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Please. I expect better from you of all people. It sucks being young and seeing two opposing intellectual heroes or sides at each other, yeah sure he is not on

Please. I expect better from you of all people. It sucks being young and seeing two opposing intellectual heroes or sides at each other, yeah sure he is not on the side(or my side in the end) of the LW/OB crowd of AI/Modification etc etc, but it's not true, he's not like that. What's worse is that at times I actually wondered "I wonder what gwern thinks of Taleb's xyz, or Hanson of Nassim's abc." Your post only further contributes to my melancholy.

gwern 12y ago
He's not like that? You mean aside from everything he's ever written, every interview of his I've read, his Twitter activity, and so on and so forth? > I wonder what gwern thinks of Taleb's xyz I'll save you some time: Taleb is a pundit who has forgotten all the truths he learned about randomness, who makes shallow analogies (to take the last one I remember which irritated me: muscles are anti-fragile? Uh, no, they're optimized for minimizing resource usage and that's why exercising stops them from underperforming and produces illusory 'anti-fragileness'; put real stress on them and you'll get something like rhabdomyolysis), whose financial ideas seem to have been refuted in practice without any acknowledgement by him of this. And his personal style destroys any possibility of meaningful discussion with him: he lives in a world where he is surrounded by sycophants or fools. If he is right about anything, it'll be the usual stopped-clock thing; just like Seth Roberts, his methods do not allow him to regularly arrive at truth, and so unless one plans to investigate his claims in detail, he is better avoided since he is a good writer who is good enough to fool a great many people with ideas which, if implemented, will predictably make them worse off on average. OP is an example of this: he says he has learned an abrasive personality style from Taleb, which is not going to make his life better.

gwern 12y ago

He's not like that? You mean aside from everything he's ever written, every interview of his I've read, his Twitter activity, and so on and so forth? > I wonder what gwern thinks of Taleb's xyz I'll save you some time: Taleb is a pundit who has forgotten all the truths he learned about randomness, who makes shallow analogies (to take the last one I remember which irritated me: muscles are anti-fragile? Uh, no, they're optimized for minimizing resource usage and that's why exercising stops them from underperforming and produces illusory 'anti-fragileness'; put real stress on them and you'll get something like rhabdomyolysis), whose financial ideas seem to have been refuted in practice without any acknowledgement by him of this. And his personal style destroys any possibility of meaningful discussion with him: he lives in a world where he is surrounded by sycophants or fools. If he is right about anything, it'll be the usual stopped-clock thing; just like Seth Roberts, his methods do not allow him to regularly arrive at truth, and so unless one plans to investigate his claims in detail, he is better avoided since he is a good writer who is good enough to fool a great many people with ideas which, if implemented, will predictably make them worse off on average. OP is an example of this: he says he has learned an abrasive personality style from Taleb, which is not going to make his life better.