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Taleb Says Fed Should Do 'Minimum Harm' [video]

• User23 7y ago
  I have great respect for Taleb, but the value of his work is pretty much a linear function of closeness to the statistical math he used to get rich trading derivatives. He has extremely interesting things to say about uncertainty, randomness, fat tails, dynamic systems, and more. And he offers theorems to support his assertions. At the other extreme, the limit case so far is when he starts tweeting about anthropology: it's utterly cringe-worthy.
  • dwater 7y ago
    He seems to have figured out that hot takes get him more visibility than measured discourse, and he's optimizing for that visibility. There's always value in his ideas, but the presentation seems to have veered toward clickbait.
  • m_sahaf 7y ago
    And if you disagree with him, he'll reach for his ad homonym stash (mostly calling others "imbecile"), which is why I stopped following him in social media. Read his books, but stay away from everything else he produces.
    • ixtli 7y ago
      Being anti-fragile means that everyone who disagrees with you is fragile ;)
  • ixtli 7y ago
    Heh. Should be noted that basically every top comment here says the same thing in different ways about Taleb.
• kepple 7y ago
  who is this straw man that is shaming entrepreneurs? I think it's fair to criticize Trump for telling everyone that he is tremendously successful while hiding his tax returns that reflect large losses, but Taleb doesn't address that concern.
• vowelless 7y ago
  Tldw version?
• xstockix 7y ago
  I've never felt more conflicted over a public person than I am about Nassim Taleb. He's clearly brilliant, and makes bold statements that he stands behind- that takes guts and is to be applauded. On the other hand, he can be an outright prick and I don't understand some of the fights he picks. Dude is polarizing and fascinating.
  • formalsystem 7y ago
    I used to be thrown off by the fights he picked but then I had a thought. The fact that's it's considered rude to criticize people with influence means it's difficult to gauge their performance. If anything public figures should be harshly criticized because they make tons of money when things go well and don't seem to be taking on any risk from their bad decisions.
  • 781 7y ago
    One of the reasons for the replication crisis in science is the lack of more people like Taleb who are not afraid to say "this study is bullshit" instead of being ultra-polite and never daring to put into doubt the integrity of the authors (p-hacking, data falsification, ...) I've read quite a number of blog posts about scientists who were certain a paper was p-hacked (and proven right later) but who said they would never dare raise their voice publicly because it would kill their career.
    • justin66 7y ago
      I don't know what the equivalent to Taleb would be in the hard sciences, but it wouldn't be an antidote to bullshit research. The answer to a bad paper is generally a better paper, not loud whining.
      • cgiles 7y ago
        Funny, I'm a postdoc (in biomedical research), and I and my boss, a PI, had this exact debate last night. I took the side of 781, and he was justin66. My perspective is that you cannot take data, or a concept, that is fundamentally broken, add a little effort, and fix it. For example, if a collaborator sends data for analysis where the sample size was too small for the effect, or worse, asked to find statistical differences between 1-2 samples per group, you can't fix that with any amount of algorithmic mumbo-jumbo. You can only fix it by redoing the experiment properly. Although we are asked to do this sort of thing almost daily (not always this blatantly). His perspective is, and maybe I'm being a bit uncharitable, you take what you're given, do your best, clearly describe what you did and honestly note the limitations, and move on. Even if the result is something highly dubious, that is for the reviewers to decide. But I personally think a little loud whining is called for in the sciences to discourage totally half-baked ideas and data from ever seeing the light of day. But the trouble is the pressures are so intense and funding is so tight, people feel compelled to halfass many things, which is the real problem. EDIT: I should add I am not talking about data falsification or major ethical breaches like that. I'm talking about things that more amount to a form of pressure-induced willful stupidity, no dishonesty involved. I would speculate this is much more of a cause of the replication crisis than outright dishonesty. People don't like to outright lie because it could cost them their careers. But they certainly can conveniently forget some basic scientific principles at times if it suits them and they can't get a decent story while being rigorous. And their excuse will be -- well, we clearly documented everything we did in the paper, and the reviewers thought it was OK (because the reviewers do the same sorts of thing). And this, folks, is how you get a lot of shitty papers.
• ixtli 7y ago
  I'm wary this might end up aggravating the subset of Taleb adherents on here but from what I've seen of him (segments of some of his books, tweets, essays) he cultivates a pretty brazenly idealistic / ideological (as opposed to materialistic) worldview that he repackages in academic language in order to bolster his authority. To be clear this is not to imply that he isn't in control of his subject matter. Just that to say Ray Dalio is "mistaken" about his largely philosophical/ideological claims about capitalism fits into a pattern I observe from Taleb where he uses a deep and nuanced understanding of the status quo as a weapon to beat down normative arguments that the status quo should be changed. It's very similar to how Sam Harris uses his specialist authority to deliver regressive social critiques that he wraps in academic language. We need to remember that expertise on a subject is a tool, but how you use that tool is always guided by ideologies. I challenge people to think critically about what those like Harris and Taleb's morality and ideological positions are.
