-Predictions-Fail/dp...
- iron0013 7y agoI agree about Silver, and that was kind of my point! Silver knows his shit and is able to communicate it in such a way that the reader actually learns something. Taleb may or may not know anything, but all he is able to convey to the reader is the impression that they've learned something (however, he is very good at giving the reader an unearned sense of intellectual superiority).
- dmix 7y agoSure but he sounds like a decent scientist to me. While it’s true his organization is very much an entertainment vector rather than a more academic science output, which lowers the bar, that doesn’t necessarily mean the work he’s doing doesn’t have some utility and value. Probably a lot more real value than a typical news outlet these days which pump out garbage at high speeds.
- mathattack 7y agoTaleb expanded my view of the impact of fat tails. (And my interpretation of his book helped me in an interview) He also helped me realize the limitation of models.