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As I understand it, the feud in its current form started from a tweet from Dinesh D'Souza [1] in which he interpreted Nate Silver's statement that "Dems, GOP wi

As I understand it, the feud in its current form started from a tweet from Dinesh D'Souza [1] in which he interpreted Nate Silver's statement that "Dems, GOP winning House are 'both extremely possible'" to mean that they had gone from an 80% chance of winning to a 50% chance. Taleb inexplicably chose this as the hill to die on [2] and wrote a lengthy and technical paper to refute, and replied (on the [2] thread) "When someone says are event and its opposite are extremely possible I infer either 1) 50/50 or 2) the predictor is shamelessly hedging, in other words, BS." I've often found Taleb's ideas to be profound and interesting, and unfortunately offset by his arrogance and occasionally cryptic pronouncements and colorful colloquial "Brooklyn-ese" intentional misspellings of words (like "gabish" for "capisce"). But in this case I'm having trouble following what his criticism even is -- forecasts, especially probability forecasts, are hard, and evaluating them is hard -- the dimensions of skill vs. calibration vs. precision are hard to evaluate, and Nate Silver does a fairly good job of describing the tension. [1] https://twitter.com/DineshDSouza/status/1059147114826162177 https://twitter.com/DineshDSouza/status/1059147114826162177 [2] https://twitter.com/nntaleb/status/1059202026184282113 https://twitter.com/nntaleb/status/1059202026184282113

theseatoms 8y ago
Taleb's forte is applying various insights from practitioners of financial options to other domains.
Alex3917 8y ago
That's not specifically a Brooklyn thing, it supposedly has more to do with the fact that most Italian families in the tri-state area came to the U.S. before Italy was a country with a standardized language. That's why e.g. in Connecticut they pronounce pizza as abeetz. For whatever reason knowing how to pronounce and spell Italian words "incorrectly" has become a point of local pride, even for people who aren't at all ethnically Italian.
- mhermher 8y ago
  Is this related to the characters in the Sopranos dropping the final vowels in a bunch of Italian words? Madonn, gabagool, prozhut, etc.
  - andrewla 8y ago
    For sure the pronunciation thing is real, either due to regional accents or linguistic divergence; I've heard it firsthand used unironically by Brooklyn and Philly Italian-Americans, as well as ample examples from television and movies. But writing it that way I haven't seen outside of Taleb (and Google seems to bear me out to some extent), and using it that way isn't wrong, per se, it's just an eye-rolling moment; someone trying too hard to show that it isn't book-learning, it's "street-learning".
  - Alex3917 8y ago
    Yes. My favorite example of that is risott, since that's something that people actually commonly order in restaurants. Then there's also things like tirami-sue vs tirami-zoo, which don't even make sense since the dessert wasn't invented until recently.
tshaddox 8y ago
Yeah, "extremely possible" is perhaps a poor choice of words, and could be interpreted uncharitably as a hedge against any outcome, but I think there's an obvious charitable interpretation too: that things that have a 20% chance of occurring turn out to occur around 20% of the time. No one would be blown away by surprise if I proclaimed "SIX!" then rolled a six-sided die and got a six, but that's even less likely than 20%. So it's reasonable to say that, if 538 claims that an event has a 20% probability of happening, and that event happens, no one should be astonished. Of course, such events ought to happen about 20% of the time, if 538's models are good. And that evaluation is precisely what 538 published a few days ago: https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/checking-our-work/ https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/checking-our-work/
- Bjartr 8y ago
  Reminds me of the old essay on "Words of Estimative Probability" from the CIA https://www.cia.gov/library/center-for-the-study-of-intelligence/csi-publications/books-and-monographs/sherman-kent-and-the-board-of-national-estimates-collected-essays/6words.html https://www.cia.gov/library/center-for-the-study-of-intellig...
  - ohashi 8y ago
    That's a great table they have with associated words and numerical probability associated with them.
- tcbawo 8y ago
  Loads of people criticized Silver for not having "predicted" Trump's electoral victory. I imagine Silver's language was trying to hand-hold people to an understanding that even 20% probability events happen 1 out of 5 times. With so many people trying to twist and spin every headline, prediction, number, I appreciate Silver's attempt to make a reasonable guess with transparent methodologies.
  - jandrese 8y ago
    The same people were criticizing him a day before because everybody else had Hillary at a 99% chance to win. Nate tweets that Trump is one standard polling error away from winning and people scoffed.
fc_barnes 8y ago
>I've often found Taleb's ideas to be profound and interesting Really? Because financial crashes happen a lot more regularly than black swans. This seems like par for the course for Taleb; I've never read him in depth but he always seemed like a memer.
plainOldText 8y ago
Here's another article analyzing their disagreement: https://towardsdatascience.com/why-you-should-care-about-the-nate-silver-vs-nassim-taleb-twitter-war-a581dce1f5fc https://towardsdatascience.com/why-you-should-care-about-the...
oarabbus_ 8y ago
Taleb is simultaneously both worth reading as well as one of the most pretentious, unpleasant asses I've ever read. The Black Swan was mostly fantastic, but Antifragile was mostly regurgitation. The biggest problem with him is he thinks he's much, much smarter than he is, like a kind of inverse-Dunning-Kruger effect. It's odd because he is quite a smart man in the first place; there's no need for him to be such a pretentious asshole.
- fineline 8y ago
  I've never read Black Swan. I found Antifragile hugely thought-provoking. Knowing both, would you imagine I had anything to gain from also reading Black Swan, or do you really think they basically cover the same ground?
  - niyikiza 8y ago
    I read both, and Fooled By Randomness. I would say you stand to gain a lot reading about the older ones as well.
  - oarabbus_ 8y ago
    There is a lot of overlap in the Venn Diagram between the two. I would say read the first 80-100 pages of Black Swan and decide if you would like to complete the book.
oska 8y ago
> But in this case I'm having trouble following what his criticism even is A piece by Isaac Faber [1] from December last year clearly described what Taleb's position is. A summary paragraph towards the end: > Here we can say, with some confidence that FiveThirtyEight predictions are not always reliable probabilities. However, they masquerade as one, being between 0 and 1 and all. This is Taleb’s primary argument; FiveThirtyEight’s predictions do not behave like probabilities that incorporate all uncertainty and should not be passed off as them. Faber's piece was discussed on HN [2] soon after it appeared. [1] https://towardsdatascience.com/why-you-should-care-about-the-nate-silver-vs-nassim-taleb-twitter-war-a581dce1f5fc https://towardsdatascience.com/why-you-should-care-about-the... [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18704376 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18704376
- maps 8y ago
  By far a much better write up of the issue.
- andrewla 8y ago
  I confess, I still don't follow the critique. Let's take the output of a skin-in-the-game model, like a binary futures market. This also predicts numbers between 0 and 1, that look a lot like probabilities, but by the argument presented here, they are not probabilities, and if you look at the output of a futures market, then you are being scammed because the market itself is not giving a decision boundary; it's just outputting the last trade price. Yes, this allows a forecaster to say that even if the <50% candidate wins, that they weren't wrong, but so what? The forecasts should be reasonably well-calibrated -- that is, of all 20% predictions, 20% of them go in the 20% direction. 538 recently published a report of their calibration, which bears out their results (and kicked off the latest round of name-calling between Taleb and Silver). Is the criticism just that we shouldn't look at Silver as a person with anything interesting to say because he won't commit 100% to one side of an argument? I honestly don't understand what the critique is, and this link I don't find helpful.

