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I think Taleb was among the first to hit this tune. " To be completely cured of newspapers, spend a year reading the previous week’s newspapers. " " The best
by Hitchhiker 14y ago
I think Taleb was among the first to hit this tune.
" To be completely cured of newspapers, spend a year reading the previous week’s newspapers. "
" The best test of whether someone is extremely stupid (or extremely wise) is whether financial and political news makes sense to him. "
" There is a certain category of fool—the overeducated, the academic, the journalist, the newspaper reader, the mechanistic "scientist", the pseudo-empiricist, those endowed with what I call "epistemic arrogance", this wonderful ability to discount what they did not see, the unobserved. "
" Daily news and sugar confuse our system in the same manner. "
source : http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Nassim_Nicholas_Taleb http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Nassim_Nicholas_Taleb
- MichaelGG 14y agoI played with options for a bit. Nearly all the "financial news" is information free. No matter what happens, there'll be an article explaining why. Even decent-seeming publications would join along in the "Stock X moved <direction> because of event Y", even though you could flip the predicates around and still have a coherent story. As Eliezer writes, "If you are equally good at explaining any outcome, you have zero knowledge"[1]. To be fair though, I suppose the real "news" is subtle information and isn't likely to become a simple headline and the people able to make use of it are unlikely to detail the causation afterwards. Although, sometimes I wonder, at least in stocks, if the nonsense "news" ends up driving things more than any fundamental reasons. 1: http://lesswrong.com/lw/if/your_strength_as_a_rationalist/ http://lesswrong.com/lw/if/your_strength_as_a_rationalist/