• povertyworld 7y ago
  Weird interview. He starts out angry that someone insulted risk takers who lose money. Then by the end of the interview he says people should just get jobs and make super conservative investments like gold and short term bonds. Waste of 20 minutes.
  • ixtli 7y ago
    Honestly Taleb's cult is pretty disconcerting.
    • spenuke 7y ago
      Can somebody please ELI5 his whole phenomenon? I don't really understand who are the targets (other than Nate Silver) of all his polemic. From my limited exposure, he's basically making age-old conservative points, arguing that the Enlightenment ideal of human knowledge has strong (but unidentified) limits. Why is he so popular? And how did he get so rich on Wall Street if he just thinks randomness blows all the statistical experts out of the water? I know I'm missing something.
      • pfortuny 7y ago
        No: he does not say that statistics are useless. He says that the assumption of normality does not hold in real life: fat tails and the absence of means are ubiquitous. That is all the “black swan” means and how he got rich: taking risks which are nonsense under normal distributions but not so under, for instance, the Cauchy distribution.
        • Animats 7y ago
          Taleb's basic claim is that options that are way out of the money are underpriced. So he set up a fund, Empirica, which bought options a long way from the current value. This strategy does extremely well in years of a sudden downturn, and loses money in all other years. He and his investors did really well in 2008. He doesn't talk about the other years. Solid numbers for Empirica are really hard to find. Whether this is a win as an ongoing strategy is a big question. If you'd bought into that strategy in 2009, after it worked once, you'd have lost money for a decade.
• temac 7y ago
  I question that kind of opinion talk, which boils down to (often implicitly) debating the definition of words in a boring way and/or trying to attribute meaningless merits and demerits to whole arbitrary idealized "class" of people. There is so little information and it is so caricatural and simplistic to come and state in a kind of absolute tone that "entrepreneurs" are good and they build "value" (while basically the "others" are all of the inverse?) I do not expect to get any insight from somebody with that kind of point of view. I already know that some people have that kind of point of view, and I already know that some people have radically different one, and the philosophical framework in both cases has some validity, with idealistic components and realistic ones, of which both intuitively and descriptively we should strive to get a balance from. On top of that, postmodern capitalism has taken a turn that very few academics would found merits in (and even fewer have called for), yet it managed to influence the policies in way that are not even widely debated (at least as widely as they should) by the media and the public. So the ever increasing amount of discretionary power that a defacto class (real this time, because having 100000 times more wealth than your "neighbor" is a criteria vastly more useful than being e.g. an Uber driver vs. being salaried in a taxi company) of people already have achieved and are continuing to amass is extremely concerning, even more so given the choice that have been made, the impact that this yield, and the quasi complete lack of action that could show we could have some confidence in their infinite wisdom. I do not buy that the only thing that is needed is some kind of natural regulation by (re-?)allowing "failure". "Risk takers" can still have a shitload amount of money after they loose some. If some attempts of political organization in other forms failed, my guess is that postmodern capitalism in the form of unbridled individualism and deathmatch to grab control and dispend resources will fail harder. And I'm not sold on the concept on "not true capitalism", because of the principle of realism, that I refuses to apply only when it suits my narrative. A far better and hopefully far more actionable way to present things is to state that model X tends to degenerate into concrete situation Y, while model T tends to yield Z. So of course there will be some corrections to give. AND I do not believe we should primarily listen to people who do not recognize some extraordinary value brought by some people in the society (e.g. nurses, they could be on the "sideline collecting their salary"?), to decide of those corrections. I believe that individualism and hubris is a big component in those deviations, regardless of the original ideal. On the other hand, trying to attribute merit or demerit on abstract mythical "entrepreneurship" without the details is an activity I consider having absolutely no meaning: I'll be more happy that some projects fail so I could consider people achieving success in horrible projects even "worse" than people failing at such projects, and on another dimension failures (on both horrible and wonderful projects) can be attributed on their leaders while other on other factors.
• Animats 7y ago
  "The job of the Federal Reserve is to take away the punch bowl just as the party gets going." - William McChesney Martin, head of the Fed in the 1960s. His point was that if you don't want a crash, steps have to be taken to stop a boom before it's too late. Politicians hate that, because it means deliberately stopping a boom. But that's the Fed's job, and it's why they have some independence from administration policy.
• rfrey 7y ago
  Any discussion about Taleb always leads to questions about why he picks such public fights. I've said this before: The most salient anecdote Taleb tells about himself is the one where he's going onstage to debate an opponent. He asks his publisher if punching the other guy in the face would be against his contract, and his publisher notes that it would be very good for book sales. All Taleb does is punch people in the face nowadays. It's probably very good for book sales. He notes elsewhere, rightly I think, that the goal of anybody seeking PR should be to get the attention of somebody more famous then them: since it's much easier to pick fights than make friendships, and either will do, he picks fights with anybody he thinks has prominence. I believe it's a persona, and he's a very good method actor.