theseatoms 8y ago

Taleb's forte is applying various insights from practitioners of financial options to other domains.

Alex3917 8y ago

That's not specifically a Brooklyn thing, it supposedly has more to do with the fact that most Italian families in the tri-state area came to the U.S. before Italy was a country with a standardized language. That's why e.g. in Connecticut they pronounce pizza as abeetz. For whatever reason knowing how to pronounce and spell Italian words "incorrectly" has become a point of local pride, even for people who aren't at all ethnically Italian.

mhermher 8y ago
Is this related to the characters in the Sopranos dropping the final vowels in a bunch of Italian words? Madonn, gabagool, prozhut, etc.
- andrewla 8y ago
  For sure the pronunciation thing is real, either due to regional accents or linguistic divergence; I've heard it firsthand used unironically by Brooklyn and Philly Italian-Americans, as well as ample examples from television and movies. But writing it that way I haven't seen outside of Taleb (and Google seems to bear me out to some extent), and using it that way isn't wrong, per se, it's just an eye-rolling moment; someone trying too hard to show that it isn't book-learning, it's "street-learning".
- Alex3917 8y ago
  Yes. My favorite example of that is risott, since that's something that people actually commonly order in restaurants. Then there's also things like tirami-sue vs tirami-zoo, which don't even make sense since the dessert wasn't invented until recently.

tshaddox 8y ago

Yeah, "extremely possible" is perhaps a poor choice of words, and could be interpreted uncharitably as a hedge against any outcome, but I think there's an obvious charitable interpretation too: that things that have a 20% chance of occurring turn out to occur around 20% of the time. No one would be blown away by surprise if I proclaimed "SIX!" then rolled a six-sided die and got a six, but that's even less likely than 20%. So it's reasonable to say that, if 538 claims that an event has a 20% probability of happening, and that event happens, no one should be astonished. Of course, such events ought to happen about 20% of the time, if 538's models are good. And that evaluation is precisely what 538 published a few days ago: https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/checking-our-work/ https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/checking-our-work/

Bjartr 8y ago
Reminds me of the old essay on "Words of Estimative Probability" from the CIA https://www.cia.gov/library/center-for-the-study-of-intelligence/csi-publications/books-and-monographs/sherman-kent-and-the-board-of-national-estimates-collected-essays/6words.html https://www.cia.gov/library/center-for-the-study-of-intellig...
- ohashi 8y ago
  That's a great table they have with associated words and numerical probability associated with them.
tcbawo 8y ago
Loads of people criticized Silver for not having "predicted" Trump's electoral victory. I imagine Silver's language was trying to hand-hold people to an understanding that even 20% probability events happen 1 out of 5 times. With so many people trying to twist and spin every headline, prediction, number, I appreciate Silver's attempt to make a reasonable guess with transparent methodologies.
- jandrese 8y ago
  The same people were criticizing him a day before because everybody else had Hillary at a 99% chance to win. Nate tweets that Trump is one standard polling error away from winning and people scoffed.

fc_barnes 8y ago

>I've often found Taleb's ideas to be profound and interesting Really? Because financial crashes happen a lot more regularly than black swans. This seems like par for the course for Taleb; I've never read him in depth but he always seemed like a memer.

plainOldText 8y ago

Here's another article analyzing their disagreement: https://towardsdatascience.com/why-you-should-care-about-the-nate-silver-vs-nassim-taleb-twitter-war-a581dce1f5fc https://towardsdatascience.com/why-you-should-care-about-the...

oarabbus_ 8y ago

Taleb is simultaneously both worth reading as well as one of the most pretentious, unpleasant asses I've ever read. The Black Swan was mostly fantastic, but Antifragile was mostly regurgitation. The biggest problem with him is he thinks he's much, much smarter than he is, like a kind of inverse-Dunning-Kruger effect. It's odd because he is quite a smart man in the first place; there's no need for him to be such a pretentious asshole.

fineline 8y ago
I've never read Black Swan. I found Antifragile hugely thought-provoking. Knowing both, would you imagine I had anything to gain from also reading Black Swan, or do you really think they basically cover the same ground?
- niyikiza 8y ago
  I read both, and Fooled By Randomness. I would say you stand to gain a lot reading about the older ones as well.
- oarabbus_ 8y ago
  There is a lot of overlap in the Venn Diagram between the two. I would say read the first 80-100 pages of Black Swan and decide if you would like to complete the book.

oska 8y ago

> But in this case I'm having trouble following what his criticism even is A piece by Isaac Faber [1] from December last year clearly described what Taleb's position is. A summary paragraph towards the end: > Here we can say, with some confidence that FiveThirtyEight predictions are not always reliable probabilities. However, they masquerade as one, being between 0 and 1 and all. This is Taleb’s primary argument; FiveThirtyEight’s predictions do not behave like probabilities that incorporate all uncertainty and should not be passed off as them. Faber's piece was discussed on HN [2] soon after it appeared. [1] https://towardsdatascience.com/why-you-should-care-about-the-nate-silver-vs-nassim-taleb-twitter-war-a581dce1f5fc https://towardsdatascience.com/why-you-should-care-about-the... [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18704376 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18704376

maps 8y ago
By far a much better write up of the issue.
andrewla 8y ago
I confess, I still don't follow the critique. Let's take the output of a skin-in-the-game model, like a binary futures market. This also predicts numbers between 0 and 1, that look a lot like probabilities, but by the argument presented here, they are not probabilities, and if you look at the output of a futures market, then you are being scammed because the market itself is not giving a decision boundary; it's just outputting the last trade price. Yes, this allows a forecaster to say that even if the <50% candidate wins, that they weren't wrong, but so what? The forecasts should be reasonably well-calibrated -- that is, of all 20% predictions, 20% of them go in the 20% direction. 538 recently published a report of their calibration, which bears out their results (and kicked off the latest round of name-calling between Taleb and Silver). Is the criticism just that we shouldn't look at Silver as a person with anything interesting to say because he won't commit 100% to one side of an argument? I honestly don't understand what the critique is, and this link I don't find helpful.